Apples, Apples, Apples...

Apples, apples, more apples. Crab apples, Norton apples, applesauce, apple jelly, apples and strawberries. Apples for me, apples for you, and you, and you. Apples for the sheep. 

We now have the rams and some wethers at home on enough pasture for a couple of hundred sheep, can hardly see them in the tall grass. My husband actually went out and mowed the field in front of the house so the sheep could see an approaching coyote - and the coyotes are here nightly, singing their hearts out while Josie the Guardian barks and protects. The rams love garden treats - pea pods, carrot tops, beet tops (yes, we eat them too), extra zucchini, vines of anything that’s finished producing, and this year - apples!

        I’ve done all I can with apples. The peas are filling out now, the cukes are happening, beets…  a busy, busy time.

       …and an update on the bees. Our bee master found time to visit, gotta love this man. He and my husband had a good look at our colony. They are healthy, active, filling up the second brood chamber with a winter’s supply of food. But honey for us won’t be happening this year. We don’t know why but we learned, once again, more about bees. They may have swarmed. The queen may have been weak. The bees may not have liked the queen for whatever reason - pheromones, weak?? If they decide the queen must go they surround her in a tight ball, so tight you’d have a hard time breaking it up, essentially smother her, boot her out of the hive and make another queen.

So, as we always say in Alberta, this is next year’s country. We will protect the hive as best we can (time now apparently to insert strips to kill mites) from the winter’s extreme weather conditions, and hopefully have a strong, healthy colony come spring and many kilos of honey next fall.

Waiting (Not So) Patiently for Something to Happen

Every day my husband walks down to the bee hive to have a look. He sees bees coming in and out and it seems like all is well. We keep looking at flowers, both wild and cultivated. My husband nearly had a stroke when I wanted to cut the lawn because so many clover flowers had bloomed. We compromised and I left two large sections uncut.

He added a second brood box, at the same time checking the health of the hive and the “busyness” of the bees in both bee and honey production. Again, things looked good. Our bee supplier and local honey-master told us they needed to fill this second brood box with honey for the winter. 

        He added the super, the top box, the place where “our” honey will be produced, the box with the special HoneyFlow mechanisms for retrieving honey with a spout rather than using an extractor. He placed a queen inhibitor between the 2nd box and the top box. This is a sort of screen which prevents the larger queen from going into the top box to lay eggs. 

        He built a shelf of varying heights to hold the jars while they fill with honey. And, last but not least, he enlisted the help of our neighbor to fall some trees that were shading the hive.

We watched, we waited, we are still waiting. 

        But hold on here! A fellow honey producer told us she has already collected several pounds of honey. Is something wrong??? We phoned our honey-master and yes, he said we should have honey by now and that we’d better check the hive and see what was up. We spoke to a neighbor, also a bee keeper novice, and he hasn't extracted any honey yet either, so he and my husband got together to check their hives. 

        Our honey-master said they might be “honey bound”, that maybe the queen inhibitor was keeping bees from entering the top box. Be aware, he said, that when checking the middle box (2nd brood box) it could be full to the brim with honey and extremely heavy.

        But it wasn’t heavy. It was only partly filled with honey. There were quite a few bees in the top box though so they decided the queen inhibitor is not the problem. Not enough flowers around? Did they swarm at some point without our knowledge? Were those trees shading the hive so much they were inactive much of the day? 

       Another call to our honey-master. Thank heavens for his help. There is so much to learn! Just being able to tell the difference between worker bees, the queen, the larval cells, the honey cells - gleep. To a novice, none of these things are all that obvious. But our honey-master, surprise, surprise, is currently busy harvesting honey, so we’ll have to wait and see how it goes. Will update when we know more.