Farmer Ed

I am sure they are starting to build up their hive numbers now.  We filled up the feeder times today for them

Harvested honey from our apairy today... even though we had a drought up thru July the bees still were able to give us a fair harvest. 

The boys and I in the thick of it...  Jed always like plenty of smoke!

Hauling a tub of frames out of the apiary

 Looking at the inside of the honey extractor. Honey is extracted from the frames by centrifugal force as the basket turns... of course everyone likes a turn at the crank.

Grace straining the honey as it comes out of the extractor

Fine looking bowl of honey

Deciding best course of action

 

Jed got a little carried away with shaking the branch and knocked my veil askew... he assured me he didn't do it on purpose!

 

The boys were out trying to dispatch some rabbits that were using our melon field for a salad bowl and they stumbled upon a swarm.  It was an easy capture they were close to the ground and it was cool morning.  Bees normally don't sting when in the swarm ball but when I poured them into the hive they let me know there are always exceptions!

Giving the bees a new home in the Kenyan Top Bar Hive we built last winter. 

 

 

June 11 as you can see they have made it a home...

 

The golden cells below and in the center are bee brood... 

Uncapped honey is the light yellow cells and the dark cells are pollen

Keep in mind, we don't claim to have carpentry skills.  We got the plans here http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?=f155490ac5b87c8d2d3026fe84a6ab1c

Here are the layout instructions http://topbarbees.wordpress.com/about/design/  The big plus to this project was learning how to use free google sketchup CAD program. 

The boys and I have enjoyed learning some carpentry skills.

We 1st made a template for the faces of the hive.

 

So far so good it looks like the drawing

Notice on the lower right of the hive we cut in a window to peek in on the bees.

If you look real close you can see blood strains where we got lacerated trying to bend the roofing aluminum.  There has to be a better way of bending it or use a different material.

We put a door on the hive body window

Now for the top bars

The bees are suppose to build their comb on the sharp edge... you can encourage them by painting some wax on the edge also.

 

Bees didn't find much nectar this fall so their winter stores of honey aren't what they should be... We feed them sugar water in a bird bath to give them a hand.

The owner said the paint job cost $75,000. 

 

 

We have 1 colony of bees that started hard and fast early in the spring and hasn't slowed down since... the bottom 2 boxes are the bees home and the top 4 boxes are where they are making honey for us. Those 4 boxes represent 120 honey bears of honey which we sell for $3.00 ea at the farmers market. Needless to say, I talk real nice to this colony. 

Here is a colony that we started from scratch this spring...  To start a colony you take some frames of bees, eggs etc and put them into a new box the bees will make their own queen and if everything goes right you can make a box of honey the very 1st year.   As you can tell we make all the boxes ourselves from plywood and need to purchase very few things for our apiary.