Dessert

Some folks came over earlier this week, and I served coffee and dessert: spritz cookies, chocolate chip cookies, lemon cake and brownies. I may have gone a little overboard -- we probably have a hundred extra cookies in sitting in our freezer. I guess we just have to have another party.

The Week, part two

I almost forgot of one more thing we did this week. I tore up the zucchini plant because it wasn't producing much of anything anymore. I think it was too stressed from growing that enormous zucchini a few weeks ago and it never bounced back. Lettuce seeds were sown in place of the squash plant, and they're already sprouting.

The Week

Let's see...we went raspberry picking and made muffins with the fresh berries.



Karl fixed a leak in the hive from when he worked on the hive last weekend. Bees were getting out somehow and were flying around the porch so Karl had to fix that. Also, last weekend he put a "bee door" under the top super. The top super is full of capped honey ready to be harvested, but it's covered with bees. One way of moving all the bees on these frames is to install a bee door which is a one way exit-only contraption. The bees go down through this door, but can't get back into the top super. Supposedly, this happens pretty quickly and you should have empty frames in a couple of days. Unfortunately, after 5 or 6 days, we still had a mess of bees up in the top super. We learned later that these bee doors only work when it's cold. Who knew. So Karl fixed that yesterday.

And little Aksel got his first bee sting, but he survived with no allergic reaction. No picture of his fat lip, but it wasn't pretty. The funny thing was even though we live with tens of thousands of honeybees, he was stung by a wasp or a yellow jacket while we were on a picnic miles from our house. He had been drinking orange juice and the juice on his lip attracted an aggressive insect that got him. Our honeybee girls would never do that.

"The Honey Trail" on NPR

Today, NPR's Diane Rehm interviewed Grace Pundyk, author of "The Honey Trail."

From the NPR website (which has some great photographs taken by Ms. Pundyk):

"Honey is a global food -- part of tradition, culture and trade. But it's not all sweet: the story also involves smuggling, deforestation and climate change. One woman explains what she found out when she went around the world in pursuit of liquid gold and vanishing bees."

Interesting interview -- the book's now on my reading list.

Montgomery County Beekeepers Association

Karl's a member of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Beekeepers Association. We just got the September, 2010 newsletter, the Honeypot, that talked all about everyone's favorite topic these days -- small hive beetles -- as well as what everyone needs to do in the coming weeks to help their bees make it through the winter. They're good folks who have helped us throughout our first year of beekeeping so I had to provide a link to their website.

Hive seems in good shape

Karl opened the hive up this morning for the first time in over a month. Before we left for vacation at the end of July, we were concerned that the girls were working on a new queen and may be unhappy and ready to swarm. Karl was eager to check the hive since we've gotten back a couple weeks ago, but waited a bit until he had a chance to order some bee supplies -- small-hive-beetle traps and some post-honey harvesting pesticides to kill off mites or beetles.

The best news of all is that they definitely have a queen and she is making tons of babies! Karl didn't see her, but he also didn't dig around for her. He simply wanted to make sure there wasn't an infestation of anything, check for bee larva (aka, make sure we had a healthy queen), see where they were in terms of honey for the winter - and get out.

More good news: there's plenty of honey. Here's a picture of a honey filled, capped frame.



When he was done looking around and was ready to close up the hive, Karl also put several small hive beetle traps in the hive. These plastic vegetable oil filled traps simply lay between the frames and have spaces too small for bees to get through, but just right for beetles. The beetles are constantly under attack in the hive and so they look for places to hide. The idea is the bees chase them through the small holes and they then fall into the oil and die.

The bad news is that Karl found two strange larvae in the hive. They were little grubs about as long as a quarter -- disgusting. Karl saw the first one and squished it with his finger but then immediately regretted it when the bees gathered around the squished larvae to carry it out of the hive. Karl later found another one on the baseboard of the hive, and the bees were not being nice to it, either. He didn't squish this one right away because he wanted a picture of it to use to identify it later. Even when he removed it from the hive and placed it on the windowsill, the bees followed it over there, gathered around and continued to sting and bite at it. Pretty amazing.


Now we'll get ready for cold weather and winter. Karl thinks we have enough honey to pull off some more frames for spinning. Once we clear the bees from those supers, we can take that honey off and put beetle and mite poison into the hive for pest control.