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.