Fun with demos

Okay, we've been super-negligent and didn't write anything at all about our last trip to the beehives. It's a bit late now, and there are new things to talk about, but suffice it to say that it was idyllic, it was a beautiful day, the hives were going great guns, neither of us got stung despite bothering the bees for a ridiculously long time, and Jacob went home that afternoon with a raging case of hayfever. Oh, well...I guess I do have to tell one funny story. So we'd spent over an hour going through the two established hives--longer than you should ever take, of course, but we're slow still, and we get distracted by watching totally awesome fascinating things like watching new bees hatch--and were looking forward to being almost done, because we only had the little new hives to look at. They should be a cinch, right? So we popped the first of the two open, and what do we see?

Aaahhhh!! Our bees have been building castles in the sky! And worse yet, they've been socking away sugar-syrup "honey" in it! So all of this beautiful comb had to be destroyed, and syrup was everywhere, and bees were everywhere, trying to clean up and getting stuck in the syrup, and both hives did it! So, that was a headache, but it was quite lovely, and it was entirely our fault for leaving them so much space--after that, we filled the space with a second, smaller feeder bag--and all in all, it was quite a laugh.

Oh, and also--if you take up beekeeping, a highly reccommend a pair of pointy-ended tweezers for your tool kit. Ripping wax moth larvae out of the frames without destroying anything else around them is very satisfying. Nasty, vile things...

So, on to yesterday, which was the "Friends of River Farm" picnic, where we were expected to set up and demo for the attendees. The demo was primarily run by the old owners of the hive (with whom arrangements for the demo were originally made) and Brenda, our mentor, so we were mostly along for the ride, and didn't have much idea what to expect. We've done lots of demos for various things before, but of course never one on the subject of bees.

The day was gorgeous, so Jacob and I packed a blanket and some books, and went out the the gardens early to pretty much just hang out and be on hand when people started showing up. We've been sneaking mulch from the big pile provided down by our apartment's communal garden area, a couple of buckets at a time, and putting it around the hives to keep down weeds and prevent the mower from coming quite so close to the hives. One of these days we're going to get there right after mowing, and open up a hive, and they're just going to boil out in fury. I'll say no more on this subject for the moment, though, because Jacob promised to tell that story.

Eventually, Brenda showed up, immediately followed by Michael and his family. Michael's daughter Theresa is an officer in the local 4H beekeeping club, 2 B A Bee, which Brenda runs. We procured a table and set up with the plethora of posters that they had brought under a nice shade-tree in the main stream of traffic, well away from the hives. We pulled a couple of frames from one of the new hives to put in Brenda's observation hives, being sure to get the queen. We picked a new hive because that way the queen would be marked, and easier to point out. The queens in the established hives are unmarked, and though if you're looking at her it's very obvious that she's the queen, the turquoise dot does really help you spot her.

Our audience turned out to consist almost entirely of families with young children, which was really delightful. The great thing about demoing bees is that no one knows anything about them--I didn't, before the class--and so you can say almost anything and everyone will be amazed, children and adults alike. After all, bees really are amazing. Some popular facts:

• The queen bee can lay up to 2000 eggs in a day, day in and day out.
• Bees are not the same as wasps or hornets and are not related to them. Almost every time you get stung, it was one of these latter beasties, which can sting multiple times without dying, and are much more aggressive than honey bees. (Besides, they're far and away more common than honeybees in most places.) In fact, they will attack and eat honey bees, given the chance.
• Drone (male) bees don't have stingers, so you can give them to little kids to hold, which is obviously always a big hit.
• The queen bee is mommy, but she isn't the boss. Decisions (such as when/if to swarm and whether to make a new queen) lie collectively with the workers.

So we spent from three to six talking to people. There were almost always people around watching the bees and asking questions. I love demoing to kids, because they are so eager and interested, and often so clearly intelligent that it's really delightful, and yesterday was no exception. Early on, it became obvious that a lot of people were going to want to know how they could buy honey from us, so we made a sign-up sheet, and we have maybe eight names on there. Rather exciting! What's more, Michael and co. brought some of their honey from last year's hives at River Farm, and it was delightful...light-colored, mild, and floral. We had various honeys out for sampling at Jacob's suggestion, and many small ones went away sticky, no doubt to the despair of their parents. There were still people around, still interested and questioning, while we were packing up at the end.

Also, we got fed. Sausage with peppers and onions, yay! Which makes the third time I've partaken of that most delightful of festive food traditions in the last three weeks, I think. Food is nigh on to a religion for me, and free food is sacred. I got free food three times this weekend. This weekend was good.

Well, Jacob promised that he'd fill in whatever I left out, so I'm going to feel free to post this and leave him to amend my inadequacies, many as I know them to be.

Installing

Well, isn’t that nice? I don’t write a post for over a week because I’m busy being run over by the end-of-semester freight train, and then when I have a blissful free day, my internet is on the fritz. Ah well, I shall persevere! All the world must know how utterly adorable and delightful our bees are!

Heh.

So, as you know, we picked up our package bees last Tuesday, and they were fascinating and delightful and jiggly. Here are a couple of pictures, so that you can be awed at the sight of hundreds of cages, and, on a smaller scale, three pounds of bees. This hobby is so cool.

We were a bit surprised to find neighbor bees on the package on our back porch, because it’s news to us that there should be any bees around here. Admittedly, where we live is a bit “greener” than a lot of places around here, and there are trees and grassy spaces and whatnot, but it’s mostly all apartments and townhouses, and we weren’t aware of any beekeepers in the area. Anyway, that was cool, but a couple of them have evidently decided that our porch is the place to be, as I saw one of them out there just a couple of minutes ago. I feel sorry for the little lady, wasting her time in such a barren, lonely spot. We don’t even have any plants out there, because it gets no sun.


Anyway…our teachers had advised us to let the bees rest and get used to each other for a few days—around four—but as usual, we came to our own conclusions about that. Mostly, we have limited access to our site, and on Saturday, which would otherwise have been the obvious install day, we knew that the gardens were going to be swarming with people for the annual plant sale. Swarms of bees and swarms of bystanders don’t go together all that well, ya know, not to mention that parking would have been heinous. So we decided to install on Wednesday.

When Jacob picked me up Wednesday afternoon after classes, I was so exhausted that I thought I might pass right the heck out. We went home to collect our stuff and mix up the feeder syrup, and I was just barely above useless, drooping all over the house. Mostly because of me, we didn’t get out of the house with all our gear until a little after four (the gardens close at 5, and they’re half an hour away, recall). Then, tada!—Northern Virginia happened, and we sat in traffic. I crumpled over sideways onto the big metal box between our seats, and fell asleep, despite massive discomfort.

So we arrived at the gardens just at 5, me with my left arm asleep and corduroy imprints in my forehead, Jacob hot and exasperated. Not a fortuitous start, eh?

But almost immediately the peace and sunshine began seeping through our sulk. The few people still around the gardens seemed to think that it’d be fine if we took care of business and left whenever we were done—they were going to be there late getting ready for the plant sale anyway. So we trekked everything down to the hives, posed for a couple of pictures with a box of bees for one of the garden employees, and started getting ourselves organized. The bees were decidedly ornery, so we gave them a good soaking with dilute sugar water in a spray bottle, and they calmed right down.

First off, we stole a couple of frames of honey and pollen from the strong hive, because they had some “to spare” and we thought it’d be a nice boost for the new colonies. Then, we arranged a couple of boxes with combinations of these filled frames, drawn comb bought from Michael, and foundation, in a way that seemed best to us at the time, whether it was or not. I sprayed down all of the frames with sugar water to make them more appealing to the bees, and we withheld four frames from each box to give the bees somewhere to go quickly when we put them in. By this point in time, I was feeling significantly more energetic. Once we had the first box all set up to our satisfaction, we pulled the top off the shipping cage, hammered down the ends of the staples for safety’s sake, and pulled out the queen cage by its little round shipping tab. And tada!—there was the queen, the ultimate “fat bottomed girl”—I kept humming the song to myself after that. She has a little paint dot on her back—I think it’s turquoise-ish, I forget—to make her easier to find on the frames. Her abdomen is much larger than that of the defective one we removed the other day, it’s obvious. Since we hadn’t really brought the necessary equipment to suspend the queen cage between the frames, we laid her on top of the frames in the requisite position and orientation and stapled the box down with a bit of ribbon (it’s supposed to be hardware cloth, but we don’t have any yet, and Jacob read somewhere that you can use ribbon too). Then we knocked the bees to the bottom of the cage and opened up the cage again, and pulled out the feeder-can. We’d expected it to be pretty much empty, since our bees had been so ornery about getting fed, but it seemed to be pretty well full right up, so who knows what their beef was.

This is where the real fun starts—at this point, you just upend the cage, and dump the bees out over their new home. The first shake gets a great huge pile of them, and after that you sort of have to shuffle the box back and forth to get them to fall out of the hole. Shaking a box of bees, knowing that they can get out, is a surreal experience. Even given that Jacob and I seem both to have been born missing the “afraid of bees” gene, we’re not nuts, and we do have a healthy caution for them. Consequently, having a hundred bees swarming all about your head—a hundred bad things that could happen but just aren’t happening—is an almost therapeutic experience. You know? All of these worries, and here I am, just fine, in the middle of it all. I can’t explain it to my satisfaction, though. All I know is that, by the time we got to this part, I was entirely refreshed from my killer week, and positively buoyant.

Once we’d gotten out as many bees as were reasonably going to come out, we propped the box up against the entrance board so that the rest could climb in. You could see bees that were just shaken out of the box there on the front porch, butts up in the air and wings fanning, sending out the “come home, come home, this is home” pheromone, which made me feel good about how everything was going. Slowly, steadily, we dropped in the rest of the frames, and I feel pretty good about our low rate of bee-squoosh-age. We put a gallon bag full of syrup on top of the frames and made a little slit for them to get it out of, dropped another hive body over it all to make room for the feeder bag, and dropped a lid on it. Rinse and repeat for the second hive, with Jacob and I trading off tasks so that each of us got to try most everything. We filled up a couple of mason jars with plain water and put them in the front entrances. (At some point, we’ll make some sort of waterer for all of the hives. I don’t know where the established hives are currently getting their water—obviously somewhere—but it can’t be but so close, and they’d probably benefit from something closer.) You’re supposed to put entrance reducers on new hives, but our entrance reducers, in combination with the Boardman feeders we bought, are actually entrance blockers (lame and stupid, considering they’re the same brand), so we blocked off a portion of each entrance with a brick, since there’s a great pile of bricks back in the yard. If you’re all to heck confused as to what this setup looks like, just take a look at the pictures and hopefully it’ll make more sense. The Boardman feeder is the bit of wood and galvanized steel with the big round hole, which is where the mason jar goes, perforated lid down.

We watched the other two hives a bit, though mostly we left them alone, especially the combined hive. There was plenty of activity on the porch for both hives, which is comforting, but there was, as yet, no evidence of the removal of the newspaper. It was wet when we put it in, so some of our “slits” were more like holes, so you wouldn’t expect them to have too much difficulty getting started on removing it. We were told to expect a litter of newspaper-confetti, and so far, nada. Well, if there isn’t something by the time we go back to check on the queen cages and replenish the feeders, we’ll have to figure out what to do next, but it’s probably nothing.

Oh, and a last note…a few days ago I made up the grease/sugar patties that you’re supposed to keep in the hives as a treatment against tracheal mites, and it turned out to be loads of fun, because the stuff models startlingly well. Here’s a picture:

I envision that years from now, it’ll be a much anticipated family tradition—“Yay! It’s grease patty time!”—and we’ll end up with all sorts of silly looking grease patties and Crisco all over the kitchen. Ahhhh.

Some basic information

Jacob and I don't really consider that beekeeping "how-to" is within the scope of this blog, on the whole, partly because it's just an unreasonable amount to cover, and partly because we have no damn clue what we're doing anyway. However, it is reasonable, I think, that we provide links to some basic information so that those who just want to understand what the heck we're talking about and picture the scenes we describe can do so. Besides, Mamma asked, and I always do what Mamma tells me to. Right, Mamma? ;-)

Besides, I'd already found a nifty breakaway diagram of a Langstroth hive that I was going to post a link to, and that's specifically what she requested. A Langstroth hive, simply, is a modern hive, named after the guy who came up with the basic design in the mid-1800's. It has removable frames to let you manipulate and examine the hive easily, and it takes advantage of the concept of "bee-space", that being, roughly, the amount of space you give the bees to move in so that they will be able to move, but won't build comb where you don't want it (too much). A couple of things, though: First off, section supers are also optional, though they're not labeled as such. Basically, they're shaped frames so that you get neat little rounds or rectangles or whatever of comb for sale intact. Also, I think there's more visual difference between mediums and shallows. Shallows are really shallow, in my opinion.

I'm not thrilled with any of the glossaries I've come across yet, but this one seems fairly good. For quick reference, some of the terms Jacob used in the last post that might be unfamiliar:

Foundation: The thin sheet of beeswax, or sometimes plastic, that is printed with the hexagonal-cell shape and put in frames to encourage the bees to build the way you want them to. You can also buy all-plastic frames, complete with "foundation". There are various supposed advantages to plastic, but Jacob and I just generally don't like plastic for anything where something else will do, and anyway, we've noticed the bees aren't too fond of it either. There are some frames in the existing hives that have plastic foundation, and in many cases, they are partially or completely bald of comb. We'll be phasing those out, yeah.

Supers: In my opinion, a somewhat confusingly used word, as it refers both generically to the boxes that make up the hive and more specifically to the boxes that go above the queen excluder and are meant to contain only honey. "Supers" in which the queen is laying brood are also referred to as brood chambers, but then, too, people usually refer to all of the supers in which brood is laid as the "brood chamber". Sigh...anyway, they're all the same wooden box, in three basic sizes, with an inner rim to hold the frames.

Queen Excluder: Just a plastic or metal screen that you stick between supers to keep the queen from going into the upper boxes and laying brood where you want only honey. The spacing of the screen is such that workers can get through, but the queen, with her larger abdomen, cannot.

Brood: Eggs, larvae, or pupae in various stages of development.

Propolis: "Bee glue" that the bees make from gathered tree and plant resins combined with wax and whatever else is around, and use to seal up gaps in the hive and generally gum everything together. It makes moving things around in the hive more difficult, but it supposedly has a wide array of medicinal properties (mostly it's antimicrobial) and uses in varnish and whatnot, so you can sell it, and some beekeepers even install propolis traps (screens, basically) to collect it. We already have quite a collection, because some of our used equpiment was thoroughly junked up. I'm thinking it might be cool to try to make propolis soap--good for acne, maybe. I think propolis smells just wonderful, actually. Smells like honey and resin and beeswax...mmmm.

Nectar Flow: When a given plant or set of plants that provide a major source of nectar to the bees (around here, clover, black locust, maple, various other things) is in bloom, you have a nectar flow, and you want to do your best not to interrupt the bees. Bees hit up only one type of flower per run, which is part of why they're such affective pollinators, and a hive, as I understand it, pretty much concentrates on one plant source until they've run it dry.

Okay, I think that's more than enough for now. We'll try to put up more educational links as we find them, but there's a good one over there right now, if you must know more. ;-)

More pictures

Okay, okay, so I'm utterly besotted with my husband, and so I put the picture of the Potomac with him in it up in the last post, even though it was actually a rather uncomplimentary shot of the landscape. In atonement, I offer this one. Actually, I was so hot and dehydrated by then that all of the pictures I took of the gardens kinda stink, but this one is better than the other, at least. There will be, I assure you, more and better in the future. Besides, everything's rather parched up here anyway, so it's not as lush as it really ought to be, and no one's to blame. Oh, I hope it rains...

I also felt a little silly for not having put any good pictures of the bees up, so here you go. This shot ought to give you some idea of how terribly aggressive honey bees are--these are our mentor Brenda's hands, and she's grabbing worker bees bare-handed to put in the cage with the defunct queen. (Queens cannot take care of themselves, and need to be tended by workers.) I don't believe she was stung while doing this. I wish I could give you a properly high-resolution image so that you could really see the bees. They're really the sweetest little things.

Pride of ownership

Today we are officially beekeepers--that is, we own bees now! We met up with the owner of the hives, Michael, his daughter Theresa, and our mutual mentor Brenda at River Farm at 10:30 in the morning. The place was swarming with people for an Easter egg hunt. We ended up buying three hives, in a manner of speaking--one hive (on the left in the picture below) is very strong, and one is large but its queen had apparently run out of sperm, because she was laying mostly unfertilized drones. The last one is quite small and weak, but possessed of an apparently healthy queen. So today Brenda took away the dysfunctional queen, and we'll leave the bees to sweat it out until Monday, at which point we will stack the large hive on top of the small hive with a piece of newspaper between. The bees will shred and remove the newspaper in a couple of days, but meanwhile the bees in the top hive will have time to get used to the pheromone of the small hive's queen, and should hopefully accept her, at which point everything can go on its merry way. We also bought an extra medium super with ten frames of drawn comb from Michael, because the less time the bees spend drawing out comb, the more time they spend collecting honey.

Here we are popping the inner cover off the dysfunctional-queen hive. We went through all of the hives pretty thoroughly to check for queens and general status. In the case of this hive, it was particularly important, because we had to find and remove the queen if we could, and if we couldn't find the queen, we had to ascertain if perhaps we had laying workers (workers, who lack the necessary ovarian development and sperm, trying to lay eggs in the absence of a queen), which would have been a tricky situation to fix.


Here's the view from the gardens down to the Potomac. It's a really lovely, really excellent site, and we feel quite lucky.


Who could resist that smile?

Checking the frames:

Putting things back together:

The queenless hive got very ornery towards the end of our inspection. Jacob got stung several times overall, though all he has to show for it now is one slightly red spot on his side. I didn't get stung for a long time, despite bare hands (dang bulky hot icky things, gloves), but my hood was gapping badly in the back, so that when one did get me, she got me in the neck. Obviously, we're going to have to work on our wardrobe. By the time we were on our way home, though, the sting was barely a reminder--the sun and heat were far worse.

All in all, we ended up spending $300 for the hives, bringing our total investment up to around $1000. So, not the cheapest hobby to get in to, but after this initial investment (we need to get a few more things--at least a couple more queen excluders), there won't be much upkeep money. Besides, unlike a lot of hobbies, this one bids fair to pay back a lot of its investment. One woman who was at the gardens stopped to talk to us, and immediately asked if she could buy honey. We told her that there wasn't going to be any for a while, but we exchanged contact information. She was of the opinion that she knew a great many people who would be interested in buying truly local honey. The gardens are in the sort of neighborhood populated pretty well entirely by people with more disposable income than we're used to, and even off in a corner, beekeepers draw attention.

We had a lot of fun, even though I think today was the warmest day so far this year. Brenda and Michael both seemed very pleased with our comfort level and confidence handling the hives. I dunno...we're just not fearful people, I guess. I am glad there are two of us, though--it'll make things faster, easier, and companionable to boot. We're really going to enjoy this. The bees are just so cute! ;-)

Progress

The bees have been inspected. We were hoping that we might be able to be there for the inspection, mostly to glean information that won't be obvious to us from what the inspector might have said. Oh well.

So now we're trying to figure out the next step--you know, the one where we actually buy the bees, pick up the spare hive parts, and see our new hives. I guess maybe it's pretty strange that we're buying them without seeing them, but seriously, what would we be able to tell anyway? "Ooh, the hive boxes are painted an ugly color, how unfortunate"? Precisely why we were hoping to see the inspection.

In the interest of keeping a proper log, I should note that, while it rained last weekend, and evidently sprinkled on my friend at the bus stop yesterday (a mile away, I saw only clear skies), it's still dry dry dry overall. How disappointing...we were really hoping that last weekend signaled an end to the drought. So everyone agrees that we'll likely have to start feeding the bees sugar-water before the fall, because there won't be enough nectar or enough honey. We honestly don't mind if we don't get much honey, since we're in it for the knowledge this year, but it's bad for everyone else, from beekeepers to the local farm (Bull Run Mountain Farm) that we've bought a vegetable share from this year.

And, on a last note, last night was the party at the end of the class. We're officially on our own, now. It was a snackie pot-luck, and I figured that under the circumstances I had probably better bring something that wasn't sweet, out of self-defense. So I brought tuna salad and crackers, and was very gratified by the enthusiastic reception it got. We had several nice conversations, and I will miss seeing these people so often. Hopefully we'll see at least some of them at the next BANV meeting. Turns out the BANV summer picnic is on my birthday--not such a bad thing!

A couple of pictures

Here are a couple of mildly entertaining pictures for you, and a bit of explanation.

Modern beehives don't look anything like the cute little straw skeps that people associate with beekeeping. They are stacked towers of rectangular wooden boxes, filled with removable frames in which the bees build their comb, ideally/hopefully in neat rows with no junk in between. This allows for convenient manipulation, expansion, and so on, but it's also legally required, because it permits the inspector to get a good look at the hive and assure himself that it is disease-free. Most people order their hives unassembled, because it's cheaper and shipping costs less that way. We did. We also decided to get medium-sized boxes (the choices being shallow, medium, and deep, and Jacob can give numbers if he wants--he's the more technically minded between us), because shallows aren't really appropriate for brood chambers (where the bees actually live and the queen lays eggs), and deeps, once full, would be very difficult for me to lift. All mediums, though, means that there are more frames to make up than if some of the hive was made from deeps. And the pieces for frames are little and weedy and the nails that are used to put them together are similarly little and weedy. We ordered 100 frames, and of those 100, I assembled four. Go me!

Here's Jacob, working away.

And here are most of the frames, assembled and stashed in the closet. That's 1000 little weeny nails, ladies and gentlemen, and dozens more bent and twisted in the trash. And for only two hives. And I wondered, even for a second, why we would choose to buy established hives when the opportunity arose?

The adventure thus far

Here we are, in a third floor apartment in Alexandria, with the back porch full of painted hive bodies, and bees on the way. How did we get here? Actually, I guess it's not that good a story. But you get to hear it anyway.

Jacob and I are in the city right now pretty much purely because that's where the job was. Ourselves, we're country people right down through (which is funny, because Jacob grew up entirely in the suburbs), and we would like to have our own little homestead in the country someday (hopefully sooner than later). One of the things we always thought it would be cool to do is keep bees, and in fact we had a beekeeping book sitting around that we picked up maybe a year ago.

So, when it very much looked like we were going to be renting an old farmhouse on three acres out in Fairfax Co., we thought of bees. We thought about bees very hard for a couple of days, and looked around, and discovered that two days from then, on a Thursday evening, was the first meeting of a class about beekeeping, maybe twenty minutes away from our house. Well, we blinked a few times, then called up, found that it would be fine to just show up for the first class, and...did.

The class was great good fortune for us--every one of the eight two-hour classes was just packed with information, and the ticket price included another beekeeping manual, a little full-color pests and diseases booklet, a great pile of relevant catalogs, a mentor to help us through the first year, and a membership in BANV (Beekeeper's Association of Northern Virginia).

It also included dibs on ordering bees through one of the teachers. Now, the owner and realtor for the place we were trying to move in had accepted our application and the concessions upon which the application was contingent, about which we were very happy and excited, but had then dragged their feet ridiculously on moving forward. Bees, like many other aspects of agriculture, have to be started in the spring. So it was that the bees had to be ordered before the lease was signed.

And then the lease came, and it was utterly unacceptable, and it went back on all of the conditions established in our application, and it wasn't even internally coherent. So we sent a fax full of requested corrections and amendations, they said take it or leave it, and we would have been mad to take it, so we left it. Very upsetting, but it's in the past now, and at least in this case, that closed door has presented a variety of opened windows.

But all that left us with two packages of bees on the way and the supplies for two hives already in possession and no place whatsoever to put them.

That was about a month ago. About then, there was quite a scramble to find a place to stow the bees. Bees in the back yard are awfully convenient--you can pretty much just go out there and take a peek any time the weather's nice--but after all, most bees aren't kept in back yards, they're kept in scattered outyards, potentially many miles away from the beekeeper's home. That's pretty far from ideal for beginning beekeepers, but you can't just tell the supplier "Hey, just kidding, I didn't really want those bees anyway," and, after all, we did really want those bees.

The hopeful solution was actually struck upon by our mentor, who knew of another beekeeper in Alexandria who was scrambling to get rid of his hives because he is about to have to leave the country. His hives are located at River Farm, a horticultural garden right in Alexandria. As far as he knows, the gardens should still be amenable to the idea of having bees around. (I should point out here that arguably the most vital role that bees play is actually pollination, not honey production, and bees are very good for gardens). So the plan is to buy a couple of his already-established hives and install our own new hives at the same site.

Why buy his hives? Uhhh, I don't know--because that was the original proposition? Because they were already there? Because we need the location and that's part of the deal? No, really, it'll be very cool for us. For one thing, buying his hives like this should be cheaper than buying everything independently, so it's a good deal. More importantly, first year hive management is significantly different from second year hive management, and this way we'll get to have experience with both right away, and while we still have a mentor and the beekeeping club to help us when we're drowning. It'll be an unparalleled learning experience. Also, established hives produce surplus honey, which first-year hives cannot be expected to do. ;-)

So the situation as it stands now: Hives have to be inspected by the state-appointed inspector before they can be sold. The hives we're planning on buying should be inspected early this week--possibly even as we speak, for all I know. The man we're buying them from has the impression from River Farm that they're fine with the changing of the guard, and the hives need spring care, so as soon as the hives are inspected, he wants the changeover to take place. Meanwhile, our own woodenware (hive bodies, frames, etc. that make up the actual substance of the hive) is painted and pretty much ready to go, and our two 3-pound packages of bees are due to arrive on the 18th of this month. They will need to be installed in their new homes within the week of their arrival.

And here we are--we need to get back in touch with the current owner of the hives and create a more detailed plan for transfer, and I'm supposed to be painting a third coat onto the parts of our hive that we've decided to paint a rather lovely green, which, of course, allows the wood to show through more strongly than does the off-white we painted the hive bodies. When I get to it, I'll put in some relevant links and things, and I'll write again when we know more!

Welcome!

Hello, everyone! My husband and I are starting this blog because we hope that it might be a different and interesting way for people to learn about beekeeping. As we go through our first year of beekeeping, we're going to try to record what we do as we do it, our adventures and misadventures, and our sucesses and failures. It should be quite a trip!

What do we hope to accomplish by doing this? Well, maybe you're thinking about keeping bees, and seeing us stumble our way through our first year will give you the confidence to give it a go on your own--if so, I would be absolutely thrilled. Maybe you've never thought about keeping bees, and this blog could be a bit of an education for you--though certainly not the most efficient way to learn! And maybe you already keep bees, but figure we'll be good for a laugh or two. You're probably right. We figure that if only a few people enjoy our record, that'll be good, and meanwhile, it'll help us keep track of what we've done for future years. Wish us luck!