So I didn’t think I was buying any more equipment, but the Dadant and Sons Catalog showed up at my door the other day, and I couldn’t resist this hive stand for 20 bucks. I was planning on just buying 4 cinder blocks to elevate my hive, but this is much better and even has legs with pest deterent trays. You can fill the trays with something like vegetable oil, and it will prevent ants and other non-flying insects from crawling up into your hive.
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While I am very excited about starting my honeybee colony, I would be remiss if I didn’t have at least one post on native bees here in Austin. There are hundreds of varieties of native bees in our area that each do their part in pollinating plants.
There has been a lot of emphasis on Colony Collapse Disorder affecting honey bees and their ability to pollinate commercial crops, but the real story should be how the use of chemicals and pesticides have killed a lot of the native pollinators which used to do the heavy lifting. The honey bee was not native to the United States until it was introduced from Europe so it was humans who helped create this dependency on honey bees to pollinate a lot of our food crops.
I am by no means an expert on native bees, but Texas Bee Watchers is an excellent site to learn a bit more about our native friends. It even has good links on creating a Nest Box to attract solitary bees to your garden. I also found their list of bee friendly plants to be very informative, and if you take a look, a lot of the plants are native and/or adapted plants suitable to the Texas climate. You won’t see a lot of bees on the “six packs of color” you find in your big box nurseries.
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Little more than a month away until the bees arrive! The above picture is from the class I took last summer, and I soon hope to have a hive filled with happy honey making bees.
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I watched Bees: Tales from the Hive: Nova (2000) via Netflix last night. I got into a little trouble because I did not tell my wife I was taking up a valuable space in our Netflix queue with this DVD, but luckily it is only 54 minutes long, and I was able to watch and return it in a day.
It is a good documentary as it explores the inner workings of the hive and the entire bee life cycle. It is not an educational video on how to become a beekeeper, but simply takes you through an entire 4 seasons of a beehive. The camerawork is amazing, and I still wonder how they got some of the shots inside the hive. It also appeared to be shot somewhere in Europe and the type of hive they showed was not the usual Langstroth hive as it opened from the side and not the top. I’m going to do some research to see if I can find anything about this hive setup.
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Bees are incredible creatures able to fly miles in search of good food sources, but I never realized how efficient they were until my wife told me about a story she heard on NPR this morning. According to research done on a bee’s ability to convert honey into energy, a bee actually gets 4,704,280 miles per gallon of honey. To put that into perspective, the average distance from the earth to the moon is around 240,000 miles.
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A single bee will only make 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.
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The New York Times has an interesting article on how bees can recognize faces. This may lead to two different scenarios:
Perhaps I need to start collecting fakes noses and moustaches…
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In my entire 35 years of life, I have yet to be stung by a bee, wasp, hornet, yellow jacket, etc. I did have a nasty run in with fire ants at an early age even after my mother warned me not to poke at the pile (I did anyway for the first and last time), but so far, no flying insect stings.
I don’t think there is a single beekeeper in the history of the world that has never been stung so I know it is not a matter of if but when. I think the anticipation of that fateful day will end up being worse than the actual sting itself. As I beekeeper, I guess I need to add getting stung to the list that includes death and taxes as the only sure things in life.
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With all the crazy winter weather around the country, I thought a post on how bees handle the cold weather would be appropriate. A good beekeeper will always leave enough honey in the hive to see the bees through the winter months when nothing is in bloom. The bees will mass together over the comb honey in a large ball with the queen at the center. By flexing their wings they can maintain the temperature in the hive so they will not freeze.
An interesting fact is that bees will not “go poopie in the potty” while in the hive. They will wait for a break in the cold weather to take a cleansing flight as well as remove any dead bees from the hive.
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The folks over at Sunset started the One Block Diet blog to chronicle their adventures in producing their own veggies, eggs, honey, etc.
The blog is a useful resource for anyone looking at trying their hand at beekeeping as well a variety of other fun projects.
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Urban Beekeeping in Austin, Texas 