Get your Honey Here: BEElieve Honey at the Farmers Market

Today I spent five hours at our Farmers Market selling BEElieve honey. It was incredible. We sold out in 1 1/2 hour. What we sold this week was my honey, harvested last year and still left over, even after all that eating and bartering with it. I had twenty-three 10 oz jars (by weight). I’ll harvest …

Hive Opening for the BEElieve Folks

The Transition Wayland BEElieve group met yesterday in my apiary, aka the “bee yard”, that is, in the close vicinity of my one hive (soon to be three!), for the first hive opening of the year. This is a cross post with the one I posted on the Transition Wayland blog, called “Wayland Voices“. ~ …

BEElieve Beekeepers Group and Feeding the Bees

One of my most favorite projects with Transition Wayland is the BEElieve group. We sent out calls for beekeepers and bee enthusiasts in Wayland at the beginning of the year on our website and in the local media. Within two months, we had twenty people on the email list. We held our first meeting last …

Visit to the deCordoba Museum

The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum is situated in Lincoln, the town to the north of us. Still, though it is only a twenty minute drive away, I had in all the years of living here never gone there until my friend A managed to pry me off my mountain and out of my town …

Honey Extracting with the New Extractor

Today I robbed seven frames from the two hives in my beeyard. Many  more frames were only half or three fourths capped, but with some luck in weather and nectar flow, the bees will cap those fully and I’ll have more to rob.  There’s also the third hive at our friend’s place: I’m curious to …

Extracting Honey with a Home-Made Extractor

I have three hives, with four honey supers, chock-full of honey. But how to extract it? What I did two years ago, just cutting off the capping with a knife and letting it drip, takes a long time during which the hygroscopic honey will absorb a lot of water, making it more prone to fermentation …

Elements!

Just for my own satisfaction (sanity?), a reckoning of the elements in place or about to be in place here at Robin Hill Gardens: Veg gardens, all grown from seed (reasonable harvests, gardener needs more experience) Hoop house (12’x20′) Solar PV array (5.1 Kw – supplies 100% of electricity) Medicinal herb garden (minimal, needs more …