Where Are the Bees?

I can't seem to go anywhere without stopping to say hi to bees. Toby and I were at Manito Park this week admiring the annuals and I saw a lot of happy bees on the salvia. I should plant more of that next year. I've also been surprised to see them working the lobelia in my containers at home. It hasn't rained in two months so anything that hasn't been watered had totally dried up.

Selling Honey

My honey has real labels now! They're colorful and have a picture of the hives from back in August when all the supers were on. I'm amazed at how many people want to buy some honey at work. If this keeps up, it'll be gone after the garden club meeting in a couple of weeks.

Getting Ready for Market

Now that the honey is all bottled, I have to get it labeled and ready to sell. I'm getting labels made by a local company; they should be ready by the end of the week. I'm putting polka dot ribbons on the jars too to dress them up a little. The TIEG meeting in October is coming up and I have a table reserved at the 'marketplace.' I have no idea what the demand is but it should be fun to find out. If I have time, I'll make some 'award winning' caramels too for people to sample and purchase. I can use the fair ribbons to decorate the table.
How are the bees doing? They still have lots of honey in their hives even after the big harvest. Toby's hive has a new queen who's only a couple of weeks old. She was starting to lay eggs last week which is good news but I plan to check on her again this week and make sure I see good brood production. Still need to keep my fingers crossed! I talked to a fellow beekeeper this week whose hive also went queenless this week. She had to get a new queen from Tate's. It's not a good time of year to re-queen but what can you do?
It's time to get ready for colder weather: night time temps were in the upper 30s last week but now it's warmer and will be close to 90 by Friday! Not sure how that affects the bees. I do know that we haven't had rain for a month and a half so it's really dry which decreases the available forage for the bees. At least we live on the South Hill where much of the yards and parks are watered which helps.

Extraction Day!!

And the grand total is.... 200lbs!! That's a lot of honey. I spent saturday afternoon at Sweet and Simple Apiaries for the extraction and got five five-gallon buckets of honey. Now I'm in the process of getting it filtered and bottled.

This is the uncapping machine: it's kind of like a giant electric bread knife that slices the wax caps off the surface of the honeycomb so it can go into the extractor.

Here's the extractor filled with frames of uncapped honeycomb.  I think this one held around 30 frames.

The honey pours out of the extractor into these plastic bins that have a filter on top to catch chunks of wax and debris.  I think I filled three or four of these.

                             The proof: my receipt for the day's work.  The guys were having fun joking around that I'd produced almost double my weight in honey!

My haul: the buckets were so heavy that I had to use the wheelbarrow to move them around.

After I lugged the buckets home, I started filtering the honey in this bucket which then can be used to fill other buckets and jars.

All done bottling!

It took several days the yield was:
Six cases of pint jars.
Three of half pints.
Two cases of quarts.
One case of little 1/4 pint jars.
And a gazillion rags, paper towels and woman hours! Next is getting them labeled and decorated and we'll be ready to sell.

Blue Ribbon!

In other exciting news, I got a blue ribbon at the Spokane Fair! I entered some salted honey caramels in the 'food made with honey' category since my extracted honey wasn't ready in time. I guess the judges liked it! I

Queenless!!

It's been a bit of a roller coaster on the beekeeping front lately. The bad news in that Toby's hive is queenless! There were eggs in the drone comb when I rotated those frames a couple of weeks ago when we pulled the honey supers so I thought everything was good. Unfortunately I didn't do a full inspection at the time and didn't realize I had a problem until last week when I opened up the hive and saw lots of queen cells. I'm waiting to see if the hive was able to create a new queen. I checked it this week and no eggs yet. The queen cells are all gone. Either I have a queen that has yet to mate and start laying or no queen at all. If that's the case, I'll need to buy one. Hopefully I'll know within the next week...
Luckily, Cam's hive is happy and healthy and has lots of honey so I'm thankful for that!

Bee School Grad

It's official! I am a bee school graduate. I got the certificates at the bee club meeting last Friday. I should frame them and hang them up in the shed. We had a really good meeting that focused on what we need to do to get our hives ready for fall and winter.

Pulling Honey Supers

Well, we got the honey supers off! Jon helped me get that done a couple of weeks ago. I used bee escapes to get the bees out and they worked pretty well after being on for 48 hours. There were still a handful of bees left but it was pretty easy to brush them out. We stored them in the new shed in plastic bins to keep bees and wasps out. The hives are so much shorter now! No stepstool needed anymore which is nice.