Surprise Harvest

When the temp hit 65, I went out to crack open the hives and found both good news and bad news. Let's start with the bad; I lost one of my three hives. I didn't have much hope for them to start with, they were small and the queen seemed very week. I thought she quit laying pretty early in the season but wasn't sure. They must have frozen out early because, and here's the good news, they left 40lbs of honey. I have no idea why they didn't make it through the winter considering all the stores they had but none the less, I have 40 extra pounds of honey on my hands.

I checked the other hives and both of them still have enough honey to see them through any cold snaps, plus they're already starting to build up. With no plans to make spring splits, I decided to go ahead and extract the 40lbs and sell it. I just made arrangements with a local produce market to test out selling some of my Talahi Honey so we'll see how it goes.

Check back soon for results.

Ken

Visit "The Brink"

Yes, this post is very off topic, but the bees are just waking up from winter and I have something creepy to tell you about. Meet my friend J.C. Hutchins. Now, I wouldn't call JC himself creepy, but the things that emerge from his brain are.... well, down right creepified. If you didn't know better, you would think he's broken.

You've heard me talk about JC and the 7th Son books over on my other blog here and here but today, JC is up to something seemingly more sinister. We're going to learn about a place called "The Brink" and it's not exactly a pleasant place to visit, let alone, live. What's so sinister about that you ask? Well, how do you feel about you being the patient who's committed? Yeah, I thought so.

From JC's site:
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J.C. Hutchins’ new horror thriller novel, Personal Effects: Dark Art, chronicles the story of Zach Taylor, a young art therapist. Taylor works at Brinkvale Psychiatric Hospital, a facility with a dark, bloody history. Locals call it “The Brink.”

From the book:

Brinkvale Psychiatric was not built over the [brownstone] quarry, but in it. Nine stories of howling, brain-boiling madness, stacked two hundred feet into the bedrock. If you’re at The Brink, you’re at the end of the line. Only dead-enders need apply.

And now, J.C. Hutchins and Personal Effects creator Jordan Weisman are opening the doors of their bloody creation, and allowing you to step inside. You’re not getting a guided tour of The Brink. You’re … being committed.

Welcome to a first-ever in publishing called Commit Yourself To The Brink. Here, you’ll find ways to inject yourself into the Personal Effects universe and become a patient of art therapist Zach Taylor. Create a patient profile (complete with backstory), receive your admittance papers, contribute artwork, video and more … and earn the horrifically cool privilege to appear on Brinkvale’s official website.

Get creative. Get crazy. Get committed.
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There you have it friends. I'll be back to the bee talk soon but for now, enjoy the links below.

Ken


Read about it
Learn about it
Hear about it

#Beekeep

Do you Twitter? I do. In fact, if you glance over to the right you'll see a list of my recent updates (aka, Tweets). By now, most everyone knows what Twitter is so I won't go into the fine print. What I do want to say is there are several beekeepers who post with some regularity over on Twitter and it's been insightful to say the least.

Many Twitterer's (yeah, that's not going to pass the spell check thingy) stay pretty top level, meaning they follow a few people and make a few posts, but don't dive into some of the truly useful features that Twitter has to offer. However, there are many other ways to utilize Twitter and make it more issue specific. Meet the hash-tag. Whenever I update Twitter with something about beekeeping, I write it out and then put #beekeep at the end. Everyone who does this will have all posts labeled with #beekeep show up on one page like this one. You can also subscribe to the group you want to follow and have all tweets from that group sent directly to your personal Twitter page. Pretty cool huh.

You're not usually gaining in-depth knowledge about any subject since all posts are kept to 140 characters, but we are meeting each other, getting top level info with links to more details and sharing in the beekeeping community.

So the question remains; Do you Twitter? If not, go here.

Ken

What To Say?

Not sure why, but I'm dying to write something. I really don't have anything new to fill you in on bee-wise, the girls are hunkered down for the winter and I hope they're doing well and keeping warm. So far, this winter has seen it's share of sub 20 degree nights and I'm hoping for the best. We're certainly going to test out the polystyrene hives this year.

Speaking of the new polystyrene hives, I do have one concern. I'm worried that on very cold days the cluster will put off enough heat to generate a fair amount of condensation on the top of the hive and then rain down over the bees causing them to freeze. I would think that a regular wooden hive would breath a little more and allow the condensation to be kept at a minimum. With polystyrene, there will be very little air movement and that might present a problem. I guess the spring will bring answers. Anyone out there using Styrofoam hives care to chime in and let me know your experiences?

I also left on the polystyrene feeder (top feeder) for some extra insulation. I'm thinking about putting some granulated sugar in the feeder and removing the partition to see if the bees will come up and get some on warm days. Anyone else tried this? I know it's been done with newspaper sitting on top of frames with success but I'm wondering about the feeder.

Check in and let me know what all you beeks are doing to pass the winter.

Thanks for reading,

Ken

Starting A Collection

Well, the girls are all put away for the winter and given last winters disastrous results, I have high hopes for this year. I think all four colonies have enough honey to make it through, and I've also placed straw bales to act as wind breaks around the hives. As long as we don't get another freakish January tornado, everyone should keep warm and make it to spring. I'll be keeping en eye on them and may add some sugar if the weather requires (and allows). What to do now??

Aside from a new hobby every once in a while, I don't collect much of anything.... but that has recently changed. If you take up beekeeping, people start giving you honey dippers, which is pretty cool. I have two, both gifts, and I'm very interested to see how many variations of such a simple utensil are floating around out there. The first one I have looks like the picture above. Very traditional in every way except mine has a cool little bee on the other end. The second one is much more modern and lies at the opposite end of the honey dipper spectrum. Here's a pic:




When I received it, I became very interested in what lay in the middle between the two. It's now official, I collect honey dippers and the collection has now begun!

There seems to be some difference of opinion when it comes to weather it's called a "dipper" or a "dripper. I left it up to Google to decide for me. If you Google images for "Honey Dipper", you get all kinds of pictures that look like the ones I've shown you here. If you Google images for "Honey Dripper" you get lot of pics of the band and a whole bunch of links to porn sites. Hence forth, it's a Dipper.

So here you have it. the call is out to send me your pictures, links, stories and thoughts about honey dippers from all over the world.

Do only good,

Ken

A Quick Word of Thanks.

I just wanted to take a moment and thank those of you who take the time to stop by the blog. I was reviewing the blog stats and realized that there are people from 33 different states that have stopped by in the last month. Needless to say, I thought that was pretty amazing, but what I saw next made my jaw drop. When I read that people from 31 different countries, had visited the blog, I was speechless.

Okay, I realize that these numbers don't amount to a hill of beans for some other sites, but for me, well, I was a bit moved. Thanks to all of you who have taken an interest in my beekeeping and especially those of you who have written with words of encouragement or left comments about my posts.

Now, for a quick shout-out to my friends in Turkey. Next to the USA, my fellow beekeepers in Turkey represent the country with largest number of different readers. There are people from 17 different cities that I would like to thank personally (Ken quietly wonders if anyone in Turkey might want to fly him over for a quick beekeeping visit but then pushes the thought from his mind.), but a "thanks" from over here will have to suffice.

Anyway, I just saw the numbers and wanted to thank you all for being such a great source of encouragement and good will. Our world is indeed getting smaller everyday.

Thanks for reading,

Ken

I Have Honey!

Okay, it's a pretty lousy picture but I only had my Treo with me and this is the best I could do. Oh sure, it doesn't look like much, but to me it represents a year-long effort of beekeeping. For those of you just tuning in to the program, I took up beekeeping about a year ago and have had more pitfalls than I care to mention. The Reader's Digest version looks something like this; In January 2008, my hives were hit by a tornado (who has tornado's in January!?!). It killed thousands of bees and 3 of my 4 queens. I didn't learn how bad things were until late March, finally got new queens in April and May, and then it rained all the way through June. Needless to say, Ken's bees got a very late start.

The picture above is bottle #1 and I'm pretty happy about it. I took about 25lbs of surplus honey and left enough for the bees to get through the winter. It may not be much, but it represents a year of learning about bees, how to keep them and what not to do.

For those of you who have requested to purchase my honey, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is enough honey to send to my friends who have asked, the bad news is it's going to be pretty expensive so I won't blame you for opting out. Here's the deal. The going rate in my region for a pound of honey is about $5, the issue is shipping. Depending where you are located, it's going to take anywhere from another $5 to $8 just to get it to you. That info came from the USPS, so I'll look into some more shipping options. You are all good friends but I certainly don't expect you to pay twice the price for something you can get at Wal-Mart. If you're crazy enough to pay such a price and would like to have a bottle, email me at ken at talahihoney dot com.

Thanks for all the encouragement and support over the last year. I may only have a few readers of this little blog but they sure are a very nice bunch.

Thanks for reading,

Ken

Planting for 2009

This is yellow sweet clover and next spring I planning of seeing a lot of it! Directly in front of the hives are a few acres of Tall fescue, a nasty looking field grass that, if not controlled, could take over the world. Last year I tried to broadcast (scatter) several pounds of clover for the bees but nothing came up. The fescue had choked off any growth from the clover and not much (if any) actually came up. This year I'm taking a different tactic. Over the last couple of weeks I've been spraying an acre of the field with Round-Up, a pretty serious "anything" killer. The field is now dead and this weekend I'm going to disk it up to make sure the fescue won't make a come-back. Actually, I'm going to try and disk it twice, Illinois clay is unforgiving and really needs to be worked. After the field grass has been successfully murdered, and cooler weather arrives, I'm going to drop about 25lbs of yellow sweet clover (see above pic) seed and then harrow it in. With any luck, the bees will have lots of sweet nectar next spring.

On another note, I recently received a comment from Nick at The Bee Space. Following his link, I found his site to full of cool beekeeping information, so make sure to check it out.

One last thing, I'm going to go take a look at the hives this evening and see how close we are. I'm really excited about taking my first harvest and it seems everything is ready..... except the bees.

Bee good,

Ken

A few more weeks

Just a quick update. After spending some time in the hives a few days ago, two things are pretty clear.

First, the bees still need more time. There are several frames of honey, but the honey hasn't been capped yet (see the picture of capped honey above). Capping the honey consists of applying a thin wax cap to the end of the cell after the cell is full and the bees have evaporated the water content of the honey down to about 17%. As it stands, only about half of the frames are capped and I expect it will take another 3-4 weeks before it's ready. Considering my bees got a late start due to several queen issues and tremendous rains in the spring, I'm not overly surprised that I won't be able to take an early harvest as I had intended. They got a late start so I'm getting a late harvest.

Second, There's not going to be as much honey as I had hoped for. In a nutshell, my hives are young and I've been told that I need to make sure that they have ample stores to get through winter since they're still a bit on the small side. If I took a large harvest, there still might been time for them to build back up for winter but with all the problems I've had getting to this point, it's just not worth the risk. I'm guessing there will be about 30lbs of surplus honey between all the hives. Basically, that's about 25 to 30 bottles. After I account for family (I have a very large family) and friends (Ken glances over to the BH crew) there will be a few left for Christmas gifts and that's about it. Clearly not as much as I had wanted but I believe my decision this year will reap healthy rewards for next year.

Stay tuned, September is just around the corner.

Ken

Getting Ready To Go!

For the last 13 years, the term "extraction" meant something completely different than what it does now. As a firefighter, "extraction" was something that you never wanted to hear because you knew someone was in deep trouble. Today this word is taking on a brand new meaning and it's something that I'm really looking for to. In a few days I'll be extracting my first round of honey from my hives. Truth be told, I'm downright giddy with anticipation.

Above you'll see the first step in honey extraction, uncapping. More on that in another post. After uncapping, I'll place the frames in an extractor and that's where the sticky fun begins. I plan on recanting all that fun stuff after the harvest is complete. At this point, I have my beekeeping mentor meeting me later this evening to determine how much honey I have capped and ready to harvest. I'm also going to combine a few hives to make them a little stronger going in to winter.

It's been a long and difficult year for my bees, but the end in finally in sight.

Thanks for reading,

Ken