Honey!

This morning our beekeeping mentor, Lew, stopped by to visit 'his' bees. (The guy that never wears a bee suit!)



He says they're doing really well! He put his finger into one of the combs and let some liquid honey drip onto my finger. Oh. My. Word! Have you ever had honey THAT fresh? Delightful. Warm from the sun, gentle sweetness. Oh, wow. I can hardly wait to extract some of it and start using our very own honey!! (Our old honey, purchased from other local beekeepers, will probably land up in new batches of mead, lol!)

Here Jim and Lew are looking over the supers already in place.



Yup. They've been busy little bees!



In fact, they then placed our very last supers in place. This means we either need to buy more supers...or extract honey in the next week or so in order to reuse the ones we have. Yay!

The Bees are Settling In :)

Here are the two hives on a sunny summer day. The hedge behind them is a caragana, which will help shelter them from the east wind (our nastiest weather is from the east). It also gives the bees a handy place to go should they decide to swarm.



Just to the south of the hives is a mass of wild roses, which they've definitely discovered!





Because we're leaving on vacation Friday morning, it was imperative for us to set up a self-watering system right away. It's not a good idea for them to be drinking out of the cow troughs! Here's what we've got:



The barrel is full of water with the tap set to a slight drip. An old hubcap is beneath it with a folded up towel in it. The saturated towel allows the bees to have something to walk on without drowning while they drink. Now our farm babysitter will only have to check the level of the barrel, which probably won't need topping off while we're gone.

The farm sitter will also want to keep an eye on the farm cats. Here's Mary, who was slightly tame when she arrived a month ago but has decided to raise her three kittens in the *wild*.

The Bees are Here :)

We have our own hives now! I'm so excited! Jim's been in touch with a local beekeeper for the last couple of weeks and arranged to purchase two hives from him. This evening was deemed "Bee Weather" (not too windy or rainy) and so the transfer took place. Here Jim and Lew are getting ready to off-load the hives.



Two guys can lift the hives quite readily.



Here Lew is introducing Jim to OUR bees :)



Then they off-loaded a stack of supers, which we'll add to the hives as needed for honey storage. We're headed off for a week's vacation this coming weekend (yeah I know, great timing!) and we'll leave a super on each hive before we go.



We've got a temporary water supply set up but will need to have a drip set up for them for while we're gone. Jim's folks can keep an eye, but the least they have to do (besides water the garden) the easier it will be for them.

Yay! We have bees!!

Bee Day

A few weeks ago I coerced Jim into writing a blog post about the beekeeping course he's been taking. After his second classroom instruction day, he didn't have a lot to say about it. On Saturday was his hands-on day. He'd asked if I could come along to participate, and they were happy to have me come. Also didn't mind that I brought the camera and stuck it many places!

We met on the property of Lance, the bee inspector for our region (and the teacher). Here he is expounding on the parts of the hive:



He'd set up various stations around his property with activities, and split the class up into groups to go through the stations. Everything from identifying disease, to learning how to set skunk traps, to treating bee diseases, to learning to build an electric fence to keep bears away from the hives, etc. And, of course, everyone got their chance to suit up and have a demonstration right in the bee yard.

Here's Jim:



Yep, I suited up and went in the bee yard also. It didn't occur to me how many people would be horrified that I'd do that, knowing I get allergic reactions from stings. But I felt quite comfortable in the suit--other than hot. The bees buzzing around didn't really *bug* me.



Not everyone suits up. The fellow on the right of this photo has been running bees for 45 years and says he hasn't suited up for over half that time. He did get a couple stings that day, but just gently flicked the bee away. Amazing.



He was in charge of the bee yard demonstrations and lifted frames out of the supers--yes, bare-handed--then handed them around so everyone could see the pollen, the larvae, etc.



Here the White Lab Overalls examine all.



Bees!!



So, now we have a bit of an idea what beekeeping entails and are on to the next steps: preparing our own bee yard and looking for hives to purchase. Will keep you updated!

Beekeeping

Today I took the first of three days of a beekeeping course. It covered the development of the bee, hive construction and comb types. About bees and drones and how the hives work. There's the queen and all the workers which are female (as it should be). All the drones have to do is fly, catch a queen, have sex, and die. What a way to go. Drones don't sting, they have no defenses. If the workers are full of honey they can't sting either, because they have to bend their abdomen to sting.

I didn't know that honeybees were not native to North America. They were brought over by the Europeans when they brought over fruit trees and orchards which are not native to North America, either. There was no natural pollinator for the fruit. Bumblebees were too busy with their natural niche of berries and crabapples to be interested in the new varieties. I didn't know that and I thought it was kind of cool.

Sometimes wasps kill honeybees. One guy in our area lost a whole hive to wasps. Can you have organic honey? Unless you own thousands of acres that you know you keep organic, it's virtually impossible to claim organic honey. I kind of figured that. Bees go out about five miles from the hive so you'd need to have ten miles you know is organic. You can say it's natural honey. Made by bees for bees.

Interesting stuff. Something we're looking at doing on our farm. You need a permit in B.C. and your hives have to be inspected. I'll keep you posted after next week's lesson. There's lots more to learn. I've always been interested in entomology. It's interesting when you can mix food production with something else you enjoy.

Val found an interesting YouTube on beekeeping:

Food Action Coalition Meeting

This hasn't been a good week for me to blog, so I nearly forgot to tell you about the local food coalition meeting on Monday evening.

Our eyes were really opened as to what all is going on in our valley to support local agriculture. Here are some of the highlights.

If anyone reading is from the Kootenay region, you might want to get into purchasing grain shares for autumn 2009. What this means is that for $125.00 (paid by April 30, 2009) you get one *share* of local whole grain, which includes 20 pounds Hard Spring Wheat, 20 pounds Hard Winter Wheat, 20 pounds Spelt, 20 pounds Khorasan (also known as Polish Wheat or Kamut), and 20 pounds Oats. Your family can purchase more than one share, and there are additional shares available for lentils and red fife wheat. Sounds like I might need to purchase the grain mill attachment for the KitchenAid!

We have a community greenhouse. Now, this I didn't know. I know there's a community garden--it's just up a block from where I work. But it sounds like the greenhouse is involved in projects with schools and the senior center as well as having 55 participants in a winter harvest project. We need to find out more about this, methinks.

The farmer's markets have been running on Saturday mornings the past couple of summers, and we've gone into town a number of times to get fresh produce that we aren't growing ourselves. Good to know these will continue and that they are looking for ways to expand and be more efficient. I'd like to see them get off a gravel parking lot and into a venue that would offer shade, like a park.

The Garden Hoe folks (I posted a photo of Barry--now I know his name!--on the Seedy Saturday post) talked about the challenges they face in their greenhouse and market garden business, namely time and weed management. They're excited because a group of about 30 regional restaurants are actively seeking local produce.

Jim and I have talked about raising chickens again for meat. We've really wanted to do this because we wanted to know where our meat was coming from and that it was naturally grown (if not organically). But it's a big undertaking, and we are always short on time and energy, so we're very pleased that we'll be able to purchase chickens from a new business start-up here in the valley who has built a poultry barn and fenced off an area for the birds to get outside. We've ordered 10 birds for June pickup and 10 more for October pickup. These will be roaster size (5-6 pounds) and the expectation is that the price will be similar to that of the grocery store. If anyone reading this is local and wants to get in on this, just ask us for the guy's phone number. He's still taking orders as far as I know.

The main presentation of the evening was by Susan, a local beekeeper and orchardist (cherries are the big local crop). She gave comprehensive insight into the challenges facing beekeepers and how to get into the business, saying that there is need for more hives locally to satisfy demand. Who knew that huge apiaries from the prairies bring truckloads of hives to over-winter here in our milder climate and then hire the bees out to pollinate the orchards? Her talk was extremely interesting to both of us in that this is an avenue we've seriously considered pursuing and now we have the information to evaluate.

Apparently these meetings are held monthly, with various local agribusinesses presenting their challenges at each one, as well as reports from the various arms of the coalition. Very interesting. I'm glad we went.