Bee Club Picnic

   I belong to our local bee club, the Northwest District Beekeepers Association. This past July they held their annual picnic at Polestar Farms near Granite Falls, Washington.  It was a lovely event and was very well attended.  I had heard there were 115 RSVPs and I'm sure there were at least that many attendees.  The club provided hamburgers, hot dogs, and drinks while everyone was supposed to bring either a dessert or a salad.  They ended up with enough food to feed a small army. My hat is off to Helen Crozier who was the primary organizer of this year's picnic. I can remember club picnics in the not too distant past which had less than 20 attendees.

    They had a number of fun activities scheduled to include door prizes, a creamed honey demonstration, the use of beeswax in making cosmetics such as lip balms, a hive side chat, mead making, and candle making.  I assisted with the hive side chat.  Mark Salser, co-owner of Polestar farms used two of his beehives for the hive side chat. He very wisely moved them from their normal location a few days before the picnic to his front yard. This resulted in all of the older foragers being left behind at the old location to drift into the neighboring hives. As a consequence we did a hive demo with only younger house bees present in the hives.  The older a worker bee gets, the more inclined she is to behave defensively and to sting a perceived intruder.  On the other hand, younger worker bees are not very inclined to sting.

   Mark did the hive exam wearing a T-shirt and shorts.  The only safety precaution he took was to wear safety glasses to protect his eyes from a possible sting.  I, on the other hand,  had brought a new bee jacket for the occasion. I'm less inclined to trust other people's bees than I am my own bees so I decided to wear the jacket.  I imagine that I looked a bit timid compared to Mark.  As it turned out, the bees were total sweethearts and showed no inclination to act defensively.  Mark did most of the talking and it turned out to be a pretty easy gig.  We could have just as easily done the hive exam in our swimsuits. The main value in the hive side chat is for the newer beekeepers to be able to watch an experienced beekeeper like Mark demonstrate good technique and explain what they are supposed to be looking for when they open one of their beehives.

Mark demonstrates how to light a bee smoker

My obsession with propolis gets the best of me

   The other demonstrations that I watched were also well done.  I have to admit that I didn't stick around for the mead making demo. Being a good Mormon I didn't anticipate I would use that information very much. The lip balm and hand cream demo was definitely a big hit as everyone got to take home samples. Most importantly there was lots of good food and interesting company. I may have mentioned before that beekeepers tend toward the quirky side (myself included)

Harvest Time and Observation Hive Update

        A customer brought this little gift down to the Beez Neez this past Saturday.  I didn't know who it was at first because I wasn't working that day.  I was attending  my grand daughter Natalie's baptism.  I later learned that it was Susan, who works as a professional gardener. I was touched by her thoughtfulness.  Judging by the way it had healed I'm assuming the pattern was cut into the squash while it was still green.  Between the squash and my drying corn we have a harvest theme going in our decor.

A gift from a thoughtful customer

     I put bees into the store's observation hive about a month ago.  My primary incentive to replenish the observation hive was a scheduled field trip from a local home school co-op.  The hive I chose was a small five frame nuc (short for nucleus colony) that had recently been used as a queen bank.  When the queen bank had just one queen remaining I released that queen into the queen bank.  It seems a fitting thing to do after the worker bees had labored so diligently caring for about fifty queens.   This Italian queen had been released in early August so the bees had about three weeks to build up before they were put into the observation hive.  They had started with two frames of drawn comb and three additional new frames with plastic foundation.  During that three weeks the bees had partially drawn out the foundation on either side of their drawn comb while the queen had mostly filled the two frames of drawn comb with brood.

    Since going into the observation hive, the bees have done a very good job storing nectar from the Japanese knotweed on the Pilchuck river and are continuing to suck down the sugar syrup from my feeder in the window.  They have done so well storing honey that the queen now has a somewhat limited area of comb in which to lay eggs.  All of the capped brood that went into the observation hive has now emerged and the bees have backfilled most of that space with honey and pollen. That is actually a normal thing to happen in a beehive at this time of year.   The queen reduces her laying in August and September and the bees backfill with honey as the brood nest shrinks.  The bees are actually drawing out  comb in September and have given the queen a little more space in which to lay eggs. They have done so well storing nectar and pollen that I've decided to make yet another attempt at overwintering the bees in the observation hive.

The bees have stored a lot of nectar in the past few weeks

They are also storing a lot of orange and yellow pollen

    There is one thing I intend to do differently on this attempt at overwintering.  I am going to limit the bees' access to the outside world once the weather turns colder.  I think what happened last year was that the bees were clueless as to the weather outside the store.  They were living in a year round 70 degree environment.  There was nothing going on inside the hive to tell that it too cold for them to be going outside, even for a short cleansing flight.   I noticed that the population of the observation hive dropped precipitously in November, just after a week of colder weather.   I am going to build a little screen door that I can affix to their landing platform just before the weather turns cool.  Then I will keep the screen on throughout the winter except for whenever we get a nice break in the weather.  That way the bees won't have the option of going outside unless it is warm enough for bees to fly.