Well, us humans have been busy with other things besides posting articles on the ways of the bees. This weekend it will already be time to spin out the season’s honey and you can easily reserve some by placing an order on our online shop. We look forward to bottling some for you!

Tonight though, I just want to sit down for a few minutes to give you a quick glimpse of a few of the things that have been happening this 2019 season.

A third bee yard

For the beekeeping operations, we added a third yard this year on “Nancy’s” property, basically diagonally opposite of us on the other side of Rochester. This is where the two sick hives came from last year (they didn’t survive the winter). There are actually 8 colonies from splits and new packages in that apiary currently.

Update on the Honey-House

In Iowa, my dad has been busy working on the honey-house addition to their place. It is quite the space! Very open, bright, and equipped with commercial sink and stove.

Recently the floor has been painted and sealed. I wonder what color they chose? 🙂

Now the honey supers have been moved into the space and we just need to setup the uncapping and extraction equipment!

A Solar Melter

We are blessed to be able to take the funds from honey sales and invest much of it back into the operation. This year we got two items, and one of them was a Lyson solar wax melter. Through the summer on sunny days, we can add wax cappings and frame scrapings into the device and it will melt and flow into a reservoir, leaving the residue and impurities behind. Pretty cool! The wax still needs to go through a finer filter like folded cheesecloth, but this does help condense it down. If time in the future, I’ll do a whole post on this.

Going digital with citizen science

Another item we invested in this year is “techie”, but something I have been considering for sometime. Going to the American Beekeeping Federation conference in January with Jana allowed me to look first hand at some different monitoring devices on the market. What I ended up purchasing this spring was two citizen-science Broodminder kits.

Inside each are two temperature/humidity sensors and a hive scale with an outdoor temperature sensor. The temp/humidity sensors go inside the hive between the brood boxes to record the brood temperature and humidity. The scale sits under the front part of the hive for recording the weight. Once an hour, these sensors take a reading and store the reading to internal memory. Later when I visit the bee yard with my phone, I have an app that downloads all the monitoring data from the sensors over bluetooth. Immediately, the app sends the data to the “cloud” where I can login and view the data graphs from anywhere, other people can see my hive data, and I can see theirs!

I learned some things through this process and have some ideas for next year. More on some of the interesting data and where this is headed in a separate post.

Making the splits

Last year I posted on doing end of July splits (5 total) as a management technique to help with overwintering and increase colonies without having to buy as many new packages. On the whole, that was successful. We had more colonies survive this past winter than in any past year. So this year I have been doing it again. I did some splits in the spring and then four more in July. That has us sitting at a whopping 24 colonies right now, including an insurance nuc with new queen that is starting to lay like gangbusters. Now come fall, not all of those 24 colonies will be queen-right or viable due to high mite counts or other illness, but this will give a larger starting number for going into winter, and God willing, maybe I won’t buy and new packages next spring. We’ll see.

But enough about our busyness! Next time I’ll tell you about what the bees have been up to 🙂 I hope your families have had opportunities to enjoy the beauty of the past summer months. Even this evening, it was great to take a break from things for an hour, start a fire in the patio fire pit, roast marshmallows with the kids and read them Dr. Doolittle while the sun set on the last bees bringing in their nectar from goldenrod and jewel-weed.