Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
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 …
Continue reading “Get your Honey Here: BEElieve Honey at the Farmers Market”
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“. ~ …
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 …
Continue reading “BEElieve Beekeepers Group and Feeding the Bees”
Both my colonies perished over the winter. When I opened them up in early spring I found only a handful of dead bees (no queen, that I could see), and quite a bit of honey left. It was too late, the bee bodies were too decomposed, to send off a sample to the Beltsville Lab, …
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 …
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 …
Today I went into five hives, three my own and two of a BEElieve beekeeper who broke his ankle. All but the latter two were in the full sun. Today we also had a heatwave at 93F. And in the morning, before my bee run, I spent an hour with Amie’s classroom planting poor wilting …
Continue reading “An Exhausting Day, But all Bees Taken Care of”
Yesterday was an animal day. First, I checked on Hive 3 and finally undid the mistake I made over a month ago. Back then  I pulled a deep frame out of that hive’s brood box to give to a friend, bees, brood, eggs, honey and pollen and all, whose hive was in trouble. I pulled …
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 …
Continue reading “Extracting Honey with a Home-Made Extractor”
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 …
