Giant Spring Bee Update

This is the first year we've been able to pull bees through the winter. It's very exciting considering we thought for sure our Stripes hive would be dead. Our plan has always been to have the bees tested twice per year, early spring and early fall. This gives us time to treat them or figure out what's wrong and change it.  Our master beekeeper Jim Miller over at Millers Homestead has a lab that can test all sorts of stuff from varoa and trachea mites to the PH level in the bees body. Just take him a sample of 100 bees and he can figure out if you should treat them or not. I've never gotten a picture of what a sample of bees looks like but picture this: scooping/brushing/dumping, a mass of bees from a hive frame into a wide mouth mason jar and getting a lid on is fun. 1 inch deep = 100 bees roughly. The mason jar doesn't have to be full of bees that would be thousands! But I am a bit occupied while trying to collect a sample to take a picture. Then in order to kill them as quickly as possible I run inside and put the jar in the freezer. It sounds heartless I know, and honestly we don't enjoy bee sample collection day, but it's for the good of the hive.

Here's what Jim found out about Snow hive, I haven't received the results from Stripes yet.

100 frozen bees from snow hive 4/14/12
Weight 14.4g/100 bees or 0.14g/bee – good weight
Varroa mites – none found
Tracheal mites – none found
Nosema spores – none found
pH – 6.02 – a little high, looking for about 5.5 pH.
Deformed bodies – none found
Color of thorax muscles – light pink
Sample looks good. Suggest checking pH late June.

Awesome huh!?  We decided to give them a spring tonic for lack of a better term its made up of various essential oils mixed into a sugar syrup. Here's the recipe:

To make 5 gallons of "medicine"

25lbs Granulated Sugar (we used a mixture of drivert sugar and organic granulated)
3 Gallons of water
Mix these together to form a thick syrup. To this add the essential oils below.

1/2 tsp. Thyme
1 tsp. Lemon Grass
1 tsp. Peppermint
1 tsp. Sweet Orange
3 parts polysorbate (this helps the oil mix with the sugar water, it's an emulsifier)

I didn't have a container big enough to make 5 gallons of syrup, so I had to split the recipe in half and then mix both parts into a 5 gallon bucket. But we got it done in the end. 

We made this and fed to to both hives to boost there health. Since we don't usually do sugar syrup feeding we did the plastic bag method. Fill a gallon ziplock about 1/2-3/4 full and make sure it's sealed!! Then lay it across the hive's frames and using a box cutter or sharp blade, cut some slits in it so the syrup will pool in the top. For a great visual of this check out this beesource link. The syrup smelled lovely. This weekend we will be going and refilling the bags until the mixture is gone. Which should take about 3 weeks for 2 hives to drink 5 gallons of syrup medicine.














Last year when we got our bees they came in a nuc or a small already started hive with 5 frames each. The nuc however contained plastic frames and plasticell which is a rigid frame that has the honeycomb shape stamped into it, it forces the bees to draw comb in a predefined shape. To see the nuc and the top of the plasticell frame check out our post from last year called Apiary Expansion. Since we beekeep naturally we wanted that plastic crap out of our hive! Bees will move up over the winter and huddle in the top box, leaving the bottom box mostly empty. Last year we made sure to keep the plasticell frames in the lower box, ensuring they would be empty this spring. So we pulled them out and replaced them with empties to be filled with natural wax that the bees control the size of.

But I didn't want the wax on those frames to go to waste, so I scraped it into a big bucket, then melted and filtered it in order to get beautiful golden wax. It looks like something awful though, but it smells like wax and honey so melting it down wasn't as bad as it sounded. I put the wax in a double boiler at first but then changed my mind. I ended up putting the gunk in my wax metal mesh filter over a pot with a slight amount of water in it and sticking it in the oven at 210* the wax slowly melted into pot below, the water kept it from sticking and burning in the pot and the filter kept all the bee parts and such from the wax.

Then I poured the water/wax mixture into a milk jug with a knee high pantyhose over the top, thus catching anything and filtering the wax further.


I ended up with a beautiful block of wax complete with milk jug indents. LOL! Not all of this wax was from the frame scraping. I had some wax flakes leftover from our first year of beekeeping that needed to be melted also.


I'll have to perfect my wax melting program since we beekeep naturally we'll end up with more wax then most beekeepers.

Chicken Reduction Program

When it comes to chickens we either have ones that won't lay and go broody, or ones that are so loud they are practically roosters. Neither one works for us in our current location. About 2 weeks ago I had put the babies out in the coop and Curious proceeded to have a chicken tantrum for well over a week. More babies were to follow since we'd planned to raise way more than we needed and keep the ones that seemed calm and quiet. But the noise level got to be too much to handle around here. I've been buying eggs from our local country market since October when all the sussex chickens went on strike. All the other breeds we've tried picked up egg laying after a molt but the sussex's didn't.

Since we purchase our eggs well over half the year it got me thinking about why we have chickens in the first place. I am starting to think that anything less then 10-15 birds is a waste of money. Jake and I talked it over and decided to get out of the chicken business. Not forever, just while we are here. The problem is Curious, since she has the freezer pass she is the one who makes a big stink about the new baby chickens. She's not mean to them, but she gripes about them constantly dawn --> dusk! If we didn't have her, we would have no problem culling old hens and rearing new ones. So for now we just have the two adult birds. I put an ad on craigslist and sold all the babies within 3 hours! Both adults, Curious and Shiny have a freezer pass, it might be temporary though. Shiny will inevitably go broody, and leave Curious all alone for 1 month so we are not sure how that's gonna go. I just don't want to butcher Curious, she's too sweet, I don't have any sentimental attachment to any other farm creatures but.... we'll see she may force my hand when Shiny goes broody.

Garden Layout Redux Finished

Before: Sort of, I don't have a good aerial picture of the garden in its hey day.

After: The dirt mounds, here come the weeds! Ugh!

 Garlic Beds I made last fall when we didn't have the design laid out. They are roughly 6 feet wide instead of the 4 foot we would like all the beds to be. So In the last picture you can see how the path way just stops right at the garlic bed, we'll be continuing that path once the garlic is all pulled in July. We will also be filling in the garlic path ways that run horizontal to all the vertical paths, making the garden uniform. I needed little paths because I'll have to weed and water the garlic partially by hand since the drip lines are placed where the permanent bed shape will be so about 2 feet of the garlic I'll have to water by hand.  If that makes any sense....