Beekeeping Archives - Full & Simple

Hand-Picked Peach: Week 41

May 18, 2016 by Erika

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Work on the chicken coop has commenced! We are building an 8'x8' building and adding a run on it as well. Most of the time we will let the chickens free-range in the pasture, but we wanted the run in case we ever needed them penned up.

And he's all mine ladies!

Anyway, I have had my eyes on these signs from Bainbridge Farm Goods on Etsy for a while now, and can't wait to get one for the new chicken coop. I might even get one of the honey bee signs too. But don't worry if you don't have chickens or bees, they have signs for goats, dogs, butterflies, veggies and more!

"Bainbridge Farm Goods makes modern, colorful and hip farm and garden signs that are sure to liven up your space! There are colors and designs to fit any décor, chicken coop, mud room, or kitchen alike. Each aluminum sign is fully waterproof and UV resistant—think street sign sturdy! Both vertical and horizontal designs and in several sizes and shapes are available to suite your space."

I think that these signs will make cute contibutions to our chicken coop and bee yard. I can't wait for the chicken coop to be completed so I can share it all with you...and because the chickens are starting to fly out of their brooder and they are fast suckers! LOL!

PLUS, if you visit Bainbridge Farm Goods and use the code fullandsimple you can get 25% off of your order! Hurry, this code is only good until June 12, 2016!

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Combining Hives: Easier Read Than Done

May 11, 2016 by Erika

We aren't sure what the orange in there is yet. If you have any ideas. let me know in the comments!

It has been a while since I've given everyone a bee update. Well, the good news is that we had bees survive the winter with plenty of honey stores leftover. The bad news is that the queen was not one of those bees. This meant that we either had to re-queen or combine our existing hive with the new bees that we ordered. After some research, my husband decided that it would be best to try to combine because we weren't sure we had enough bees left to attend to a new queen.

Plenty of capped honey left & a bee getting a snack.

When we bought the new bees, our hope was that the hive we bought last year would make it through the winter so that we would actually have two hives. But when we opened up the hive for our first inspection of the spring, we weren't happy with what we found. It looks like there was a lot of moisture that got into the hive. Bees can't handle being cold and wet, so we think that this is probably the number one contributor to the loss of the queen and most of the bees. However, you do expect significant losses during the winter anyway because a worker honey bee's lifespan is only four to six weeks during the active season. It could be longer if the worker honey bee was born late in the season because they do very little work during the winter. With a majority of the bees dying, their bodies blocked the bottom entrance to the hive, so we plan on making a top entrance next winter. A blocked entrance prevented the bees from being able to remove dead bees or go out to do their "business" when the weather permitted, all of which could have played a role in the moisture problem. Also, because of the moisture issue, we found mold within the hive. We have been told that the bees will clean this up now that the weather is getting better so we shouldn't have to worry about it.

We saw mold when we lifted the lid.

A clump of dead moldy bees

When our new bees arrived, we got to work on trying to combine the hives. There are things that you need to do in order to make this combining successful because each hive has its own scent. If either hive smells the "wrong" hive, it will attack and try to kill the other bee(s).

To prevent this, you are supposed add a weak hive into a strong hive by adding the boxes of weak bees on top of the boxes of the strong bees. You use a sheet of newspaper with small cuts in it between the two boxes where the two separate hives meet. With a bottom entrance, the bees on top will have to eat through the newspaper to get out. By the time that they do this, the two hives will have the same smell and will then co-exist peacefully.

Our 3lbs of new bees after being dumped into the top of the hive.

However, we added our new bees (which obviously did not have any established hive boxes) on top of our old bees. Even though we had subdued the new bees with a sugar water mist, all of the bees were buzzing around before we had completed putting the newspaper down and then reassembling the hive box, so my husband concluded that the newspaper would do very little for us. If the two hives were going to war, it was already happening. We ended up just removing the newspaper altogether.

Cutting holes in the newspaper

Placing the box on top and keeping the newspaper lined up proved to be a challenge.

When it was all said and done, I looked at my husband and said that we had just committed a bee massacre. Unintentionally, of course, but I still felt bad. He tried to console me a day or two later when he came home from work, and after talking to fellow beekeepers, found out that some had heard that bees without a queen (like our old hive) don't have a scent. Based on that, our original hive would have easily integrated into the new hive. However, I've done no research on this and fear the worst happened.

Things that we are hoping to do this summer with the bees are to possibly split the hive if it is doing well, which will give us the two hives we wanted. We are also considering buying Indiana queens and then re-queening the hive(s) later in the summer. The reasoning behind this, based on what we learned from our bee group, is that an Indiana queen may give birth to bees better able to withstand our winters and climate as we head into the cold weather. The queen and bees we buy come from Georgia, so there is quite a difference in weather.

The queen that came with our new bees is the larger one on the very left.

The queen that came with our new bees is the larger one in the box.

Bees were constantly trying to attend to the queen while I was holding her.

It's all a learning process and the learning is part of the fun I think. It can be frustrating to not do well the first time or to feel like you've lost money, but how boring would life be if we all just got "it" (whatever that may be) on the first go? I find, especially now that I'm staying home, that I crave learning. I could never understand why my students would come to class without an understanding of how fun and powerful learning could be. Maybe that's where I failed as a teacher. This love of learning is one of the things that I love about this blog too. I feel accountable to you all. I want to bring you accurate and new ideas to help you pursue whatever interests you have, whether that's beekeeping or reading or something altogether different. I hope that you will keep trying and keep learning just like we are with our little honey bees.

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The Bee-Friendly Garden

April 9, 2016 by Erika

Full & Simple Book Review The Bee-Friendly Garden

Since we started keeping bees last spring, I have been wanting to add more flowers and plants for the honey bees to eat on, so I was very excited when I found The Bee-Friendly Garden.

The one thing that surprised me, was that it was not focused on honey bees. I assumed (You know what happens when we assume....) that it would be because we raise honey bees and that is my focus and because honey bees are a big focus in today's world with colony collapse disorder being widely talked about. However, this book reminded me that there are over 20,000 different species of bees in the world and we really need them all. And here's why, honey bees do not and cannot pollinate everything that needs pollinating. They are not big enough to vibrate the pollen loose on tomato plants. I don't know about you, but I love tomatoes, so I'm thankful that the big bumblebee is around to take care of pollinating tomatoes for me. This books gives suggestions on how to plant for native bees as well as honey bees.

The Bee-Friendly Garden large

This book is also incredibly in-depth. The authors cover everything from different bee species to why some flowers appeal to some bees more than others based on the flower's structure and the bee's features. Like, did you know that bees prefer flowers that are blue, pink, white or yellow because they see in the ultraviolet end of the color spectrum? They break down the types of flowers that bees are attracted to into annuals, perennials, trees, vegetables and shrubs.

As you can see, I have several pages marked with useful information so that when I head to our local nursery I will know what I'm looking for!

The other bit of information that I found extremely helpful was in the back of the book where the authors break down what native plants are good for different regions of the United States. The reason, I learned, that you want to try to plant mostly native plants in your bee garden is to reduce the need for chemicals in your garden which we all know is harmful to the bee population. Because native plants have grown to withstand the climate, soil and pests, there should be less need to use pesticides, herbicides or artificial fertilizers.

Anyone, and really it should be everyone, that is interested in how they can help our bee population should pick up this book and plant bee-friendly flowers. The authors show large gardens as well as small urban ones, so a small area is not an excuse for not doing your part!

The Bee-Friendly Garden small

You can find out more about the authors here.

You can find out more about the book here.

Disclaimer: I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review. The above post does contain some referral and affiliate links which means if you use the link and decide to purchase an item, I receive a little money from the company, at no extra cost to you, to help keep the blog going. Thank you for supporting the blog!

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Hand-Picked Peach: Week 29

February 19, 2016 by Erika

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Hey there! Sorry I've been absent from the blog this week. With it being a short week, and "baby" J turning one, I've been a little preoccupied. We are going to have a lot of family over tomorrow for his party and I've taken on a bit of a challenge with his cake. I've made all of L's cakes and I want to do the same for J, but I'm trying homemade fondant for the first time. I practiced last weekend, and the results were far from stellar, but I'm hoping that I've learned and that this time it will turn out better. Fingers crossed anyway!

I hadn't been on Anthropologie's website forever. I used to shop there constantly, but when we were trying to get out of debt, it wasn't a store I could really afford so I drifted away. This weekend someone I follow on Instagram was talking about something that they had gotten there, so I hopped over to have a look. And then I found this!

This is their Beehive Trivet. Isn't it fantastic?! I want like six. I like finding these little pieces that add a bit of whimsy, but are still classy.

I hope you have a fantastic weekend and I should be back to my normal blogging routine next week.

Source

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Yes, I’m Trying to Kill My Bees

November 9, 2015 by Erika

Here are the bees with uncapped honey.

Before you read any further, please reread the title with a sarcastic voice. Ok, now we can go on.

Since the temperatures are dropping, I doubt we will have another opportunity to check the bees this year. In the last post about the bees, I wrote about the fact that we had decided not to supplement our bees with sugar water this summer. My husband has conducted hive checks since then, but I kept waiting for us to be able to do one together before I wrote this post. (Having littles makes it hard to do much of anything together at times.) Now that we're having days where the high is in the 50s, I don't think that I'll have an opportunity to check on the ladies again this year, but I wanted to give you one last update on how our first hive is doing.

I'm sure that you are wondering why I chose the title I did. Well, after the hive check we completed where we found that they weren't building as much as we had hoped without supplemental feeding, I started doing more research and I reached out to some beekeeping groups for advice. One group that I reached out to was a BEGINNER beekeeping group on Facebook. Let me tell you, some of the responses not polite and were not helpful. I honestly cried one day. Lack of sleep may have contributed, but still. I don't understand why people feel the right to be hateful to others that they don't know online. Many in the group asked me if we "wanted bees that were alive or natural dead bees." Well, obviously we want bees that are alive. Beekeeping is not a cheap hobby. We did not spend $140 on bees plus what it cost for the hive boxes, frames, suits, etc. to intentionally kill them, so no, I'm not actually trying to kill my bees.

There is a lot of research and articles out there that point to why feeding sugar water to your bees is not good for them. It was these articles that helped me make the decision to not feed over the summer. In the late spring and summer, flowers are abundant. And nectar and pollen contain additional nutrients beyond just sugar and water, nutrients that can help ward off parasites and boost the immune systems of the bees. In a post on Beekeeping Like a Girl, she talks about how bees actually will prefer certain flowers that have the necessary properties to kill any parasites that may be present in the hive.

Besides the online resources and groups, we also asked my brother-in-law what he did. He made a few good points. 1.) If you feed bees sugar when there is also an abundance of flowers, the colony make focus on making honey instead of brood. The brood (think babies) that the queen lays in late summer and autumn will like be the bees that make emerge in the spring. You want to make sure that there is room for them in the hive. 2.) BUT if you don't feed them at all in the late summer and early autumn, they may start eating their winter stores of honey early due to the lack of natural forage.

After all of the advice and reading, we did decide to feed our bees a mixture of sugar and water shortly after I wrote my post. There were fewer flowers around, mostly just goldenrod, making natural forage harder to come by. We were concerned that they hadn't filled up that top box yet and DID NOT want them to not be prepared heading in to winter and then not make it.

We did add in ingredients to our mixture so that the bees got more than just sugar and water. For every cup of sugar we added a drop of doTERRA wintergreen oil and doTERRA lemongrass oil. These oils are good for parasite and pest prevention. We also added a teaspoon of vegetable glycerin and a tablespoon of local honey we had bought from another beekeeper.

My husband says that things are looking good for the bees. They had started to build in the top box when he last checked. Now we just have to prep the hive for winter and hope that they make it until spring.

I'm comfortable with the choices we've made so far. As much as I want to be wholly natural, we do need to do what is best for the bees. If they lack honey of their own, we'll feed. If they have plenty and there are flowers out, we won't. And I think the longer we keep bees, the better we will be able to determine when or if they need the sugar water mixture.

Disclaimer: The above post contains affiliate links.

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An Afternoon Visit to the Terre Haute Children’s Museum

October 5, 2015 by Erika

This awesome treehouse is one in the center of the museum.

This awesome tree house is in the center of the museum.

I think that one thing (of many) that is great about being a parent is that you sort of get to be a kid again. You get to buy Teddy Grahams and go to cartoons in the theater without people giving you funny looks. And you get to visit places like children's museums.

I was surprised that we had a really nice children's museum so close to us. I saw some friends post pictures of a field trip that their kids took to the Terre Haute Children's Museum, and decided that we needed to check it out.

Disclaimer: Terre Haute Children's Museum provided us with complimentary tickets in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Before we get into all of the fun stuff, let's go over some of the logistics. The museum is located in downtown Terre Haute, Indiana. There is free two-hour street parking right by the museum, a parking garage a block away that charges $1/hour, or if you don't care to walk a few blocks, we found free street parking with no time limit. Admission is $8 for everyone ages two and older and they are open Tuesday through Sunday. If you are going to be there around lunch or dinner there is an attached pizza cafe, Savoia's.

Ok, on to the fun stuff!

We started to have fun before we even entered the museum. In the vestibule, they have a thing that makes smoke rings when you push on it. We played with it for about five minutes before even going in! Once inside, we were greeted by a very helpful staff member. She gave us the run down of where things were and provided a map.

This was the first exhibit we saw. I loved that it discussed where our food comes from, why you want to buy local and why some items can't be bought local like bananas.

The first exhibit we visited inside discussed food and the different options we have as consumers. The exhibit discussed eating locally, GMOs, and what farmers do. It had a cute little "farmer's market" where kids could play with fake produce. L was too little to figure the cost of her basket of apples, but older kids could do this to incorporate math and currency if you were homeschooling or taking a field trip.

Kids can brush away the mulch to find fossils in this area.

Next up was the dino dig where "fossils" were buried and kids get to be the archaeologist. The area was complete with brushes and scoops to move the tire material away from the buried fossils. L loved the dinosaur hand scoops.

Here is a top view of the room with all of the play tables and the beehive jungle gym.

The beehive had holes so kids could move from cell to cell.

In the same room as the dino dig were several hands on items like Kinex, musical instruments and a giant treehouse. But this room also housed L's favorite thing from the whole trip, a giant "beehive" where kids could climb and pretend to be bees. I keep telling my husband that we need to build one for our kids. It was so cute and L loved it.

The toddler play space was a safe environment for the younger kids to move around.

This gentlemen was in the grocery area the whole time helping kids "check out" their picks. The area also included little shopping carts for the kids to push around and a lot of play food.

On the second floor of the museum was the toddler play space. It was only for kids under the age of four, and had a soft floor for crawling or falling if your little one is still wobbly while walking. I loved the little bee scooters and may have to get one for our kids for Christmas or birthdays. Also on this floor were some farm items like a tractor and a cow that you could "milk" as well as a little grocery store. I loved the conveyor belt that they had made for the grocery store and that there was someone that was always there to help your child check out all of the items they wanted to buy.

Agriculture was a big part of the museum, which I think is great since we are surrounded by it. Kids need to know that there is science behind all of the farming.

L tried to pull the rope too fast and the bubble would always pop so I had to hold on to slow her down.

L and I made a giant bubble around ourselves before moving on to the water table. Baby J loved the water table and my husband and I thought it was incredible that the museum had thought to put in baby seats so that babies could enjoy their time at the museum as well. J did end up getting pretty soaked, but who cares when you get a smile like that?

The water table area had aprons for the older kids, but baby J got pretty wet. He loved it though!

The exhibit I was most excited about seeing was the indoor beehive. I had heard that it was in a tree trunk, so I had imagined a real tree that the museum was possibly built around (There are buildings on ISU campus that have been built around trees.), but I was a bit disappointed when I found the hive was in a fake trunk. The hive was in a back corner, which also disappointed me. The hive may have also been less exciting simply because now that we have our own bees, seeing bees out isn't as big of a deal. Overall though, I loved how much the museum incorporated bees into their exhibits.

This is the beehive exhibit. Unfortunately all of my pictures of the actual bees turned out really dark. They had frames lined up in the trunk behind plexiglass so you could see the bees working.

I think the things that I loved most about the museum were that it was very hands-on, I wasn't afraid to let L touch things and try things, and I also loved that a lot of the exhibits had to do with food and agriculture, things that our kids here in southern Indiana see all the time, but may not understand the science behind. The exhibits allow them to gain a deeper understanding for things that are tangible to them in their everyday life.

I can definitely say that my family and I will be going back. We had a great time, and made a lot of memories. It may even be the location for future birthday parties.

Kids can either climb up the tree house or enter the top on the second floor. L was too little to climb by herself, so we took the stairs.

When we got home, I decided that I wanted to give you all a way to put some of what you're kids will learn into action. As I said before, I loved all of the bee stuff that was incorporated into the decor and exhibits as well as the bee hive exhibit itself, so I came up with this bee waterer craft and found a book for you and your littles to read as well.

Shortly after we bought our bees, I bought L the book, Bee & Me. It is very cute and and has a good rhythm to the words. It explains that while we humans fear bees, they are around to help us and that they do more than just make honey. I think you're little one will enjoy it!

You can buy this cute board book from Amazon.

Bee Waterer

I was inspired by this bee waterer, but I wanted something a little more fun so that L would be excited about it.

What you will need:

a terra cotta pot
a terra cotta plate
yellow acrylic paint
black acrylic paint
yellow puff paint
white puff paint
a sponge brush
an angled brush
marbles
hot glue gun

Directions:

Paint the outside of your pot and plate with the yellow acrylic paint. I did not paint the inside of the plate because I was unsure of what chemicals could end up in the water and how that might affect the bees. I painted on three coats of yellow to get rid of most of the streaks. I wasn't worried about the tag mark since it would be hidden once I was finished.
After the yellow paint has dried, paint a small amount of black paint on your child's thumb and let them "stamp" the pot with their thumbprints. These will become the bees.
Use the puff paint to create the yellow stripes and wings on all of the bees that your child stamped on the waterer.
Now, using the angled brush, add streaks of black paint behind some of the bees to show a "flight path."
Once all of the paint is dry, place the plate right-side-up on the pot. I did not do this next step, as I did not think of it before I assembled my waterer, but I think it will help especially those of you perfectionists out there like me. Move the plate until you are happy with the placement, then use a pencil to trace around the bottom of the plate so you have a guide as to where to put the hot glue.
Remove the plate and add hot glue around your tracemark and place the plate back on top of the pot. Let dry.
Once the hot glue is good and dry, add the marbles to the plate. The marbles give the bees somewhere to land. Bees can easily drown in water if they don't have anywhere to land. And then fill with spring water. Tap water has chemicals like chlorine and fluoride that you don't want bees ingesting.
Now, place your waterer in your herb or flower garden so that visiting bees can stop for a drink while they're out collecting pollen!

Disclaimer: The above post contains affiliate links.

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Did We Make a Mistake Going Natural?

September 8, 2015 by Erika

Modeling my new bee suit.

Last week my very own bee suit came. Originally, the bees were supposed to be more of my husband's thing. I had planned on making yummy treats with the honey and candles and things with the wax, but that was going to be the extent of my involvement. Well, if you've been following the blog, you know that I have become very enamored with our bees. And with the realization that we need to have an "us" thing, my husband bought me a bee suit as a late anniversary gift. (You know you're starting to get older when you ask for practical gifts!)

Since I received my bee suit, we decided to do a hive inspection last week as well. When we opened up the hive, my heart sank. A month or so ago, we added frames to the fourth box on the hive and took out the feeder. My husband talked about getting another empty box to put on top so that we could add the feeder back because we only bought the four boxes so far this year. We fed the bees a mixture of white sugar and water, mostly because we were told that the bees needed an extra supply of food because they were starting their hive from scratch. However, I have been doing some reading, and natural and organic beekeepers do not feed sugar water. I talked to my husband and he said that he would leave the decision on sugar water up to me, and I decided to let the bees forage for all of their food instead of providing the sugar water. When we opened the box, the frames were empty. No honey. No comb. (Sigh.) I immediately had the "Oh, crap!" feeling. Had I made a mistake in wanting to go more natural?

Where's the honey?!

My husband has reassured me that these empty frames should not be a problem for the bees. We kept a queen excluder (a metal grate that keeps the queen in the bottom boxes to prevent her from laying eggs in the top box) on top of the third box, because this ensures that only honey is made in the top box since the top box is usually extra honey and where a beekeeper will harvest from. Okay. I felt better. We were only missing "extra" honey and we aren't going to harvest this year anyway.

You can see here that they have not built any comb on the frame. You can also see the metal queen excluder.

The queen is too large to fit through the excluder so the beekeeper doesn't jeopardize any brood when harvesting honey.

We put the top box aside and found that the bottom boxes are FULL of bees. We found a lot of brood (eggs and larvae) and honey. We didn't see the queen. I have to say that I was disappointed at how much harder it was for me to distinguish the different bees and their jobs in real life versus a picture in a book. I'll have to study more! We also took a spoonful of honey from one of the frames. I just couldn't resist. I HAD to try it, and let me tell you, it was delicious! The honey had a much more subtle taste than store-bought which I liked better. I'm definitely looking forward to harvesting next year!

That is a lot of bees!

Here are the bees with uncapped honey.

This is capped honey.

The top portion with all of the bees on it is honey and the bottom portion that is an opaque yellow is made up of brood cells.

You can see the bee larvae all curled up.

We did spray sugar water as we opened the boxes. This makes it harder for the bees to fly, but it also keeps the bees busy. Bees are very tidy and the sugar water is messy to them, so they will clean it up instead of bothering you. Here you can see them cleaning each other off.

Hopefully, my husband is right and the lack of honey and comb in the top box doesn't mean disaster for our bees this winter. I think we will do at least one more check before winter, and hopefully we'll see some change in that top box then.

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3 TED Talks to Watch if You Want to #SavetheBees

July 23, 2015 by Erika

Since I've started to stay home, I find myself craving brain stimulation. Super Why and Bubble Guppies just aren't doing it for me. I don't have adult conversations most of the day and on busy evenings, I don't have them really at all. I have found myself becoming obsessed with podcasts and TED Talks to fill the gap and give myself some "adult time." I even bought a arm strap for my iPhone so that I can listen to my podcasts while L is watching cartoons or doing something else. (Yes, I do make sure the volume is low enough that I can still hear the kids.) I watched these TED talks while feeding J in an attempt to learn more about our honey bees. If you are at all interested in bees (which you should be) then you have to find time to watch these!

Why Bees Are Disappearing

Did you know that in parts of the world, where there are no bees, that people are paid to pollinate flowers by hand with a paint brush? Or did you know that there is such a thing as a tomato vibrator called the Tomato Tickler? Kinky, huh? Bees are the number one pollinators of our food, so it should worry you that they are disappearing at an alarming rate. Marla Spivak delves into colony collapse disorder in this intriguing TED Talk. She also has amazing photography illustrations to support her talk.

A Plea for Bees

Beekeepers lose approximately thirty percent of their bees each winter. That's a lot of bees! If a cattle farmer lost 30% of their herd in a given winter then we'd call in the National Guard! The reason that bee loss seems to be given less attention is the beekeeper's ability to replace these bees the following summer. In this talk, Dennis vanEngelsdorp (also interviewed in the Vanishing of the Bees documentary which I reviewed here) discusses colony collapse disorder as it was just coming to light. This is the oldest of the TED Talks, but I find that you can feel the frustration and angst in his voice at how big of a problem CCD is for all of us.

Every City Needs Healthy Honey Bees

As the French listen to the opera at the Paris Opera House, the honey bees that reside on the roof are collecting pollen from nearby chestnut trees. Honey bees do not have to live in the country to survive and thrive. In fact, surburban honey bees actually seem to do better as is discussed in this TED Talk by Noah Wilson-Rich.

Learn more about the bees at the Paris Opera House here.

Bonus Video: The First 21 Days of a Bee's Life

While I don't necessarily feel comfortable with the genetic manipulation discussed in this video, it is something that it being researched and we need to be aware. Anand Varma was asked by National Geographic to photograph a story of the first days of a bees life. The only way he knew to do this was to start raising a hive himself. Anand is able to capture the first 21 days of a bees life in pictures and shows them in a time-lapsed 60 second video. During the video, you also get a glimpse of one of the causes of bee population decline, the varroa mite.

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Vanishing of the Bees Documentary Review

June 22, 2015 by Erika

This weekend I watched the documentary Vanishing of the Bees on Netflix, and if you are interested in bees at all, I recommend that you do as well. I'm a little late in watching the documentary; it was made in 2009, but it is still incredibly relevant.

The documentary, narrated by Ellen Page, follows beekeepers David Hackenberg (3,000 hives) and David Mendes (7,000 hives) as they try to bring attention to colony collapse disorder (CCD). The two travel to Europe to speak with beekeepers in France and testify in front of a Congressional committee as part of their journey. Hackenberg is credited with discovering CCD. When he first started to talk about CCD (then not named or recognized as a problem), he received a lot of criticism and many thought he was simply a bad beekeeper. Other experts and researchers are also interviewed as you get a glimpse into the world of today's beekeeping industry.

Colony collapse disorder is something that I had heard of before watching Vanishing of the Bees, but not something I new a lot about. It is typically characterized by three things:

There are no dead bees in or around the hive.
There are no mites or pathogens in the hive to explain the disappearance of the bees
The queen and young are left behind.

With CCD, the bees simply disappear. The disappearing is what is making CCD so hard to combat. There are no bees left behind to study in order to determine the cause(s) of CCD. From other research, I've learned that it is suspected that pesticides on crops are making the bees disoriented, similar to being drunk, which is causing them to not be able to find their way back to the hive. They eventually die wandering out in the fields.

Are the bees going to go extinct? Probably not....for a while at least. Beekeepers are great at replacing lost hives. In any given year, even when bees are healthy, a beekeeper can expect to lose about thirty-percent of their hives. To replace these losses, beekeepers simply split hives; a new queen is created and both hives then grow and multiply. The real reason that EVERYONE needs to care about CCD is because, according to Mendes, bees signal environmental quality. If the bees are dying then something is wrong.

You can help the bees and environment by planting for all pollinators, not just bees. Plant flowers and veggies that attract bees, hummingbirds, butterflies and bats. Eliminate the use of pesticides and don't buy plants treated with pesticides (look at the tags if you are at a big box store and ask your local greenhouse about their use of pesticides). Support local farmers that are more likely to have a diversity of crops (good for bees) and that are less likely to use systemic pesticides.

Besides learning a lot about colony collapse disorder, I learned a few other cool things. One of those things being that bees are trucked across the country in order to pollinate different crops including almonds, blueberries and cranberries. The hives are literally loaded onto a semi-truck and moved from Florida to California to Maine so that the honeybees can pollinate crops for different farmers. I simply assumed that local bees just did all of the pollinating, but farmers and beekeepers have contracts to have these crops pollinated by the honeybees.

I also learned that we cannot classify our honey as organic. While we don't use medications on our bees, we have fed sugar water to them so that they had plenty to eat before many of the flowers bloomed this spring. Organic beekeepers do not feed any sugar water.

And the last thing that I thought was incredibly interesting is that queen bees can be artificially inseminated! The documentary actually shows a queen going through the process. It seems like such tedious work, requiring magnification and tiny tools. But now you have an interesting fact to throw out at your next cocktail party or barbecue.

I highly recommend that you watch Vanishing of the Bees if you haven't yet. I also found another documentary available on Netflix about honeybees that I plan to watch that was released more recently. I'll let you know what I learn from that one as well!

Visit www.vanishingbees.com to learn more.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links.

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The Baults do Bees

May 28, 2015 by Erika

In my post "Why Bees?," I mentioned that the reason we became interested in bees was because my brother-in-law took up beekeeping after a swarm showed up at his house. It's been about two years (maybe more...time seems to be flying the older I get) since we started learning about beekeeping through him and other sources.

In order to start our own beekeeping adventure, we first did a lot of research. We talked to my brother-in-law and asked his advice. My husband also has a few co-workers that keep hives, so he talked to them. Pinterest is a smorgasbord of information. And one year I bought my husband the book, The Beekeeper's Bible. This book includes everything from beekeeping history to what to do with all that honey you will hopefully end up with. It is a great resource. And my husband has been attending a local county beekeepers' meeting once a month. I hope to be able to attend the meetings in the near future, but I haven't been ready to leave J much (Yes, I'm a smother mother.).

After a little over a year of research, planning and budgeting (remember we are Dave Ramsey people), we decided that this spring we would take the plunge. My husband asked for the bee boxes for Christmas. I bought them from Mann Lake Ltd. When deciding what boxes to get, we decided to go with boxes that were already assembled. Going this route was about 3x as much money, but after talking with a few other beekeepers that bought boxes unassembled and then put the boxes together themselves, we were advised to go this route. All of the beekeepers we talked to said they would buy the pre-assembled boxes from now on because it is an incredibly time-consuming task to put the boxes and frames together. My dad always says you pay for things in life with either time or money...we decided to pay with money this time.

Bees arrive in a 3lb box through the USPS.

Then in February we ordered our bees. We really should have ordered them in January. You want to order them early. If you wait, you may not get any, which is what we were afraid was going to happen to us. We looked at four to five vendors before finding one that still had bees available for sale for early spring delivery. We got ours from Mountain Sweet Honey and they were about $130. We decided to order bees instead of trying to trap a swarm in order to be able to guarantee we would have bees this year. Trapping a swarm is something we would like to do in the future, but maybe after we get this hive established. There is no guarantee bees will come your way with the trap. Also, we bought a three pound box of bees instead of a nuc. With the box of just bees, we will have to let them build the comb from scratch. If you buy a nuc box, it comes with frames that already have the comb started so the bees have less work to do. Nuc boxes are a bit more expensive, but they can also increase the odds of your bees staying put. The nuc is sort of like a mobile home, the location of the home can change, but its still home. Because we will have to wait for the bees to create their comb from scratch, we will not be able to collect any honey or wax from them this year. We will need to leave it for them so that they have enough to feed themselves over the winter. Bees that come in the nuc box have less to build from scratch so, depending on your hive and location, you may be able to harvest from a hive started with a nuc faster than one started without . Again, it boils down to time and money...this time we decided to pay with time, but in the future my husband says we may look into nuc boxes.

Adding the frames to the box.

The day our bees arrived, my husband donned his bee suit (I don't have one yet) and got to work setting up the hive. He dug a little spot and put down cement blocks to ensure that the box would be level and not topple over. He added the frames and then dumped the bees in. Yes, I said dumped. Now, before doing this, you will want to spray the bees with a sugar water mixture. This helps prevent them from flying because it gets on their wings, but as they clean themselves and each other off, it is also starter food for them. The queen is in a little box that has a hole plugged with sugar. My husband placed the queen in the hive box and the bees will eat through the sugar cube to release her. Then he put the top on the box. He placed a water pan nearby as well. Make sure that the bees have something in the water to land on. You don't want your bees drowning after you spend so much on them!

Spraying the bees with sugar water.

Dumping the bees into the box.

Adding the queen into the hive. She is in the small box in his hand.

Our bees have been set up for a little over a month now. We checked them last week, but they still weren't ready for us to add a box to the hive. We were told that you should start with only one box. Only add an additional boxes once the previous box is 80% full. The reason, we were told, is because the bees may build up into the additional boxes before filling up the first. Leaving this empty space can leave room for pests and other bugs to come in and possibly hurt your hive. We also assumed that having boxes that are only half full will affect the amount of honey and wax you can harvest. These were things that I didn't know until my husband was actually setting the box up the day our bees got here. I was a little disappointed because I thought all the bee boxes would be out of the office, but not yet! Soon hopefully!

Checking the bees. The dark yellow is where the bees have built the comb.

Checking the bees a month later. The dark yellow is where the bees have built the comb.

Stay tuned for more information on our first beehive!

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