Of Bees and Gardens
It has been a LONG time since I wrote here and I find that the longer I have children, the less time I have for this! However, I still want to try to stay on top of this every once in a while so you will just have to be grateful for what you get until I can find some “spare-time”! This is the biggest joke around our house right now, “We’ll do that when we get some spare time!” Usually meaning that we will get to it in the next 12 years of so.My wife wrote a while back about our new endeavor this year, that of raising bees for honey. It has been quite the experience and very much a learning one! It seems to my father and I that the more we work with the bees, the less we know! Aimee and I decided to just get one hive this spring and so bought the equipment, hive bodies, and about 3 lbs. Of bees to get started, while my father bought enough for 10 hives.
The Lord blessed our hives in the fact that they were able to get up to full size very quickly and we were all excited about the upcoming nectar flow! Then we found out what “swarming” was! It seems that when the bees get really bored or are not finding enough of nectar, they will make a new queen and just before she hatches, about one-quarter to half the bees in the hive will all of a sudden take wing and leave the hive. I would try to explain this sight and sound to you, but it is incredible to watch and hard to accurately describe!
You have about 50 to 60 thousand bees all just streaming from the hive and flying up into a column about 20 feet across and 30 feet high. This make such a loud buzzing noise that you can hear it from a hundred feet away!. As the queen and her nurse bees move in one general direction, the whole mass moves with her until she lands on a branch somewhere and then they all land on the branch and by looping the hooks on the ends of their legs together, they make a mound of bees with all the ones at the bottom, hanging from all the bees on the branch.)
We wait until they have mostly clumped up on he branch and then if the branch is not too big or important, we gently cut it off and carry the bees back down to the ground. Of all the swarms this year, we have only had two that were way up in a tree, about thirty feet up a birch tree here in our yard. When we get down to the ground, we have a new hive sitting there on a big piece of cardboard with the top off. We then position the branch over the hive so that when we shake the bees off, most will go into the open hive and the rest out in front of it. Because the legs of the bees are hooked together, all have to do to get the bee’s off, is to gently give it a little quick drop, and the whole mass drops into the hive. But because they are bees, a bunch of the will immediately take flight again and you need to quickly get the cover back on. Then the next part is what really amazes me! They bees that are out in front of the cardboard, know almost instantly if the queen is in the hive. If she is, they position themselves facing towards the hive and fanning their wings to beat the band! The harmonics of these thousands of bees doing this, as well as the chemical smell they give off when they have a new home, attracts the rest of the bees and they will spend the next half hour to and hour, slowly taking their turns, walking into the new hive.
We currently have 18 hives and have missed three more swarms. It means that we will not get quite as much honey this fall, but if we have a good winter, we may be able to sell the extra hives next spring.
On a Garden note.
When we lived in Pa. We struggle so much with potato bugs! We tried all sorts of sprays and only found one that really seemed to work, M-1. However when we moved out here, the manufactures of the spray, quit making it and so we battled the bugs with our fingers and small cans of gasoline.
However! We heard a couple years ago that if you plant really aromatic marigolds between your potatoes’, you will have fewer potato bugs. They were right!! This is the second year in a row that we have had few if any bugs and they are the biggest and bushiest potato plants I have seen in a long time!! We planted a marigold plant every four or five potato plants. It has worked and we are so grateful that we have a remedy that does not include the use of harsh chemicals! Just an idea for those of you still fighting these little pests!!
If you are still looking for our other sites, Here is the link to Aimee’s current blog and my main one.
