Adventures in Beekeeping
I've wanted to keep bees for a long time now. They were one of the earliest additions to my "homestead wish list", along with chickens and fruit trees way back in freshman year of college.* At the end of last year i started to feel a bit impatient about our plans. It's going to be a few years before I can plant perennials, or have a four season garden, or have chickens, or rabbits. I felt like I just wanted to start my career dagnabit!
Luckily, I could do something about the bees.
The lovely and awesome people at BUG Farms** agreed to let me have a hive on some of their land. They were even willing to discuss the unlikely possibility of my getting a bunch of hives and selling my honey through their CSA. I made ambitious calculations, looked into the local competition, and read up on Utah's cottage honey laws. I planned on being the premier provider of local, raw, varietal honey for Salt Lake City.
I even pondered super cute logo designs.
We... could only afford one hive complete with bees, plus an extra empty hive juuust in case i can catch a swarm. That's life though, and it'll be good to have a practice year to cut my teeth on as a beekeeper. Who knows, I might find that I actually hate it or something crazy like that.
I chose to work with top-bar hives. I talk about some of the reasons i like this type of hive in this post here. Essentially, it's much cheaper and much more accessible for a weakish and short person such as myself. I didn't want to rely on Josh's glorious muscles for my pretend beekeeping company after all.
We ordered our bees from Knight Family Honey. They actually ship the bees in from another company in California, but they seemed to have the best genetics in the area.
The bees arrived last Saturday, and all three of us went to install them in their new home. Bees are really docile when they have no honey to protect so Gwendolyn was able to get really close to examine them. She absolutely loved it, and it was really fun to see her fascination. She babbled excitedly about bees the entire way home.
I was also accidentally super rude to the next door neighbor. She was also installing bees and introduced herself. Instead of saying "we actually met last year, my name is Myka; hopefully it'll be a good year for the both of us" I said "yes" and then walked away while thinking the rest of those things rather than actually saying them...
... I was a little distracted by the task at hand.
I've checked on them twice in the last few days. It's been more terrifying than I thought it would be. Something about being near a buzzing, shifting mass of pointy insects sets my nerves on edge. Go figure
The first day I was ill prepared and super clumsy. I gave the bees more sugar syrup to eat. Then I checked on the queen cage to make sure she had been freed by the bees. The cage was empty. So far so good.
Then a bee got into my shirt and another into my veil. I did a really funny dance while getting them out, hopefully no one saw me.
Then I saw that the bees had a bit of honeycomb that was going at an angle to the top bars. I needed to straighten the comb out, so that each top bar has a single comb along it's center. This single bar/single comb thing is what allows a beekeeper to get into a top bar hive without destroying everything. You have to be able to lift a single comb out at time to inspect and move it at will. I was super shaken up though, so I thought I would come back in a couple days to tackle that problem when i was better prepared.
That... was a bit of a mistake. Instead of having two small pieces of comb I opened up the hive yesterday to find three giant pieces of comb that crossed four top bars each. I pulled off a bar and gingerly fished out a piece of comb to stick in the correct alignment. I thought I had it for a moment, but then it flopped over onto a big pile of bees. I decided to cut the comb into smaller pieces, hoping that if it wasn't as heavy then it wouldn't fall off so easily.
I was equally clumsy with the other pieces of comb. I dropped the wax multiple times onto a bunch of super annoyed bees. Plus, i had to smash it into place, crushing a lot of the comb in the process.
I was sticky, the bees were annoyed, and I had been stung twice. But I had aligned all of the comb on three bars. Success!
Then, I gingerly put the straitened comb back into the hive. Only to have half of it flop onto the floor immediately. I thought about trying to fix it up again, but my smoker had gone out and bees were bouncing against my veil trying to find my eyes.
I decided to call it a day instead.
I'll keep trying. I plan on going back tomorrow just to check if they are drawing out their wax with the correct alignment now. I need to get that right as quickly as possible, or else it will just become an insurmountable task.
This will get better. I want to be a beekeeper too badly to get very discouraged about it. Pretty soon, it wont even be frightening any more.
Who knows, in the next couple years I might even get to sell a bit of delicious raw honey.
Wish me luck.
*wow... six years now, what the heck?
** is there a word for having a platonic crush on people? The farmers are all super awesome people. I would love to be friends with all of them.
