New Hive Base

Karl built a new base for our hive so that he could incorporate small hive beetle traps into it. The new base consists a layer of beetle traps that small hive beetles can crawl into, but are too small for honey bees. When the beetles go into the traps they fall into a tray into which Karl poured a layer of vegetable oil. This picture shows how it all slides together. He also had to make sure that the stand was the exact right height so that the new entrance would align with the slit cut into the exterior wall.

Karl also used installing the new base as an opportunity to open up the hive and check out how everything looked. Bottom line, everything looked pretty good. There still was capped honey, there was larvae which means the queen was still around and healthy and there was newly stored pollen. Kai got to help this time. Next time it's Malin's turn.

Honey Bee in Action

This isn't a great picture and I don't know what kind of flower is in the planter, but I just can't resist snapping a photo of a honey bee in action on a beautiful spring day. I saw this one around the corner from where a fellow beekeeper lives so it likely was hers.

Pea Shoots

Our porch is a greenhouse this spring. We have peas, sugar snap peas, swiss chard, a raspberry bush, arugula and tomatoes growing in various buckets, pots and Chinese takeout containers. I was hoping to harden off the peas during the last few days, but it's been so cold here (it snowed this morning!) that I decided to keep them inside another week or so.

Here are the garden peas.

And the sugar snap peas.

Daisy Girl Scout Gardeners

The girls all picked out and planted seeds this afternoon. Hopefully they'll sprout and we can eventually plant them in the Girl Scout community garden plot. For the next several weeks they'll stay up on our green house of a porch.

Honey Bees on Phlox

At the National Arboretum this morning, tons of honey bees were gathering pollen from phlox. The National Arboretum is about two miles from our house as the crow (or the bee) flies so it's possible that they were our honey bees. More likely, however, is that they are bees from hives that are on the Arboretum's grounds.

King Cake

This was my attempt at a King Cake for Fat Tuesday earlier this week. It rose so much while baking in the oven that the ring turned into one big circle. We didn't have purple sugar so we made purple icing and sprinkled yellow and green sugar on it.

Bee Feeding

Karl and the kids marked the mason jar of honey to see how much the bees were eating. They took about a half quart of honey in a week. This mason jar held honey that we had extracted last October. Karl punched pin holes through the lid and its set upside down in the hive's screen top. We've put towels on top of the screen lid to keep the bees warm.