I love my bees

 My beekeepering friends probably get tired of me talking about how calm my bees are….but it’s true.

When we retired and moved back home in 2019, I ordered new bees from BeeMaid in Alberta, three packages.  In the past I had mostly gotten nucs but since I had lots of drawn out comb and had some nasty experiences with some nuc suppliers, I decided to order packages from New Zealand. When they arrived, they were beautiful healthy bees, with nice temperaments. I was very happy with them.

Here it is Sept 2022 and I still have those three original hives plus a split I did from one of them last year.  I love these bees. They are calm and relaxed. And even the bee inspector commented how calm they were.

 I decided two years ago to start going into the hives with only wearing nitrile gloves. I wanted to be able to feel the frames better and they are way less bulky. It won’t stop a bee sting but that’s ok. This year I decided to go gloveless all together. What a difference not wearing anything on your hands. It forces you to slow down and to take note where your fingers are. There is something really neat about the feeling of a bee crawling on your hands and arms. Nothing else feels like that.

Today I went into my big hive to start pulling honey. This is my overachiever hive. It’s motto I am pretty sure is….go big or go home. Not only was there lots of honey, there was lots of bees. As I removed each frame, my hands and forearms were speckled with these little vibrating insects. There is something very calming about that. (Or frightening in some peoples eyes). 

Anyways….I don’t really know why they are like this….but I am glad they are.

Til next time….cheers🐝❤️

Swarms, splits and wildflowers

 The end of July is quickly approaching. It’s been a weird spring/summer. I’m not sure but suspect I say that every year. Spring came very late. The cool temperatures went on forever. But it is nice now and everything is lush and green. 

I am feeling we are about two weeks behind normal. I look at my greenhouse and the tomatoes are finally growing but certainly a long way from being red. But oh well, you can’t do anything about it.

Swarm season for our area can start as early as late May but mostly in early June. It was late this year…and I know of people in our general area  who are still having swarms.

I am pretty sure I had some. But didn’t see them or catch anything. I did however, attempt a split but it wasnt successful and didn’t want to try again as we were getting late in the year. I would sooner make sure all the hives have honey for winter then make more splits now. It’s not worth it. 

We added some new plants in our forest garden/orchard/bee yard this year. We made a blueberry bed and added two more bushes for a total of four now. We also planted a rose and two black elderberries. I am excited for next year, as we are adding fruit tree guilds around each fruit tree and bed. The bees will be so happy with all the new things they can gather pollen and nectar from.

Girls hanging out

August 2

Why does it feel later than August. Maybe because the days are getting noticeably shorter. It’s 9:30 and you can hardly see across the yard. It seems like only a week ago I could see across the yard well after 10:00.

So every year I promise myself thst I will pull honey st the beginning of Aug. I think I will wait til mid Aug this year since we are a little behind. I am pretty sure the girls have brought in enough nectar to take them through the winter, but I am also hoping there will be a little honey to tide us over too.

It has been a very hot dry summer. I can’t remember our yard ever having crunchy areas. We have had very few heavy down pours that went on long enough to saturate everything. We did yesterday however, and it was glorious. Everything looked so refreshed. 

We still have quite a few wildflowers in bloom. And for the past week or two, the girls have been bringing in whitish coloured pollen. I suspect it might be from the wild purple asters that are in bloom. Some of the plants still blooming are, fireweed, tansy, goldenrod, asters, hemp nettle, yarrow and a few other things I can’t think of off hand.

I started pulling hemp nettle out the other day but then noticed all the different bumblebees visiting every flower. I got mesmerized watching them go from flower to flower. I couldn’t bring myself to pull out any after that.

Anyways I am going to end this here so I won’t ramble on any longer.

Til next time. 🐝💕

New black elderberry bushes

New blueberry bed with comfrey 

Keeping bees in a Rain Forest part 3

 June 9

Up to a few weeks ago, it had been a very cool spring. It had seemed winter wasn’t going to let go, but it did and warmer temperatures arrived. We haven’t seen frost for weeks now ( touch wood).

Late May and June are always such busy months. There is gardens to prepare and plant, greenhouses to open up and get planted and lawns to cut. But it’s also a very busy time for the bees. 

I had great intentions of getting all the inspections of the hives done early. But of course that didn’t happen. The weather would hold long enough to get one hive done….then it would start to rain or the winds would start and get cool. I am not sure I have left on their winter wraps this long before. One of my hives is still partially wrapped but for the most part they are done.

I did managed to check for swarm cells last week on my big hive. But didn’t find any, so it’s given me a bit of a breather. Tomorrow I have the whole day to do what I want. Which seems to be rare these days. So as long as Mother Nature behaves I can finish doing the last three inspections and removing attic boxes and candy boards. Yes some of them are still on. I know…they should of been off weeks ago.

June 14

So I finally got all the candy boards off and put away for a few months. I added extra boxes to the hives that needed it.

Hive one, which is one of the three hives that have wintered over three years now are bursting at the seams. I was blown away that they had already filled a deep super full of dandelion nectar. The dandelions were in great abundance this year and since we live in the country (some people call it the boonies) we only cut a small portion of our lawn and left the rest. It was a sea of yellow.

June 22

The weather this past week has been unstable, cool and wet. It almost seems everything is behind by a week or so. I snuck in to hive one, between a thunder storm to see if there was swarm cells. I was really hoping the full box of dandelion honey was capped so I could remove it. But they were still working on it. I had trouble lifting it off so had to use the old lady method of removing frame by frame till it was light enough. I really should get shallow boxes. 

Still no swarm cells. But I got a new hive set up so we can take a better look once this weather settles. I also put up three swarm traps….just in case.

I check the weather  daily, it’s just a thing I do after living in the bush in a somewhat remote area, years ago. Our weather is suppose to be improving by the weekend then “they” are calling for hotter than normal temperatures during July and August. So I will start to prepare to get things ready in my bee yard for that over the next week. Last year when we had that long stretch of extreme temperatures (for our  area) I scrambled to figure out how to keep the bees cooler. So now I know, so I can prepare for it.

This is what I did last year during the “extreme” heat.

It wasn’t pretty but it worked. Over their honey supers I added my winter attic boxes (without the insulation pillow) which have a vet hole in it. Then I put on the inside cover and outer lid. I added a piece of styrofoam insulation to the top. I ratchet strap all my hives so I didn’t t have to worry about it blowing off. Before I did this my big hives were bearding on the front of the hives. As soon as I added the empty attic box, this helped a lot. I also handed two more water stations for a total of four. I had to fill them  twice a day….not that they always needed it but I did anyways.

Well……that’s all for now. Bee safe during the upcoming hot temperatures. Happy National Pollinators Week 🐝💖

Keeping bees inside a rainforest part 2

April 12 2022

It is now the middle of April and the weather hasn’t changed much. The last three nights it’s between -9C and -12C over night. The days have been sunny but it’s been windy and cool during the day. 

At these temperatures, not many of my hives are out flying. It’s that time of year where you start worrying if you don’t see them all out and about. Three weeks ago I had four out of five hives alive. Today, I have one hive only out flying. I’m pretty sure the others are hiding out inside. It happens almost every year, I worry I lost them, but suddenly I take off the lids and there they are. So I am hoping thst will happen again this year.

Last spring my friend and neighbour got her first box of bees. She was pretty excited today to find hers still alive, hiding out inside. Her bees are spicy Chilean bees. I say spicy cause…..they are fiesty, hot tempered little girls. But even so I am happy to have more boys in the hood so my queens can be bred.

Keeping bees inside a rainforest has its challenges. Our weather can be extreme, more rain, more snow and cooler temperatures. On the upside, our landscape is very lush. Forest fires have less chance of running wild because of the conditions here. However last year there were some fairly close but thankfully they were knock back. 

Also on the upside, we have tons of tree pollen available and acres of native flowers and wild fruit bushes

April18

Yesterday was a beautiful day but cool. It’s still below 0 at night and for a few hours warmish during the day. It is still very cool and very little melt on the mountains. But things are slowly coming to life. Pussy willows will be sending out pollen in a few weeks and the catkins on the hazelnuts will be appearing. But for now….we have to be patient.

May 11

I have been patiently waiting for a warm day to go inside the hives and do a spring inspection. But the days have been on the cooler side. So I have to wait. But the snow is pretty well gone and the bees are bringing in bright yellow pollen from the pussy willows. I have given them some syrup but they haven’t been eating it as all of them had some of their candy board left and some honey.

Beautiful willow pollen coming in

I have a hive that decided going out the back of their hive is way better than the front. I had blocked off the upper entrance for the winter but they managed to wiggle their way up through the insulation and get outside.  It was weird, all of the hives were busy coming and going but hive three wasn’t. I kept looking inside the hive to see if they were alive and they were always up top eating. Then one day I decided to open up the hive and check to see if there was a dead mouse on the bottom board or some other reason why they weren’t going out the front. The sun had come out so I quickly tore the hive apart.  There was nothing on the bottom board so I decided to reverse the boxes so that the brood box was on the bottom. Thinking they would for sure come out the front. But nope…..they like the back door I guess. So once the warmer days come and I can remove the insulation I will turn the top entrance around so they can come out the front of the hive. I wished I would of had more time to check for brood but the wind had come up and it started to rain. So I did what I had to and closed it up.

May 19

Well I need to finish this up tonight. Soon we will be in full swing with the bees and the garden. The weather remains cool. The nights are barely above 0C most nights. And during the day we are lucky to hit 17C, on a good day. So many of the days hover around 10 - 13C. 

Today we attempted to extend our hive stand out….but things didn’t work like we planned, so we gave up to rethink our plans. There were a few bees out today and were only bringing in a little pollen. But while walking home…I was excited to find two dandelions in bloom…woohoo. Soon the girls will have lots of nectar to bring in. And I can gather a quart or two of the flowers to make some honey dandelion jelly.

Soon the dandelions will be in full bloom

Ok enough of this rambling. Time to finish this off. I am excited for the upcoming season. It won’t be long til the bees want to swarm, I can finally remove the winter wraps and it will bee time to do some splits.

 It’s been a very long winter and I have missed sitting on my chair next to the hive listening to the bees constant hum of contentment. 💖🐝

Keeping Bees inside a RainForest

I think Spring is finally on its way. I started writing this March 17 and the temperatures have been fairly mild. Even though it’s snowing as I write, it’s spring snow…it never lasts.

Enjoying a spring day

The other day, we were finally able to walk up to the hives. Armed with shovels we dug our way through the 28” of snow that is still lingering. I had been wanting to check to see if the bees had made it through the winter. 4 out of 5 did. The one we lost was one of the splits I made last year . A few days later I went over to check their food and added a pollen patty. After a couple days of warmer temperatures, we came back and we’re finally able to access the entrances of the hives, so we could clean out the bottom boards.

Digging a path to the bees

March 29

Holy we are almost at the end of the month now. We are finally down to 18” of snow now. The bees are out flying looking for water and pollen. There are a few pussy willows out and the catkins on the wild hazelnuts are starting to appear.

We are starting to see life. We have a few butterflies now and the robins and red winged black birds are back. It gives hope that soon we will see grass again. Although the sun isn’t out, the thermometer reads just over 12C

Snow is receding back and we can now see bare ground

Life is a team sport

 

Living where and how we do, it’s important to have a partner you can rely on. James and I have been living this life style since 1996. The first twelve years we lived with out power, telephones or running water. Well that’s a lie, we did have a hand pump on our kitchen counter that delivered cold running water to the kitchen. So yes, we had a outhouse and outside shower.

It was then we became a great team, we did pretty well everything together. We worked together, cut firewood together and sawed lumber together. The only thing we didn’t do together was cook. I cooked…he ate. It’s still like that. When times were tough and one of us was hurt, the other one had to pick up the slack and get things done.

We have since moved to a less remote area but it still has its challenges. There is still 7 or 8 cords of firewood to gather each year, we are still trying to finish fixing up the old church we live in. Yards to keep up and let’s not forget about the bees. I don’t care what anyone says…bees require work, sometimes a lot of work. Thankfully the first year I got into bees, James slowly started taking an interest in them. So for his birthday in year two, he received his own bee jacket and gloves. He is more my helper when I need it. I still do the majority of the day to day work but he’s there to help build hive stands and assemble boxes and help pull honey. The bees are more use to me than him, so they remind him every so often who’s boss. 

This summer was a difficult one. Probably one of the hardest yet. Of course we are 25 years older then we were when we started this journey, so that doesn’t help. It started with me hurting my knee, which turned out to be water on it. I kept going but it wasn’t fun. Then James fell getting out of a fishing boat and smashed up his hip big time, thankfully he didn’t break it. This was months ago and since then things have gotten worse. Now his sciatica is acting up and out of no where, carpal tunnel has reared its ugly face. The poor guy is not used to be down for the count. We have always called him the energizer bunny. Now he can hardly grab or pick up anything. Getting old is certainly not for sissy’s.

Slowly but surely we have managed to get everything that was on our list of things to get done before winter, done. The only thing left is the last of the firewood for 2022/23 winter. We don’t need much more, so hoping by spring we can finish that up. But we might still managed to get it done before too much snow sets in,,,but we will get it done.

James having fun at -30C

Here it is December 28. Another year almost gone. Up to this past week, winter has been kind to us. But then -39C hit us hard. We knew it was coming so had time to prepare, but are we ever prepared for that? And when did -39 get so cold, burrr. I am pretty sure it wasn’t that cold 25 years ago. 

Anyways, what’s knew for next year? Well first thing is…we are hoping the bees survive yet another winter in Dome. They got brand new winter coats this year so I am hoping they work. So if all the hives survive, we will be doing splits on all the strong ones. I would like to keep one more hive and have a total of six.  As far as for us…. Getting the garden beds done, finish firewood and whatever else comes our way.

New winter coats

After the big dump of snow a week ago

 From our hive to yours….Happy New Year 🥳  May 2022 bring you much happiness and good health                   

Breaks my heart

 WARNING, RANT IN PROGRESS.

Back in early May, we got word that our club had been successful in receiving several grants for our youth mentoring beekeeping program. With all the trouble finding packages of bees we had to resort to finding Nucs. It was late in the beekeeping world to source out bees but we needed to get the kids started in early June.

When we met a dead end finding nucs in BC we went to Alberta. There was a bee breeder there that had come recommended from the Alberta Honey Producers. So contact was made and we arranged to buy 10 nucs, 6 for the mentoring program and the rest for personal use.

The communication between this fellow was almost impossible to deal with but we forged on and we finally got word that they would be ready for us around the 9th of June. After more frustrating phone calls that were never returned....we finally got word

I spoke with the guy in the afternoon, he was in the lower mainland and was heading back to Alberta as soon as he was finished up doing whatever he was doing. So I sat up all night waiting for the phone call. Early in the morning James and I decided to drive to Valemount (2 hours east of us) hoping we hadn't missed him. We sat and waited...nothing. So I made an attempt to call him and his wife answered. Oh he was still getting the bees ready and it will probably be later. So we headed home. 

11:30pm that night, the phone rang and it was Monica. She had just received a call from him and he was 5 hours away. So at 12:30 I left home, met up with Monica in McBride and we headed once again to Valemount. By time we got to Valemount it was now 2:30AM. We sat there chatting and drinking coffee trying to stay awake. We were giddy from not sleeping for over 24 hours. We finally got a phone call from him at 5:30 that  he had arrived.

It was a gong show to say the least. He had a helper who had a full bee suit on in the truck......she was scared of the bees and was struggling to get the boxes out of the truck. But while loading the 10 nucs in the back of my car....she made slip that the bees had just come off of the blueberry pollination. My heart sunk, I felt sick. I had gotten bees fresh off pollinating blueberries before and they all died. When talking to him when ordering the bees, he never mentioned that. He led us to believe they were doing splits and would be introducing new queens. Never in our conversation was there a mention he was taking them down to the coast to put them in the blueberry fields. He told us he was delivering all these nucs down there. I was so angry and still am.

Anyways we got home and got the bees all settled into their new homes. At first they seemed to be doing fine. Immediately after getting them settled in, Morgan (my student) and I did a mite test. They seemed to be good, I thought I had done a good job of testing them but couldn't find any mite. So I thought...hey, this is great.

Setting up Morgan's hive

Doing its first mite test

A few weeks later, I noticed they weren't building up as I thought they should. They then developed Chalk Brood, it wasn't serious but I was still concerned. Over the next month, I was still noticing they weren't doing good. The population remained small. Then I noticed there were hardly any nurse bees so the brood was not being attended too. I really didn't want Morgan to lose his bees, I didn't want him to feel like he had done something wrong, and I didn't want to feel like I failed Morgan. So I decided to take some frames of brood and nurse bees from one of my strong hives and add to Morgan's. I was optimistic this would save the hive. But sadly I was wrong.

 Our inspector, Barry Clark, came out to do the yearly inspections and found them in a sorry state. We ran another mite test and they were high. We also found eggs with no royal jelly in the cell for them, few nurse bees and they were still fighting chalk brood. We decided to take some samples of older capped brood to send off to the lab for analysis.

By the time the results came back the hive was almost dead. Other than chalk brood all other tests were inconclusive. Because we really didn't know what was wrong, we decided not to combine them with one of my hives to save them. They died shortly after that.

I then had to have the difficult job of telling Morgan that his bees were dead. It broke my heart when he asked about the Queen who he had named after his sister. I fought back the tears, but he took it better than I thought. I made sure he knew it had nothing to do with anything he or I did. Sadly they were sick bees and we did everything we could to save them. 

Sadly the other 9 hives are also struggling. Some are doing better than others but we suspect quite a few of them will not make it through the winter. 

 This past weekend I attended the BCHP conference and there was a presentation on blueberry pollinating and European Foul Brood. The Dr. discussing this subject said that the disease they found in the bees after coming off the blueberry fields have European foul brood type symptoms. They also had chalk brood.

So after listening to the presentation, it only confirms to me that people need to be aware right off the bat when bees have been in the blueberry fields. I would like to see something put into place where breeders have to let their customers know this before buying them. 

 Ok....rant over!

On the upside. All of our youth who lose their bees due to this will get another chance next year. As long as we can find good healthy local nucs.