Gangbuster!

Our fuzzy bugs are going gangbuster - that's really the only way to describe their activity level. Seriously! There is no stopping them from drawing comb, raising baby bees and loading up on pollen and nectar to feed everybody and hoard for the coming winter.

Heh, that one cracks me up. If they only knew. Our girls are from Minnesota and are probably expecting massive snowfall and months with temperatures below freezing. Man, are they going to be in for a surprise.

Ahh, sunny Florida. Living here has its perks.

We try to inspect our hive every other week but because the weather had been hot, humid and Hordor! , I mean, wrought with thunderstorms, we missed one. That taught us that our girls aren't to be trusted to stay in line. Since they had an extra week of unsupervised activity, they came up with a few small, but crazy cross comb sections that we had to adjust which they didn't like as much.

Imagine you discovered the mother lode of all thrift stores going out of business and bringing home all kinds of cute side tables, chairs, chests, baskets, etc. only to have a cleaning crew come in and leave with half of it. Without asking.

Not cool.

Despite us rummaging through their stuff, they were still pretty mellow. They grumbled i.e. their buzzing sounded quite a bit louder and urgent than their usual constant hum, but there were no defense flights or straight-out attacks.

We also discovered a few small hive beetles which didn't make us too happy as they can become a real pest, even overrun your hive, but down here in the south it's like termites: the question is not 'if' you will have termites but 'when'.

 Our bees weren't crazy about the little bugs either. We watched them chase them around and even tackle and wrestle with them, so that's good. We'll help them out by installing a beetle trap to manage the numbers.

The coolest thing about Sunday's inspection?

One of the pieces of cross comb we had to cut loose (and shamelessly kept to ourselves) was stuffed with honey. Once we closed up the hive again, the three of us ended up in the backyard again, breaking small pieces of comb running with golden honey over our fingers and getting a first taste of what our bees had produced.

O-MY-GOD! So good! So sweet! So beautiful!
You stick whole chunks of comb into your mouth and chew it like gum and all the honey bursts out (you don't have to eat the wax; you can just spit it out and return it to the bees)
Simply amazing!

Since this is our first year we are not expecting an actual honey harvest; the bees will need pretty much all of it to build up the hive and to last them through the winter so sneaking a bite (or two) is very very precious and a much treasured experience.

Busy Bees

On a completely different note ....

 While we are still waiting for the chicken legislation to pass that will one day hopefully allow us to legally keep a chicken or two in our urban back yard (I so would love to own a pair of silkies!), we have been toying with the thought of keeping bees for several years now.

Last year this plan of ours was tabled due to a possible job offer that would have relocated us waaaaay north (too north for my comfort, if you ask me) but this year nothing was going to stop us from adding a bee hive to our little old house.

After much research we decided to go for one of those new-fangled topbar hive - its simpler nature of construction and maintenance appealed to us, including the smaller amount of needed storage and heavy lifting (neither of which we have to waste nor feel too keen on doing). The drawback of a smaller honey harvest is no big deal for us since we are not looking into going into business with it. We are looking forward to 'harvesting' more sweet-swelling beeswax, and frankly, an expected 15-35 pounds of honey from a healthy topbar hive is still way more honey than we use in a year.

Soo, all that being said, when we received the notification that the apiary from which we are getting our bees and queen this year has begun preparing the bees for shipping, we frantically started building our hive.

And here it is! In all its glory, with topbars in place. It's a simple box, about 4 1/2 feet long. The inside is angled at 120 degrees and measures about 7" at the bottom board and 20" at the widest point.

Here you can peek into the cozy inside. We opted for a closed bottom for this hive (we might experiment later) because supposedly it's easier for the bees to maintain the proper interior temperature and humidity when they don't have to factor in a screened bottom that may or may not be open.
The screened bottom is often used as a tool in dealing with Varroa mites but we're hoping to avoid this issue altogether by buying hygienic, mite-resistant bees able to battle those pests by themselves without the 'help' of pesticides and antibiotics used in the hive.

Of course I had to pick up a few new flowers for the yard as well when I went to the Blue Box to buy the lumber! I added a few red salvias, orange bulbines, more bright orange and yellow lantana and Confederate Jasmine to our back yard. All of those plants do well in our climate, are drought resistant once established and bees like'em!

We also added a cute roof to our hive to keep the girls nice and dry. Here is the husband hard at work measuring and cutting the sides for our hive's roof. He's just as excited about the imminent arrival of our bees.

I poked around the hardware store for a lightweight roofing solution and finally settled on those light, clear but textured light box panels (you know, for those awful fluorescent ceiling lights *shudder*). We attached the panels with screws and then caulked over the screw holes to make sure no rain would seep through those holes, and voila! a roof!

Now we have to wait for a probably frantic call from the post office to come and get this 3lbs box of a buzzing nightmare busy bees and their queen. STAT! So stay tuned for more updates on this little side adventure!