On Labor Day, our labors churned out sweet success. The bees produced some bee-autiful wildflower honey.

The bees store the honey in cells on frames. To get the honey, Jaime uses a hot knife to remove the wax caps on the cells, while Robyn (left) and Nikie offer a hand.

Any cells that are still intact after the hot knife get scratched by Deidre, wielding the funky yellow fork.

Then the frames go into the extractor, a stainless steel drum that is cranked by hand. Centrifugal force pulls the honey out of the open cells. It collects at the bottom of the extractor.

Cranking the extractor provides a great upper body workout!

Honey (with bits of wax) pour out the bottom of the extractor into a filtering bucket.

Once the honey has had a chance to settle through two filters, it’s time to bottle!

From IvanaMarzipan:

It’s not a bad movie (well, ok, it is that, too). It was my weekend.

We inspected our honeybee hives on Saturday morning and were startled to see that two of our newer hives had no brood in them. No baby bees means no queen bee is laying eggs. That’s bad. We called Jim Kloek at Nature’s Nectar, our bee expert. He said it was too late in the season to introduce new queens, and told us how to add the bees from the queenless hives to our other hives.

“But you have to make sure they haven’t swarmed,” he said.

I turned to Deidre, my partner in beekeeping and life, and shook my head.

“Nah, I don’t think they swarmed,” I said.

“Me neither,” she said. “They have plenty of room.”

Just 15 minutes later, Deidre was mowing the yard when she stopped abruptly in front of an apple tree and shouted for me. There was a swarm of honeybees clustered on a branch. We looked at each other. We were stupid. And lucky to have happened upon the swarm. But, now what do we do? Time to call Jim again.

Following his instructions, we got out an empty box and positioned it below the swarm. Then fully clad in my white coveralls beesuit, sweating profusely, I climbed the apple tree and layed out on the branch. I was very aware that if my neighbors didn’t already think I was strange, this would provide ample evidence. Then I vigorously shook the branch.

A good clump of bees fell right in the box and Deidre covered it. After letting the bees settle down, we took them to the beeyard. In a few days, we’ll see if there’s a queen in the box. Then, we’ll have to call Jim again to plot our next move. In the meantime, I’ve got to do some homework and see if I can figure out why the bees swarmed in the first place. I just love a good mystery, don’t you?

Just in case you’ve been wondering, the beekids are alright. In fact, they are very happy these days when the sun shines and they can head outside to forage for nectar and pollen. I thought they might like the clover in the yard, but they seem to prefer these poppy blooms far more.

As I stood watching, honeybees alit and disappeared to the bottom of the flower, then slowly worked their way back up. As many as four honeybees worked one flower at a time. If one headed back to the hive, another arrived, as if cued by a choreographer.

We have six active colonies in our little apiary now, and they are all busy. We overwintered one hive and split it in April to make two hives (we added a queen to the second colony). The brood chambers (kind of like a new bee nursery) are three boxes and we’ve added two shallower boxes for honey on top. We hope to get a good harvest from it.

In early April, we bought four “packages” from our bee supplier, Jim Kloek at Nature’s Nectar in Stillwater. They are all doing ok and we’ll probably add more room to each colony for their growing brood soon. We’ll let them keep most of the honey they make so they can get through the upcoming winter.

We check in on the hives every week or two to see how things are going for them. So far, so good.

The two apricot trees I planted in the yard last fall burst into bloom this past weekend, which pleased our bees. We successfully overwintered one hive and added four more about 10 days ago.

When colonies of honeybees come through the winter strong (and if you’ve been reading about problems such as Colony Collapse Disorder, you know some colonies didn’t make it at all), beekeepers can divide them — a sort of buy one, get one free deal with nature.

Normally, such a hive would have enough workers and brood (eggs and unhatched bees) to split in May. But when we pried the cover off our hive on Saturday, I knew we needed to take some action sooner that that. Talk about wall to wall bees! There was abundant honey, pollen and brood, but not much room for the queen to lay eggs.

Preparing bees for their new home

What to do? We called on Mike Mackiewicz, an experienced beekeeper in Scandia, near where we live, and asked his advice. He came over within an hour and we went through the hive together. As beginning beekeepers, it was great to get his observations and help. He pointed out a large number of drones (those are the dudes of the hive, who get to spend the summer hanging out and watching beeTV while the gals do all the work — at least they do until their mating services are needed). And then we saw a queen cell that looked like a small circus peanut. Then another. This hive was thinking seriously about “growing” a second queen so it could swarm –divide itself — and, soon.

The queen bee in her cage

We did some rearranging of boxes and frames to give the queen some room to lay, and slow down their urge to swarm. We’ll get a new queen and split the hive this coming weekend if they haven’t already done the deed themselves. It’s wonderful they are healthy and happy. But the experience was a good reminder that bees don’t read beekeeping calendars or how-to books. They know what they are doing. Now I just need to catch up.