Long time, sorry!
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
This is the time of year that I spend time farming, not writing about it, so sorry! Today the Canadian wildfire smoke is making it difficult to work outside, so I have time to sit down and highlight a few farm notes from the summer. The picture above was taken the very end of June. It was a very hot day, brooding for storms, NOT the best weather for opening hives. But I could tell these guys needed me to relieve them of some honey to make room for all those bees hanging around outside. Plus, if a hive is full, sometimes the bees will just quit foraging, why not?
So, I opened the blue hive first. They had filled 2/3 of the hive. I removed about four frames of honey, then a bee got inside my veil and stung me. After that, the smell from the sting excited everyone else, and I had to walk away. I got them off me, and went back and closed up the hive and moved to the tan one. When I opened that hive, I noticed they had worked out to the very last frame - 30 frames, most of which were foundationless at the beginning of the season - WOW! I got three frames out, then suddenly noticed I did not have one bee in my veil, but a whole bunch. I had to walk (quickly) away, and try to keep them from stinging me too much in the face and head. I managed to get my beesuit off and jump in the pool. I had to take three dips underwater, one in which I had to shake my hair out to remove all the bees. Amazingly, inspite of several stings to the face and head, I did not significantly swell. I was so thankful for that! But the hive was still open, so after everything calmed down, I put on a different beesuit with a zipper veil and got everything closed up. Then I ordered a zipper veil to fit on the new beesuit I got for Christmas!
Due to being too busy, I have only crushed and strained two of the frames which had fallen apart. The rest are ready for extraction and will be done very soon. Then, next week, with my new zipper veil, I will get serious about collecting honey and extracting and will have the first real honey harvest I have had in almost 10 years.
This season the bees are acting like they always did before I had trouble with the commercial beekeeper so long ago. I am not doing anything different. In fact, I have to admit the hive inspection I just recorded was the first time I had opened the hives since I installed the nucs! I am not proud of that, but apparently the bees did fine. Honestly that is one reason I went to the long hive, so that I didn't have to babysit the hives all season. There are a few pallets of hives next to my hayfield, but I can tell they are not doing so great because he has taken down several in each pallet. My bees are not affected, obviously. It feels like old times and I feel vindicated that it was not my beekeeping techniques that caused me issues all those years.
You never know what will happen on the farm. One day my daughter went out to collect eggs and found this! A hen had hatched eleven chicks out in the chicken pen. We have so many hens, we didn't miss her. Unfortunately, she was better at hiding when she was brooding the eggs than after the chicks hatched. Not having any practical way to move them inside at night, we left her to take care of them outside. One morning after a stormy night, she was gone and only one lone chick was anywhere to be found. Likely an owl got them. But the spunky little chick (which a friend dubbed "Nemo") apparently had survival skills. Since then, we have been carefully catching him each evening and putting him in the nesting box with a hen. Two or three hens eventually decided to adopt him and they watch over him during the day. We have trained him to be willing to be caught in the evening. He isn't big enough yet to climb into the coop himself, but we have found him almost halfway up some evenings.
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