Oak Orchard Honey

The end of the school year is coming up fast. For me this is always a mad dash to the finish. I've got projects that students have started that need to be wrapped-up, and bookkeeping that needs to be entered... I've got a picture of my new method of protecting my ankles with my bootlaces that works very well and makes me look a lot like the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. If I only had a brain... Last weekend I was picking up a piano that was a Mother's Day gift when my "A" hive swarmed. My wife was out in the backyard when it happened and she told me it was amazing. By the time I went out to see where they were - it was too late. They had left the area to parts unknown. Yesterday I went out to my $300 beekeeping shop (well-beaten travel trailer) got my tools ready and headed down the hill to see what had happened. Luckily for me Matt, a local beekeeper showed up just as I was struggling to light my smoker. After a lesson on how to make fire we walked the path ba...

It's really cool to finally get to hear Michael Bush speaking after reading so much from him on bushfarms.com . I thought I would give this video a place to live on my blog so I can come back and listen any time I like. I'm not sure when-and-if I will ever get to the point of raising my own queens, but life is an exciting journey and one never knows. (PowerPoint slide link) Today was very windy, so I never got a chance to look inside the hives to see how things are progressing. I did add medium supers about a week ago because both hives looked as though they have a lot of capped honey in the top medium and they were running out of room. When I got home one day this week I slid the cover back to see if they were building comb, and I could see that they were - that's always exciting. I've ordered six more mediums and frames from my friend Joe Caton at BeeManDirect.com along with some other things - like a bee brush. Ive been grabbing handfuls of grass to sweep the bees a...

So, 34 million years seems like a long time... It's pretty amazing to be working around insects that have been doing what they do for so long. From Wikipedia: Honey bees represent only a small fraction of the approximately 20,000 known species of bees. Some other types of related bees produce and store honey, but only members of the genus Apis are true honey bees. The first Apis bees appear in the fossil record at the Eocene-Oligocene (around 34 million years ago) boundary, in European deposits The origin of these prehistoric honey bees does not necessarily indicate that Europe is where the genus originated, only that it occurred there at that time. There are few known fossil deposits in the suspected region of honey bee origin, and fewer still have been thoroughly studied. There is only one fossil species documented from the New World, Apis nearctica , known from a single 14-million-year old specimen from Nevada. Honey bees represent only a small fraction of the approximately ...

Everywhere I look I see the beauty of an early spring in Upstate New York. The only exception is for the catalpa trees. As I understand it, the catalpa that grows here in this climate is the most northern variety of a tropical species. Also, the name catalpa was writen in error by an early botanist. The name originally being catawba after the Native American tribe Catawba. When the catalpas in this picture have leaves, I'll know warm weather is here to stay. It will be interesting to see if the blossoms are a big hit with the honey bees.

This is a test to see if I can upload movies from my iPhone. I was out at sundown and tried a 15 second movie of the evenings's activities. Now I just have to figure out why it's sideways...

Cold with a bit of snow today; kind of thought we were past all that. I took some pictures of what is blooming in the yard so I could look back next year and get an idea how early or late spring is. The dandelions have just appeared in the past couple days. I've always liked dandelions and felt that they are wildflower not a weed. I think of a weed as one of those things with thorns that causes intense pain when you step on it. Now that I have honey bees I feel like mowing all those great flowers is not as easy as it used to be, especially when bees are working them. The catalpa trees have small buds and some are starting to open on lower branches of the young trees. The older ones look as if it were mid-winter, not any signs of life. The cherry tree pictured here has bloomed within the past two days, while the Bradford pear has been in full bloom for about the past five or six days. A few honey bees were on the blooms in the late afternoon when I got home the other da...

Things look active at both hives, but I won't see them for a week because of vacation. I'm writing as we travel down 95 on our way to Kure Beach. The forsythia and cherry trees are in full bloom as we motor along the Virginia countryside. I'm looking to see if there are honey bees on the blossoms, but haven't noticed any yet. I have heard it said that spring travels north at about twenty miles an hour. That puts flowers like the ones I'm looking at about twenty days away. That's not too bad.