Bay Area Maker Faire 2015

Bay Area Maker Faire is coming this weekend! I've been accepted to do two talks: Backyard Beekeeping and Bee Beautiful. Both talks are on Saturday, May 16th. Backyard Beekeeping starts at 1:00PM and Bee Beautiful is at 4:30PM - Come check it out!

I did the Backyard Beekeeping talk last year - it's a 30 minute primer to help people assess whether they would like to start beekeeping. It's also a great talk for just general knowledge about bees.

Bee Beautiful is a new talk for this year. I'm going to do a 30 minute live demonstration of how to make lip balm, a face mask, and a body scrub. All of them will have honey in them and the lip balm contains beeswax too :)

I'll be posting the recipes for the beauty products on Saturday if you want to try them at home.

Growing Apiary

Just did a quick check in on my new baby hive that I started on 2/14, they are doing amazing! I definitely moved the queen from the Yellow hive into this new hive, there are eggs and young larvae everywhere. It takes about a month or a month and a half to start seeing activity like that when a hive has raised a new queen. Here is a great picture of some nurse bees in the baby hive feeding young larvae (and a lot of bee bread and nectar in the bottom right):

The new hive was so packed with eggs and larvae that I added another medium hive body with all just foundation in there (no drawn comb). Those bees shouldn't have a problem filling that box in the next few weeks.

This also means I shouldn't open the Yellow hive until at least 3/14 because they are the ones raising the new queen.

In addition to checking out the new baby hive (which I will probably paint pink eventually, since I made it on Valentine's day) I took a look at Green. This is the first time I've checked out Green this year. When I opened the hive - it was a freakin' disaster. I had thrown some supers on about a month earlier (without checking the state of the hive) and when I opened the hive today, there was brood in the super! The top super was the 6th box on the hive, typically you should only see brood in boxes 2 and 3, maybe 1 and 4. Definitely not box 6.

When I started going deeper in the hive - box 5 was all capped honey, so was box 4. Box 2 and 3 were about 50% honey and 50% brood. Box 1 was mostly empty, but also a lot of pollen. When the brood laying space is that full of honey, it is referred to as "honey bound". It is the same concept as "root bound" for a plant. There is no space for the queen to lay eggs because the brood nest is filled with honey. This can seriously stunt the size of the hive if not addressed quickly.

I reorganized the hive by putting all of the brood in boxes 2 and 3, then giving them some extra empty frames in those boxes as well. I also put a 7th box on the hive (all just empty frames with just foundation) so that they would have a place for more nectar.

I managed to find enough eggs and capped brood to create ANOTHER little hive out of the Green hive. Here is what the apiary looks like now:

Re:Make

Today I volunteered at the Beekeepers' Guild booth at Re:Make. It was a fantastic event filled with DIYers.

At our booth, we were providing hands-on demonstrations of how to create a Honey-Salt Body Scrub and a Honey-Oatmeal Facial Mask (thanks to a lot of hard work from Tori Muir). The demonstrations were very popular, and we were swamped the entire time. We had approximately 2000 people come through and make beauty products with us!

Brisbane Library Talk

Today I did a backyard beekeeping talk at the Brisbane Library. There were only a few students, so we were able to customize the class to be exactly what the attendees wanted :)

Royal Jelly & Honey Update

I did a quick check on the hives this morning to see if honey production was picking up. So far I have only harvested 50 pounds this year, which is 30% of what I would have expected from all three hives.

The purple hive was doing very well and looked to have quite a lot of capped or ready to be capped honey. Additionally, it looks like the bees have started drawing comb in the Ross Round frames (which they haven't touched until now). I actually ended up putting another super on the purple hive.

The green hive was doing alright, the supers didn't seem to have a whole lot of capped honey, and a lot of the frames in the top super were looking very empty.

Yellow hive appeared to be re-queening itself, I found some queen cups with some royal jelly in them. Here is a pretty good shot (the white substance is royal jelly):

I'm not exactly sure why they would be re-queening themselves at this time of year, whether something happened to the old queen, or perhaps they have swarmed again. In any case, it means we probably won't be seeing very much more honey from this hive this season.

First Place and an Honorary Mention!

I submitted some of my lip balm and honey into the San Mateo County Fair for competition. I didn't do so bad for my first year: My lip balm won first place and my honey got an honorary mention!

The competition categories are quite small, so it's probably not the biggest achievement, but it was still pretty cool :) Here is all of the competition:

The honey is divided into several color grade categories: water white, extra white, white, extra light amber, light amber, amber, and dark amber. Each color category competes separately. Here is the grading chart (mine was in the "white" category):

San Mateo Couty Fair

The San Mateo County Fair went really well! Fellow beekeeper Brigitte organized the booth for the Beekeepers' Guild of San Mateo County this year, and it was absolutely beautiful. The focus this year was bee-friendly plants and gardening, the booth won second place out of all of the agriculture exhibits. Sanda and I manned the booth together on the first afternoon of the fair:

One of my favorite things about the guild's booth is the observation hive. The hive fits 10 frames, and has an entrance so that the bees can still forage during the day (there is a tube that goes from the bottom corner of the hive, through the wall, to the outside). Here is a group of fair goers (and myself) looking for the queen bee: