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:

Coming Soon: San Mateo County Fair

The San Mateo County Fair is running June 7th through 15th! I'll be selling honey from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM on Saturday June 7th if you want to come by and see me at the Beekeepers' Guild of San Mateo booth. I've also submitted my honey and lip balm for competition. Wish me luck!

What: San Mateo County Fair - Selling Honey

Date: Saturday, June 7th

Time: 2:00PM to 5:00PM

Location: San Mateo Event Center. 1346 Saratoga Drive. San Mateo, CA 94403 ‎

Crystallization Experiment Followup

In trying to get the prettiest honey for the San Mateo County Fair this weekend, I conducted a crystallization experiment with some of my May harvest honey.

The categories were:

1. New Comb: the category that I qualified as "New Comb" was comb with bright white cappings. I believe that the bees capped this honey less than a month before harvesting.
2. Old Comb: the category that I qualified as "Old Comb" was comb with darker cappings or darker honey. There is nothing wrong with this honey, in fact, I prefer the taste of this honey, but due to the types of pollen in this honey, it tends to granulate more quickly.

Within each category, I had 3 sub-categories:

1. Normal: the "Normal" honey, I just extracted and put in the jar. That's it. This is exactly how I sell it when it is bottled.
2. Microwaved: the "Microwaved" honey, I microwaved for 30 seconds at a time until it just started to bubble at the top (approximately 180 degrees Fahrenheit). I never heat the honey I sell, but my Mum claims that microwaving my honey keeps it nice and clear. Heating it also eliminates natural enzymes and counts as "altering" the honey, which is why I never heat the honey I sold. I figure if you'd like to heat it, you can microwave it just like I did here :)
3. Frozen: the "Frozen" honey is honey that I bottled as normal, then popped in my freezer. I've heard that this reduces the likelihood that the honey will crystallize. I think this also counts as "altering" the honey, so I don't freeze my sold honey either. Again, I'm just kind of curious which of these methods might actually work.

Now, it is one month later, and here are the results:

There was no notable difference between the Old Comb and New Comb honey. However, the sub-categories did seem to make a difference.

The Normal honey has a bit of crystallization at the bottom. You can see the white flecks near the very bottom of the container, but most of the rest of the honey looked exactly as it did one month ago:

The Microwaved honey looked the best, all of it looked exactly as it did one month ago:

The Frozen honey, in my opinion, looks the worst right now. Perhaps the cloudiness is due to the bubbles not settling out of the honey, perhaps it is crystallization. This honey has been out of the freezer overnight:

The Normal and Microwaved honey have been sitting in my living room. During some of the high points over the last month, the living room has reached just over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Perhaps that mild heat helped the bubbles settle out of the honey.

Though the Microwaved honey is the clear winner, I will submit the Normal honey to the San Mateo County Fair because the Normal honey is the honey that I sell.

Backyard Beekeeping Talk at the Brisbane Library

Another beekeeping talk! Come check me out at the Brisbane Library on Saturday, June 14th at 2:00PM.

What: Backyard Beekeeping Talk

Date: Saturday, June 14th

Time: 2:00PM

Location: Brisbane Library. 250 Visitacion Avenue, Brisbane, CA 94005

I'm going to be covering:

• Benefits of beekeeping: pollination, honey, wax and other products.
• Honey bee biology and behavior.
• Caring for your bees.
• Beekeeping equipment: what you need to get started.
• General time, space, and legal requirements.
• Additional resources to learn about beekeeping

Moving Day

It is finally time to move my little hive! I created this hive by splitting it from the Yellow hive around the end of March. I verified that there is a laying queen and the bees are nice and healthy, so it's time for them to move to their new home.

Last night around 9:00PM, we installed a migratory cover. This is a nifty little mesh screen that keeps the bees in the hive while allowing for some air circulation. We put it on at night so that all of the field bees would be inside the hive. Here they are this morning:

Around 11:30AM, we popped them into the trunk of the car. Bye bees!

Their new home is only 5 miles away from their old one, so once we placed the bees in their new home, we opened the two flaps on the migratory cover to make sure the bees left slowly. Altering the entrance by placing something in the way (like sticks/grass) makes the bees pay more attention while leaving and theoretically you suffer fewer losses.

Here they are in their new home:

Mead

Happy-harvesting-helper, Russell, and I have a great mead/honey exchange going. Here is Russell's progress on the latest batch of mead from our May honey harvest. This is 7 pounds of cherries from the Farmer's Market in SF. Pitted, pasteurized and mixed with honey to ferment:

Agriculture Inspection

This honey hobby is becoming much more official, today I got an agriculture inspection from Santa Clara county!

This was a lot less complicated than I thought, and now I can legally sell honey products at any Farmers Market in California!

The process was:

1. Fill out an application to be a Certified Producer
2. Set up an appointment with the Santa Clara County Department of Agriculture's Biologist to inspect the hives for the Certified Producer application and register the hives with the County.
3. Pay Inspection Fees.
4. Done!

During the appointment, the Agricultural Biologist confirms that you can produce as much as you say on your form, this is done by merely looking at the hives and confirming you have the number you say you do. The main goal of these inspections is to provide a contact for learning more about local regulations. The Agricultural Biologist was able to provide me with information about labeling my honey correctly and what sorts of products I can sell.

Maker Faire: Backyard Beekeeping

There was an amazing turnout of over 100 people at my Backyard Beekeeping talk at Maker Faire today! 

My 25 minute presentation covered:

• Benefits of beekeeping: pollination, honey, wax and other products.

• Honey bee biology and behavior.

• Caring for your bees.

• Beekeeping equipment: what you need to get started.

• General time, space, and legal requirements.

• Additional resources to learn about beekeeping

The talk was a high level primer aimed at providing a base level of knowledge about beekeeping and multiple sources for additional information. I got an excellent response from the audience and many compliments from the Maker Faire staff! An absolutely amazing experience!

Here are a few more pics:

New Website

In some last-minute preparation for Maker Faire, I've got a new website up and running. Most of the content is still right here on this blog, but I've got some more contact and education information on the main site: kendalsbees.com

Honey Harvest

Another honey harvest! This time my happy helpers were Russell, Emily and Jordan.

Emily and Jordan took some fantastic pictures and video of the whole process, take a look over on their blog: the answer is always pork.

The main goal for this harvest was to prepare for Maker Faire and the San Mateo County Fair. I'll be selling honey at both events, so I want to make sure I have enough bottled. 

For the County Fair, I'll also need to prepare some honey to show and be judged. I harvested honey in two batches so that I could try to get the "prettiest honey" for the fair. I think that the newly capped honey will probably show the best since the honey will be judged on its clarity (among other qualities), and the Spring honey typically crystallizes less. I personally believe that the older honey (possibly still left from the fall) has a more delicious flavor, a little bit spicy even, but I think it could be graded down because of the quick crystallization.

I set aside a few different samples to see which one looks prettiest when I have to submit them in a few weeks. Check out my science experiment below:

I think all of them look the same right now, but we'll see if they change in the next few weeks. I've had fall honey crystallize as quickly as within a month, I've heard this is because of the higher pollen content in Farmers Market quality honey. I've also heard there are some methods for reducing, that's where my experiment comes in.

I divided the honey into two major categories:

1. New Comb: the category that I qualified as "New Comb" was comb with bright white cappings. I believe that the bees capped this honey less than a month before harvesting.
2. Old Comb: the category that I qualified as "Old Comb" was comb with darker cappings or darker honey. There is nothing wrong with this honey, in fact, I prefer the taste of this honey, but due to the types of pollen in this honey, it tends to granulate more quickly.

Within each category, I had 3 sub-categories:

1. Normal: the "Normal" honey, I just extracted and put in the jar. That's it. This is exactly how I sell it when it is bottled.
2. Microwaved: the "Microwaved" honey, I microwaved for 30 seconds at a time until it just started to bubble at the top (approximately 180 degrees Fahrenheit). I never heat the honey I sell, but my Mum claims that microwaving my honey keeps it nice and clear. Heating it also eliminates natural enzymes and counts as "altering" the honey, which is why I never heat the honey I sold. I figure if you'd like to heat it, you can microwave it just like I did here :)
3. Frozen: the "Frozen" honey is honey that I bottled as normal, then popped in my freezer. I've heard that this reduces the likelihood that the honey will crystallize. I think this also counts as "altering" the honey, so I don't freeze my sold honey either. Again, I'm just kind of curious which of these methods might actually work.

I'll post again with the results.

All in all, we were able to harvest about 28 pounds of honey this time (roughly 8.5 pounds of newly capped honey, and 19.5 of comb of the older comb). 11.5 pounds went to Russell for brewing, 12 pounds went to my fair honey experiment, and I bottled the rest (only 4.5 extra pounds).

I think that the drought has been taking its toll on our harvests... year to date, we're at 51 pounds of harvested honey. That's significantly less than what I was estimating, I usually assume about 100 pounds per hive, that would be 300 pounds total in the season. I feel like I should be able to get at least 50 more pounds this year, but that is still only a third of what I was expecting.

Bee Escapes

Today I put the Bee Escapes on to prepare for the harvest this weekend. I've really gotten this process down now, putting the escapes on 3 or 4 days before gives plenty of time for the bees to drain out of the honey supers so that taking the frames for harvesting is a very speedy process. I haven't had any issues with pests moving in during that time.

Maker Faire Presentation Details

Details about my Backyard Beekeeping presentation have been posted on the Maker Fair Website! Check it out: Backyard Beekeeping

My talk is at 2:30pm on Saturday, May 17th. Come check it out!

Bee Building

I figure its about time I start building some of my own equipment. I already assemble all of my equipment by buying un-assembled hive bodies from Mann Lake. In order to make the cuts for a hive body, we would need a router, so those will have to wait a while longer.

I designed plans for both types of hive stand that we use - the 18 inch stands to keep the bees off of the ground, and the stands immediately under the bottom boards with the little ramps. I always make my happy husband helper, Brandon, cut the wood for me. I'm a bit squeamish about using the chop saw - I always think of my Dad saying "Look, Ma! No hands!" with his hands tucked into his sleeves, ha!

I guess I was feeling courageous today, so here I am cutting the wood for another hive stand:

Success! I still have 2 hands with 10 fingers!

Split Success!

Hooray! Today I checked in on the little split, and they have brood, eggs and larvae! Check it out:

I'm so happy this little hive has successfully raised its own queen. Since I didn't remove half of the bees, it seems like the yellow hive still swarmed, but it's good to know that I gave this little hive enough resources to produce their own queen. I didn't feed the split sugar water at all during the entire process, which was probably a bit of a gamble since we are in such a drought year. I did provide them with capped honey from the original hive though.

These guys have about 4 drawn frames right now, I bet I have about a month before I need to add another box. I never intended to keep this hive, so I'll need to sell them in the next month before they get too big to transport.

Anyone looking to buy a beehive? :)

Beeswax Molds

I just got some great little 1 ounce beeswax molds! Before this I was using a "brownie bite" silicon tray to make wax bricks, but these are just adorable:

Little Visitors

Today I had my littlest visitors! Brynn and Cavan (along with their parents/our friends Tiffany and Justin) came over to take a peek at the bees.

Tiffany suited up to help me lift supers and inspect the hives. We ended up seeing a lot of honey and a little bit of capped brood. I suspect that all three hives may have swarmed at some point in the last two months, so there were no baby bees to be seen.

I took a gamble and opened the new little hive to see if there were any eggs yet. The little white hive is the hive that I split from the yellow hive, these bees will have to raise their own queen now. There were no eggs yet, but lots of pollen and nectar coming in. There were no queen cells, and no eggs or larvae. This is not a bad sign yet - if this new little hive has successfully raised their own queen, she would have hatched by now, hence no queen cells. However it is still very early for the queen to be laying eggs, so I'll have to check again in the next few weeks.

Coming Soon - Maker Faire

I just learned that my Backyard Beekeeping talk has been accepted at Maker Faire Bay Area! How exciting! I do not know whether I will be presenting on Saturday, May 17th or Sunday, May 18th, I will update later with the details.

Drone Culling, Orientation Flights, and Split Update

Tonight I attended a Beekeepers' Guild of San Mateo monthly meeting where Serge Labesque was speaking. Serge is a great speaker, and even though I've been beekeeping for 3+ years now, I always learn so much whenever I attend his lectures.

On March 30th, I noticed that there were dead drones and drone larvae in front of the green (Mint) hive:

This was only in front of the Mint hive, none of the others... I wasn't sure what to think because there were no real signs of illness. During Serge's talk, he mentioned that during times of derth (little to no honey flow), the bees will kill the drones. We've been experiencing a drought over the past few years, this year is looking even worse than last year. I harvested the most honey from this hive a little over a week ago, so perhaps I created a food shortage for this hive.

Another thing that I was a little alarmed by was the unusually high activity in the afternoon:

It's not a very long video, nor is it very close (because of the high activity). I put on my suit and also snapped a few pictures:

Serge said that this sort of activity could be an "Orientation Flight", when young bees go outside and hover. This is how they get their bearings before going out into the world.

My last update is about the split. I think I may have done it a little wrong. I should have taken about 50% of the brood/bees from the yellow hive and moved it into the new hive. This will trick them into thinking that they swarmed. I moved 25% of the brood and bees at best. I also should have checked in at the 4-6 day mark to check that the new hive was building queen cells. Right now I'm at about the 12 day mark. At 16 days, the new queen will hatch. I should probably wait 2 more weeks before checking on the new hive.

Honey Harvest and Splits!

Today we had some folks come over to help us harvest honey! We were only able to snag 11 full frames, but the yield was fantastic: 23 pounds of honey! I was expecting to get about 40 frames harvested, but with all of the recent activity we weren't able to take quite as much as expected. 

Here is the result - pretty dark since we mostly harvested honey that had been in the hive through winter, you can see that there is some spring honey towards the bottom of the jar (it's much lighter):

Here is happy helper, Cara, uncapping some fresh spring honey:

Thistle (purple hive) recently swarmed, so the honey supers were mostly emptied. We got about 4 good frames of honey harvested from Thistle.

Mint (green hive) didn't yield quite as much honey because there was a lot of brood mixed into they honey supers. I haven't been using queen excluders, and it hasn't really been a problem until now. I put a queen excluder on both Thistle and Mint. We got 6 good frames from Mint. Here is happy helper, Evan, taking a look at one of the frames we found in the supers in Mint (you can see that the center is filled with brood, the edges have beautiful capped honey from spring):

On the bright side of having a lot of brood in the supers: we got to see some baby bees hatching! This was definitely a highlight for folks (she is in the middle of the picture, just starting to chew through the wax capping of her cell):

Buttercup (yellow hive) didn't have an escape board on it (one of the boards that drains the bees from the honey supers and had similar issues with brood mixed in with the honey. I took 1 frame of honey from them but then left them the rest.

I figured that Buttercup had the highest likelihood of swarming at this point (having come from a swarm last year and coming out of the winter as one of the stronger, well-balanced hives). So I attempted to do a split. I took frames with eggs, pollen, nectar, honey, larvae, and capped brood and transferred them into a fourth hive (about 5 frames total). There were no queen cells, so I hope that the bees will be able to select an egg to raise into an emergency queen, we'll see in the next 16 days or so what happens (it takes a queen 16 days to hatch from the day it was laid). Here is happy helper, Wyatt, helping select frames to put into the new hive:

Introduction to Beekeeping Class

Today was the Introduction to Beekeeping Class for the Beekeepers' Guild of San Mateo. This year I helped organize the event by coordinating volunteer speakers, collecting raffle items, managing signups and participating in a Q&A panel at the end of the day. Here I am answering some questions during our lunch break:

This was an all day event with 60+ new beekeepers in attendance! It was a great success thanks to everyone's help :)

Adding Supers

It is only February and I am already throwing on all of my honey supers! This year has been very warm so far (with very little rain). This might be a strange season for honey...

This year I am trying to switch over to RiteCell frames - these are very sturdy, inflexible plastic frames. Before I had used foundation with a very thin flexible sheet of plastic coated in wax. It holds up pretty well, but I wanted to try these RiteCell frames:

During my last inspection, I threw on supers filled with RiteCell frames. Green hive is doing an amazing job filling them up with honey and brood, here is a RiteCell frame that I put in the hive about a month ago:

Purple hive seemed to be honey-bound... meaning I didn't see a whole lot of brood in there, mostly just honey and nectar. I threw another super on top so they had a spot to put nectar, hopefully that helps. I did start to see some drone cells, so maybe I can split these hive soon. Splitting is when you take frames with eggs and larve and move them into a fresh hive, this will turn one hive into two. I don't have a whole lot more space for hives, so I will probably sell the new hives if I am successful.

Here are the three hives! I'm almost out of supers! Time to order some more:

First Checkin

Due to the freakishly warm weather we've been having lately (in the 70s and 80s), I decided to check in on the bees to see how they were faring. There was a ton of activity in front of all three hives:

I only had enough time to inspect Yellow and Green. Purple over-wintered with 4 boxes, Green had 3 and Yellow had 2 and a feeder. I figured Purple was the lowest priority because they probably had enough space to start taking in nectar for a few more weeks.

When I opened up the Yellow hive, they were definitely running out of space. In this picture the bees are building burr comb through the inner cover of the Yellow hive:

Other than that, Yellow seemed to be doing ok for laying space, so I threw an empty super on top, making Yellow 3 boxes high. Almost every single time I have opened Yellow, I have seen the queen. Here she is again:

Green hive was also running out of space and had a ton of burr comb everywhere. It looked like they had no space to lay eggs, so I threw on an empty super below the top-most super, making Green 4 boxes high. Here is the burr comb in the Green hive:

The Green hive also seemed to have a lot of pests on the bottom board. Hopefully they are doing ok. I did notice some curled up wings in the Yellow hive - that is a sign that they have a high mite load. Here is the bottom board of Green, you can see a hive beetle and many mites (the little red circles) amongst the wax crumbs.