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Saturday, I attended a workshop for our beekeeping club. There
were about thirty in attendance. The workshop was set up in a large barn, so we
were out of the sun, but it was still very hot. We learned about treatment
techniques for parasites and other invaders in the beehives, about labeling laws,
about extracting honey and how to process it after it is taken from the comb.
We spent over an hour in an apiary looking into six hives, finding the queens,
looking at the frames of brood and checking for Varroa mites in three of the hives.
We watched the beekeeper who manages those hives treat the hives for mites and
saw a little of the evidence that would lead us to conclude that the mites are
an issue in the hives. They fed us lunch between the morning and afternoon
sessions. It was a good deal of information which I am still processing, but
the time in the hives was the most enlightening for me.
On a humorous note, the veteran beekeeper who was providing the
demos in the hives for us had to take off his bee suit at one point to let a
bee out of his hood. It seems the bee found an opening in the sleeve where the elastic
at the cuff of the sleeve was loose enough to allow the bee access inside the suit.
It eventually worked its way up to the hood of the suit and had to be dealt with.
Once it was let out, it went back to the hive where it had come from. Neither the
beekeeper nor the bee were injured in the incident, but it provided a moment of
levity and helped us all to realize, we are not that far apart in our abilities
to care for our bees.
Charged up from the workshop, I looked into our hives once I
was back home. I have hesitated to open the hives while there was a chance
there was honey being made but had been assured that that was a good thing to
do. So, I put my bee suit back on and looked into all four of our hives. What I
found disappointed me as far as honey production was concerned. In three of the
hives there is no honey in the honey supers. In the fourth, the bees have
filled about four frames and are working their way outward. We will be able to
get some of that honey in a few weeks. For the other three hives I looked over the
additional boxes that were added a month ago and removed the additional box
from one of the hives. They had not started work in the box at all. I left the
additional boxes on the other two hives because the bees had begun working to
draw out those boxes, but they were focused there and not on honey.
Hopefully, on the one I took the box away from, that will
motivate the bees to start working on the honey super. The real issue is that
there is not much nectar for them to draw from right now. So, we may have to
start feeding the bees just to keep them healthy. The concern is disturbing the
hives often distracts the bees from their honey production and puts them in a defense
mode. Using in-hive feeders definitely disturbs the bees. At any rate, we will
give the bees until the end of August to get the honey produced, remove the honey
supers from all the hives and we will harvest what we can. As soon as the honey
supers are removed from the hives I will treat for mites and begin feeding the bees
with the candy boards I used last year. It seems there is a long learning curve
in beekeeping.
While I was at the workshop, Mama was at a gathering of some
of the local Color Street leaders attending their conference virtually. She had
spent the better part of Friday watching presentations from the same conference
from the comfort of home, but the get together Saturday added a little more
personality to the day’s activities as they participated from afar. She came
away very excited about what is going on in Color Street – opening up sales in
Canada, providing websites and materials in Spanish, developing new convenient
ways to pay stylists, etc. She spent the better part of Monday making contacts
with her group and reaching out to potential recruits. She is pretty excited.
All our baby goats are doing well – even out little injured
male. He is becoming more used to his cast and is beginning to paly as best he
can with his siblings, hopping, jumping and running about on the rock pile that
is the focus of all the little ones we have born on the farm. We will take him
back to the vet next week to evaluate the break, but our expectation is that he
will need to be in the cast for at least a month.
I have to teach a face-to-face class tomorrow. I do not get that
opportunity often, so I am looking froward to it.
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