First Hive Inspection

Saturday marked 10 days from the arrival of the bees, so it was time to check in and see how they were settling into their new abode. (Special Thanks to Jason who agreed to serve as my photographer so that I didn't have to juggle bees and the camera to document this momentous occasion!)

Feeling like the Michelin Man

SUITING UP

While it is perfectly safe to work around the hive without any protective gear, when it comes to actually opening up the hive body and working on the frames, safety is important, so that means suiting up with the full suit and veil. Honey bees are very gentle, but it is important to remember that you probably wouldn't like it very much either if someone essentially ripped the roof off of your house while you were taking care of your babies either! 

8 frame Super with Plastic Frame

SUPER! 

Once suited up, it is time to gather up all of the necessary equipment. Obviously you want to make sure that you have everything ready to go. Since we're hoping that the bees have pretty much managed to get the hive up and running there is a possibility that they'll already be ready to expand into a new super. I'm using 8 frame medium supers which means that the box itself holds 8 frames or foundations on which the bees will build their comb. Traditional beekeeping used 10 frame deep supers, but those can be pretty heavy to move once they are completely filled, so many home bee keepers are now using the smaller and more manageable 8's. The only downside is that you need more supers. A normal hive will usually need about two 10 frame supers or three 8 frame supers. Today's task is to see how far they've come at building out comb on the frames. If they're working all of the frames, then it is time to give them more space to keep them happy! In my hive I'm using plastic frames in the hive body section of the hive. These are single piece units and you can probably see that they are stamped in what looks to be a honeycomb pattern. The frames are then coated in beeswax so that the bees will more readily accept them. The stamped pattern helps the bees by basically laying out the "road map" for how they should set up the comb. They will build perfectly aligned combs even if there was nothing stamped, but this speeds up the process for the. Think of it as laying the foundation for their buildings. 

Where there's smoke:

Lighting the Smoker Fuel

The other critical piece of equipment is going to be the smoker. Applying small and gentle amounts of smoke to the bees helps to disrupt their alarm / defense responses and keeps them calm during the hive inspection. In this case I'm using "smoker fuel" which is essentially compressed lint from industrial fabric manufacturing. It doesn't really hold an open flame but instead smolders in the smoker can and produces a gentle cool smoke. I've also filled up the large entrance feeder which is the yellow and black thing in the bottom left of the photo. It's full of a 1:1 mix of sugar and water and is what sustains the bees while they are setting up shop. We'll be swapping out the smaller one that we used for the last week. The bees go through a TON of the feed, so having a larger feeder will mean we aren't filling it up multiple times each day!

MORE AFTER THE JUMP!

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Reach for the Sky

Time for a quick veggie garden update. I managed to finally get the rest of the greens planted on Sunday... a week or two behind schedule but they should be fine. At the top of the picture you can see the early romaine lettuce is just about ready for harvesting. Jason will be happy! In the open spaces we'll soon have spinach, swiss chard, radicchio, and more lettuce. tucked into the straw at the top of the bed is the summer and winter squash and cucumbers as well as the okra and sun flowers. To the left all of the cole crops are still very happy and growing away!  The drip irrigation is on during this photo so you can see how well the set up is working.

The Greens Bed... circa 5/20 

Many of the early plantings are well on their way and so I spent most of the morning fashioning their supports for the season:

Tomatoes with stakes and arms in place.

I'm re-using my "Ultomato" stake system from the past few years... I do have to say that it has held up pretty well. The only complaint that I have is that I wanted to swap out the 5' stakes that it comes with with 6' stakes since half of the tomatoes I planted are indeterminate and when I went to do that I discovered that all of the new stakes available are a smaller diameter and the old arms were too big to grab them snugly. After several futile searches at various retailers I just solved the problem by wrapping each of the stakes with duck tape in the area that the arm needed to connect. Not the most ellegant solution, but working for now anyway. Hopefully by next year we'll have relocated the garden to the back, and at that point I'll devise a bit more permanent and re-useable trellis or support system . We'll see!

This is a shot of the egg plant and pepper bed... neither of which need staking just yet, but for some reason I do finally seem to have a few peas trying to make it up. They should have already been up and harvested by now, but they just weren't cooperating earlier in the season. I decided to just let the ones that came up keep going so I made some little tee-pees with some shorter stakes. Well have to see how that turns out. We may or may not ever actually get any peas... that still remains to be seen! Here's hoping!

And then my pièce de résistance (hopefully anyway!)... My bamboo bean trellis:

Bamboo Bean Trellis

In the past I've done single poles and used a round wire ring at the bottom and then strung twine from top to bottom. Since this bean patch is slightly larger and I'm doing three different types of climbing beans I decided to try something different. Instead of supporting 1 sq ft of climbers, each tee pee here will support 4 sq ft of beans. Then I connected the four at the bottoms on either side, the middle on either side, and the top. That gave me support for the twine to be strung up and down which ensures that the beans have plenty of surface area to work their way to the top. In the old set-up by the time the beans got to the top of the pole there the amount of surface area was so constricted that everything turned into a big jumbled mess. Even though there is still less room as they get to the top of this trellis, it still should give them a much better opportunity to space themselves out. I checked on progress today and the beans are all up and well on their way towards reaching up to the bottom rungs to start their ascents!

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