Sometimes it is good to record the “counts”. I’m not so good at tracking hives, honey supers, mite counts, and other metrics month-to-month that can be helpful for beekeepers. So wanted publish the Our Bright Acres “numbers” for 2024. It was our biggest year-to-date in several respects. I’m including a number of “technical aspects” in this post that I’m not going to explain the details of, but feel free to ask if really interested.

• Production colonies: 13 (6 overwintered, 7 new packages)
• Splits: 1 (lower than usual)
• June nucs: 2 (my dad got these from Golden Ridge HF for his property)
• Swarm captures: 1
• Supers harvested: 48 (much more than usual)
• Total estimated lbs of honey: 1640 lbs
• Per honey super average: 34.2 lbs (lower than usual)
• Comb honey supers: 0 (maybe next year)
• Per hive average: 125 lbs
• Estimated capping honey: 215 lbs (not spun, but from uncapping tubs)
• Percent capping honey: 13.1%
• “Other” honey est: 385 lbs
• Estimated sellable: 1050 lbs

On some of these values, it’s easy to make a calculation mistake, so I caveat that in advance.

It was a great day and a long day that we spent on September 14th spinning out and bottling all the honey – phew! We had such great help again and we always want to give a big thank you to our sweet helpers. This year – my parents, Spearys, Knolls, Cullens, my brother and others.

For comparison with last year, in 2023 we spun out 1130 lbs, which is 510 lbs less on a similar number of hives. Now this is pretty understandable when we consider that 2023 was a drought year – very little rain until into August whereas we had above average rainfall this past spring.

In order to get through the roughly 460 honey frames of honey, we fully loaded our 15 frame extractor for most of the spins. Sometimes we’d need to respin with less frame like what looks like below because it was out of balance, but in general, it worked well. I noticed that we can’t get quite as much honey spun out of the frames as we used to several years ago when we were doing tangential arrangement spins because when I spot checked some boxes after spinning they would be around 19 lbs, verses it was common to see 17 lb empty boxes before. Now, that may not be just because of “radial” frame spinning, but it is likely due to build up of crystalized honey in some cells or in the bottom of cells because we store the frames “wet” for re-use the following year. So the 19 lb empty box average was then used this year for the honey amount calculations given earlier. Otherwise the total lb count would have been 100 lbs more.

While the per-hive average was up and the number of honey supers I removed was quite a bit more than last year, the per-super average of lbs of honey was less. I was providing them more supers than they could fill. And while it looked like they “finished out” the honey drying-down OK, they didn’t draw out the cells as thickly or pack in as much honey on the frames. But that is OK – lighter boxes are little easier to manage

We have been setting aside a certain amount of honey to sell in “bulk” (20 lbs or more) for each of the past years. This year is no different. We reserved several hundred lbs for bulk sales, but only 2 weeks later and the majority of that is already sold out. It goes fast folks! The majority of what we sell during the year though is what we bottle on honey day.

And in another month or so we should have a fresh batch of creamed honey available. The “creaming process” takes time and I’m using a little over 3 lbs of our own creamed honey from last year to seed the process as the mini-crystals permeates the honey in our garage over the next few weeks. Fall temps help with that.

• 4 colonies overwintered in our MN yards and 2 overwintered in Iowa at my folks
• 7 new packages were purchased (same as last year I think) with 2 being sponsored by our Douglas trail area friends.
• That makes 13 production colonies. Each year there are issues or interesting things encountered with one or more of the colonies. This hear was no different, but the weakest colonies still put away a super or more of honey. When I reference a “super”, that is a “medium” box with 6 1/4 inch frames – 9 or 10 frames to the box.
• In addition to the production colonies, I “pulled” a split and hived a swarm. My dad also purchased a couple of Russian honeybee nuc colonies from Golden Ridge Honey Farms that keeps a bee yard right next door to my folk’s property. So that is 4 more starter colonies to hopefully make it through the winter and make honey next year. Normally I’d be making a few more splits from overwintered colonies, but they didn’t look terribly strong at the beginning. That sure changed later though.

Capturing the swarm was serendipitous and fun. I happened to come out to the bee yard as the swarm was forming on branch in front of the hives. It was three-lobed at first.

Within a matter of minutes though it coalesced into one large lobe that weighed down the branch.

I enjoyed watching the waggle dances of the scouts on the surface of the cluster of bees.

But I didn’t let them decide on a new location. I hived them in a deep box and they took off as a new colony. That was May 23, and actually there would have been time for this colony to put away extra honey, but they didn’t seem to like the old queen. She seemed to stop laying brood and on Aug 4, Evan and I noticed a number of new queen cells in the colony. You can see 4 of them on the next photo where they extend to the left off the bottom of the frame.

August 4th is actually when we first started harvesting honey this year. Evan helped me haul the boxes to the car, but here he is with a frame of honey that the bees have started to cap.

It was a blessing this year to be able to take extra trips to the bee yards and harvest just one or two supers at a time from the hives. This was less of a shock to the bees and allowed them to concentrate their focus on the remaining supers. A month later (by Sept 5), we had finished taking 47 supers off the hives, including the 7 my dad harvested in Iowa. That is a record for us.

Many of the hives still had a honey super left on them that they were working on and which I will leave for them for winter consumption if they are strong enough to go into winter. On Sept 7, we checked the hives in Iowa and the one that my dad stuck an extra honey supper on surprised us by having packed out one of the supers with a lot of honey. You can see in the photos how much dripping honey is caked at the top of the box just under the plexiglass inner cover that my dad is holding.

Doing multiple rounds of harvesting and colony checks also allowed me to get some mite treatments in earlier. Some colonies were carrying a very heavy mite load, while others were doing very well with none to just a couple mites detected. In the following photo, you might be able to spot a mite crawling on one of the drone larvae/pupae.

The formic treatment strips do knock the mites back, but subsequent mite counts reveal they are much less effective in killing the mites that already inside capped cells with the larvae. So, we will see how they fair later in the fall. In the fall of 2023, I lost quite a few colonies that just absconded their hives, likely due to illness in the colony, and mites are large contributor to ill health going into winter. Especially concerning with mite load (30%) was the following hive that is one box short of tying a record for highest production for one of my hives. So that’s the fun part to help offset the mite load increasing with the bee population.

This hive stack was so big that there were laying workers in the honey supers above the queen excluder. The queen scent (pheromone) was so faint apparently, that the workers started laying drone eggs up there while the queen was still going to down in the two deeps at the bottom. Oh well. The honey looks nice an golden as it sits under its wax cappings that the bees expertly create and apply. They are truly amazing creatures that so efficiently do their thing across the varied landscapes as they scent for those nectaries the diverse flowers supply.

• The 2021 Honey Weekend is Sept 10-12. That is where we are warming the honey supers, uncapping the frames, spinning out the honey, filtering, and bottling.
• You can reserve honey now by placing an order from our “Shop” page: http://www.ourbrightacres.com/shop/
• Bulk honey is back! This can sell out fast, and we cannot ensure fulfillment of your order, however we will let you know if we have run out and give you other options.
  • We have dropped the minimum lbs to 20 for an order. This will easily fit in two 1-gal pails.
  • Ordering bulk early helps us better allocate fresh honey to bottling or pails
• No comb honey available.
  • We know some of you look forward to this, but I was not able to get equipment for this lined up in time.
  • We plan to have comb honey next year.
• Although quart and bulk honey orders are filled with 2021 season honey, it is not guaranteed that will be the case for other container types. If you want the latest spun out honey, you can mention your preference in the order notes.
  • Creamed honey is still available from 2020.
  • We will not have our next batch of creamed/whipped honey until October sometime.

We appreciate your business!

Pay attention to Facebook posts for other updates, drawing, and stats on the honey season!

To view or print the PDF version of this newsletter, click this line.

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.

With beekeeping, there is always a bit of a cycle – ups and downs, good years, and not-so-good years. If I compare this season to the last 3 years where we have been selling honey, it has been more of a down year. But Lord willing, it is not ending that way (more on that later). In the spring, we began with 6 overwintered colonies and 9 new package colonies. I’m including my folks’ colonies in those numbers since they are managed together. Several of the overwintered colonies were weak or lost their queen early on and I merged 4 into 2. One of those two was on my great, great aunt’s property and though we tried several times to help it out with an infusion of bees or brood, it did not remain queen right and could not be salvaged. However, it was an enjoyable time to have the hive on her property for the year or so it was there.

Hive of “Russian” honeybees back behind Arlene Wilson’s bird feeders.

97-year-old Arlene Wilson kept daily tabs on our Russian colony of bees. She is our children’s great-great-great aunt.

The other hive that we combined in the spring did well and became one of the two strongest colonies in Iowa, yielding 4 supers of honey.

Of the other two overwintered colonies that continued on their own, one in MN did great in May filling one and a half supers on a spring nectar flow and then it decided to swarm, leaving a small colony behind that remained weak for the rest of the season. But it looks like it has built up to normal strength in the fall. The other overwintered colony in Iowa was the aggressive one that killed the mouse during the winter. They ended up re-queening and possibly swarming. They are a gentler colony now, but only made one super of honey by the time we harvested.

Overwintered colony in MN that filled a super in May (early!)

Of the 9 nine package colonies, my dad’s was queen-less a few weeks later. We re-queened and it has continued OK, but the new queen was never a strong layer, and they produced less than a super of honey by the time we harvested in early August. However, it filled another whole super by the end of August, had a low mite count and generally looked nice going into fall.

Another colony also went queenless right away in the spring. We tried to re-queen, but she didn’t take. They developed laying workers that started producing a lot of drone brood. The colony had to be disassembled and the bees shook out in front of other hives on May 28. Three other colonies developed a brood sickness in June that left melting brown larvae and off-looking white larvae that would develop black spots and die. Had symptoms of European Foul Brood (EFB) and sacbrood. I decided not to spend more money on queens this year, so just monitored the colonies. One did not recover and the remaining very small cluster was shook out on July 7. The second did not recover either, though we allowed it to hang on longer before we found it either absconded or collapsed in early Sept. The 3rd sick hive did recover and ended up producing two supers of honey, which was a pleasant piece of good news.

Frame of sick brood: The pattern is not healthy. The capped cells are not uniform, There are partially uncapped cells, there is dead larvae, and dried out “banana-ed” larvae visible.

Practical lessons:

• Don’t wait too long to intervene in a sick colony. Their genetics may be too “poor” to recover well.
• Spending money on a new queen may be warranted. You can let them raise their own, but they would never produce honey for the season and its still a gamble keeping half the genetics.
• Raising your own queens is ideal, but its difficult to have any available early in the season.
• It may be detrimental to start package colonies on frames from old deadouts of previous season’s sick colonies.

The other 4 package colonies ended up doing well. One was in Iowa and we harvested 4 supers from it. The other 3 were on our MN property and they all fared well, producing between 2 and 4 honey supers a piece, plus a comb honey super. So that means we got honey from 9 of 15 potential spring colonies, each averaging less than 2.5 supers per colony, or roughly 85 lbs per colony. And at the time we harvested the honey, we had at most 10 intact colonies. However, the up side is that the 22 or 23 supers of honey we harvested is comparable to our 2016 season, tying for the second best year we’ve had – mostly due to running more colonies than in 2016.

So let’s compare with last year. In 2017, we also started out with 15 colonies. But not a one of them collapsed that year. Not until January of this year did winter losses set in. 12 of the 15 produced honey for a total of 31 supers, including a second harvest in September (6 supers). There are different ways to look at the numbers. Last year was a record year, but we had more production colonies and they only totaled two more supers than this year for the first harvest. Last year the basswood flow was minimal, but other nectar sources made up the difference. This year, we had a wet spring, and a slow start, the the summer flowering and basswood flow was really good. One of these years we will hit the “sweet spot” where we have strong colonies doing healthy spring build-up along with an awesome summer nectar flow.

A nice looking queen amidst her brood.

Summer Splits and Fall acquisitions

What about a 2nd harvest possibility this year? That’s not going to happen. Looking at the lower colony numbers and weak colonies that we have, I decided to sacrifice any fall harvest we might have gotten and instead focus the colony resources on producing more colonies. Remember, the colony is the “animal” we are dealing with here, not individual bees. How do you reproduce colonies? One way is to just cut them in half. We do this in the spring when we have strong over-wintered colonies (just didn’t happen this year). But another time to do it is in the summer – in the hope that the smaller colonies you produce will build up enough to have a fighting chance to make it through the winter. You take colonies out of production and divide the frames into separate hive stacks.

So on July 28, I started a procedure that I’d never done later in the season like this. I harvested the extra honey supers from the 3 colonies in our woods (leaving some honey for the bees) and proceeded to split each of the 3 colonies so that I ended up with 6 from the original 3. What you do is move the boxes containing the queen to a new location (several hundred yards on the other side of our property in our case) and leave the boxes without a queen in the old location. This means the foragers who are out flying will return to the hive without the queen. I did not introduce new queens at first as I wanted them to raise their own. It is considered late in the season to try something like that, but I like to experiment and that gives me a better feel on timing and scheduling for next year.

One of the split hives with the old queen that was moved to the center of our yard, in the middle of our weedy “pollinator quadrants” .

A week later, my dad and I did the same procedure on two of the hives in Iowa. In September I acquired the two hives of the widow we helped spin out the honey for. These hives had not been managed since early spring except for boxes being added. So it was a risk and adventure moving them onto our property in MN, and that experiment continues. I plan on doing a follow-up post that provides some details on how the splits and acquisitions fared before heading into winter. The upshot though, is that we now have 16 colonies running, which is more than what we started with in the spring. 9 of those is on our MN property, where I never ran more than 3 colonies prior to this year. Every time I walk out into the yard, I have bees following me around, begging for food or exploring some nook and cranny. It’s an interesting situation trying to provide them with sugar syrup for winter stores, as they will consume 30 lbs of sugar a day if I give it to them.

This is not a false-color image. You are looking at bees on the bottom board of a hive that have been dusted with powdered sugar during a mite check. Above those, foragers are flying into the hive, loaded with goldenrod pollen.

Not 20 feet from one of our hives, a colony of bald-faced hornets set up shop and created this large nest. They are part of the food chain here, but since they are such a nasty monarch caterpillar predator and a nuisance to anyone walking by, they had to be dealt with.

Every year it seems we try something a little different for warming the honey so that it flows better – out of the comb, out of the extractor, and through the filters. This year, we decided to put the honey in our back porch several days prior to extraction. Here are the 21 supers waiting to go, after doing a trial run with one of the supers. We have windows on 3 sides of the porch and if sun is shining, it can get downright hot in there.

And it worked pretty well, certainly better than the warming tents we have tried so far in the garage. The only thing that didn’t cooperate were the Canadian wildfires making the sunshine hazier than normal. But I kept some space heaters going in the porch, especially at night, and rotated the supers once – top to bottom. A couple days of 95+ degF temps in there made the honey flow pretty good.

An exciting this for us this year, was new honey spinning equipment for Our Bright Acres. I looked at a number of different extractors and uncappers, and for our budgeted price price point, I really liked a couple products from the Lega company (Italy). We worked through Blue Sky Bee Supply to purchase and ship these items. Here’s the extractor:

It’s actually a hand crank, 15 frame, radial. Below, you can see frames loaded in it from the top.

You might think that it would get old and tiring really fast, hand-cranking out 270 frames of honey. But not really – it is nicely geared and the basket spins easily. The tricky part, with any extractor is loading the frames so that they are somewhat balanced. Otherwise, imagine a washing machine that is severely out of balance when it spins out a heavy load of laundry. My dad, Clair Pecinovsky, quickly became an expert at loading and balancing the extractor. We also had it screwed down to a 3/4 inch thick piece of OSB with cinder blocks on top, which really helped to stabilize it.

A few more advantages: (1) it is quiet – no loud whining DC motor, so that we can enjoy the team’s company, (2) We have room to grow. We only did 10 frames at a time because that is all we had room for in a 5-gal pail with a deep filter. You can readily get 3.5 gallons of honey out of 10 nice frames. With a slightly different system, we’ll be able to add 5 more frames at a time. (3) The basket can spin 5 frames tangentially if needed. A radial placement of frames is like spokes on a wheel, while tangential would be perpendicular to that. Tangential is more efficient at getting the honey out of a frame, given an equal spin speed, so for tough frames or cooler honey that doesn’t flow as easy, this really came in handy. The downside is that you can only do 5 tangential frames at a time, you have to flip them over manually to spin out the opposing side of the frames, and the centrifugal force against the baskets outer walls can damage the comb a bit more.

The other major piece of new equipment was the Lega Roll, that used closely spaced (and opposing) cylinders of nylons “knives” to slice the honey cappings. This is instead of uncapping each frame with a hot knife as we have done all previous years. It’s kind of big deal. It means there is no “uncapping honey” and no honey going into the extractor that has touched a hot-knife and “burned out” any nutrients in those drops of honey. Here is a side view of the machine in action:

Place the frame on top of the rollers, then pull down on the handle and the frame is pushed through the rollers which slice through each row of honeycomb cells, so that the honey can now escape. The machine could stage 10 frames on its output arm, which was perfect for the number we were extracting per spin. In order to have the honey extract out smoother, we would often use the following simple, roller device – to pull open the cappings a bit more, especially in areas of the frame that were uneven.

It did not take a whole lot of extra time to run this around one the frame and then it immediately would go into the extractor.

Flowing out of the extractor, the honey would go through the first filter or filter set, just to get out the bigger chunks of wax. After each spin, the pail of honey would be moved to the bottling table. There, the top pail would be gated into the bottom pail with a finer filter at the top. For this type of process, filtering is fairly important because there is a lot more wax coming through with the honey when a hot knife is not used. Also, we are immediately bottling, rather than using a large settling tank to give time for the wax to float to the top.

We jar the honey out of the gate of the bottom pail.

From here, the jars were taken to the shelves, where they were organized and labeled (some of them).

Yeah, that’s a lot of honey Throughout this process, there was a critical step going on behind the scenes in the house. The filters would get clogged up with wax and would have to be cleaned with boiling water before being put back into circulation. Grandma Marilyn Pecinovsky handled that in stride – along with watching the kids, cooking our meal, taking pictures, and making sure everyone was well hydrated and taken care of!

Is there more? Oh, yes! Sometimes, we would come across a comb honey frame in a super – kind of surprise ‘easter egg’. These frames don’t have a stiff foundation, instead it is just a beeswax foundation and it does not go into the extractor. We had fun cutting out some different shapes of comb honey.

We had a lot of special help that we are very thankful for – Bob & Wendy Speary (and kids), Grace Barnhart, Moses & Brigitte, Roger and Shirley Schutz, Marilyn and Clair Pecinovsky. And the day was made more special with the addition of an extra spin-out session we did at the end for Nancy Salvo. She is recently widowed and her late husband had a couple hives on their property that were really doing well. My dad and I went out there in the afternoon while everyone else continued with the honey spinning to collect six honey supers that I arranged “bee escapes” for the day prior. We brought them back and were able to spin those out for Nancy as well.

What a great day! Praise God! Thanks to Moses and Mom for taking many of the photos in this post. Oh, and not to leave out the bees – there were lots of interactions with them surrounding this time as well. Cousins James and Grace came later in the week and we suited up to find the queen in a new colony split.

Yup, that’s a stinger in your glove, Grace. Time to close up the hive. Although we didn’t find the queen then, I eventually spotted her two days later.

From an old Jewish prayer, substituting ‘honey’ for bread.

“Blessed are You, LORD our God, King of the universe, Who brings forth [honey] from the earth.”

The Hogg Halfcomb system is a unique system that caught my eye. We purchased the box of halfcomb cassettes that is the top box shown in the picture below. I had just placed it on the top of the hive stack.

Here is a better top view right after placing it on the hive. There are 40 square, clear-plastic cassettes in the super. On one side of each cassette is a thin beeswax foundation for the bees to “draw” honeycomb upon. You can see the bees from the box below through the transparent cassettes. I’m hoping they will start exploring this box and making honeycomb in the July nectar flow.

It’s not easy to coax the bees to draw wax in these cassettes, so you have to put the box on when there is a lot of nectar available and you have to make sure their hive is crowded so that they don’t have much extra space to store nectar in a different box. But you don’t want it too crowded so that they leave their hive or swarm in search of a a new, larger home. I did this by removing regular honey supers of the hive so that the bees had to start spreading out in this comb honey super. We had decent success with this as they did create comb and store honey in the majority of the cassettes. Here is the super after taking it off the hive some weeks later.

What you end up with are amazing, unique creations in each cassette:

Sometimes, they build the come is a perfect way, all facing the same direction. Sometimes they anchor the comb to the bottom of the next cassette so that it hangs perpendicular to rest of the comb. They may cap the honey in certain patterns, sometimes leaving a few cells uncapped so you can see the fresh honey within. You can also see it from the sides of some cassettes. Except where I had to cut the comb off of an adjacent cassette, this is not “cut-comb” honey because I’m not cutting it off of a frame and placing the pieces in these cassettes. The comb is built right in the cassettes for you to admire

Besides having these on your shelf to look at, you might not be aware of how to enjoy this delicacy. After a little research, one common way this is enjoyed is on a hot biscuit or English muffin. Just spread it on while hot and the wax will melt and mix with the warm honey, infusing it with a rich aroma – an almost buttery experience. You need to eat it immediately, and it is perfectly safe to consume the wax. You actually won’t taste/feel the wax at all if you eat comb like this. But if you can always just eat a chunk of the honeycomb straight and spit out the wax later after giving it a good chew. Yum!!

You can order it from our website just like the rest of our products:

Untouched comb honey 8.5-10 oz

Untouched comb honey 7-8.5 oz

Because of the nature of this product and the extra expenses that go into it, it’s certainly going to cost more than extracted liquid honey. But for those of you who might be an experienced consumer or those who are up for trying out this novelty, we believe it will be worth it! Limited supply – these might go fast.

Watching bees on clover is nice, but also you feel a bit sorry for them as they flit quickly from blossom to blossom. It seems like most blossoms are already dry and it takes them a while to find one with the sweet nectar. At the end of May there was a nectar flow going in the area, and our overwintered colony here was strong enough to fill a whole honey super during that week and a half or so. That is a bit exciting because for comparison, we did not have any honey supers on hives in May in 2017 (was a cooler spring last year). I wonder how the bees fare when the lawn gets mowed, like it did yesterday? The 6 foot deck comes on them at a pretty good clip and I’m sure some of them are left spinning in its wake. We had our small group study here last night and one of the girls got stung, accidentally stepping on one of these.  There is a lot of bare foot activity in our yard, so I’m somewhat surprised it doesn’t happen more often.

This next photo is of the 6 linden trees along our driveway. They have been growing a bit each year, and now they are of a size that when they bloom, they could satisfy many thousands of bees in a short time.

Linden (basswood) buds getting ready to pop! When they do, it’s going to be a crazy free-for-all in these trees. Hopefully, the rain is kinder to us this year and doesn’t wash out the blossoms right away.

Next, I walk over to our wild-flower patches we started in our lawn two years ago. I’m afraid the weeks choke out most of the prairie plants, but it is still a nice colorful area anyway. The below series of four images are taken just moving my phone camera closer and closer to one of the daisy blooms…

This little insect is most likely an Augochlora Sweat Bee. They are nifty, being all metallic green/gold in color, but a bit smaller than the type of sweat bee I pictured last year with a vivid green thorax, but striped abdomen. And she has a little friend above just hanging there…

On the the far east side of our property are the raspberry vines. Jana worked to thin them out earlier in the spring, and the weeds took over. So we had to pull the weeds. Here is a before shot with Sadie, and then an after shot…

A lot of the old growth died on the top-most sections of their vines, but there are still a lot of raspberry canes. And the pollination activities have been intense. It is quite relaxing to come and watch the activity, the blooming, and the fruiting. Below is your classic moth – the antenna are feathery and like a comb. And those dark eyes against an orange head make it look a bit scary up close

And next we have what I thought was a butterfly because the antennae are slender and have small bulbs on the end. But alas, when I looked it up, it is still classified as moth – the Eight-Spotted Forrester.

I wondered if this guy might collect pollen pellets as well with those bright orange spots. But no, they are just markings. OK, not “just” – these creatures are incredibly ‘painted’. And look at that tongue! It snakes around between the antennae in this photo into the nectary between the stamen cluster and the outer leafage of the blossom.

And last, is one of the all-time best pollinators around – a large bumble bee. I enjoy watching the big bumbles as they dwarf the dozens of honey bees that are flying around them.

Hope you enjoyed my walk around the yard and the close-knit relationship God’s creatures have with the ever-changing flora. Time to cool off with a tall glass of lime-aide!

When I took the boxes off and exposed the bottom board, this is what we found:

We do try to help the bees out in the fall by putting hardware cloth over the hive entrances to help keep out the mice. But sometimes they chew around that or on box corners and edges. “Mouse picked the wrong hive to mess with”, was our comment here though. Bunch of dead bees behind it due to the normal winter attrition, but the single worker guarding the entrance reducer basically embodies the hive personality here: “Don’t mess with us.”  If I left the mouse there, the bees would deal with it as they would other large intruders that they cannot physically remove from the hive. They would collect resin from trees and eventually they would “propolize” it over with the resin-glue they make until the entire carcass was mummified and posed no more germ and unsanitary threat to the colony.

In other news, I found the overwintered colony on our Minnesota property to have a 3-winged queen. Now, bees normally have 4 wings, but the loss of any or all wings of the queen does not pose a problem for the colony since after the queen starts laying brood, she no longer needs to fly again unless the colony swarms. So, I’m hoping they don’t plan on doing that this year.

Checking out the bees who have consumed much of a pollen patty placed over the top-bars of this box some weeks earlier.

A frame of bees and bridge comb!

The spring flowers have been popping up and the bees are finding both pollen and nectar now. The first bloom of dandelions has also begun! So we have been celebrating Spring.

A nurse bee tends to eggs that the queen has recently laid. The eggs stand up in the bottom of the cells like tiny grains of rice.

Photo shows “bands” of resources organized across a frame of comb. From the upper left: nectar, pollen, brood, and capped brood.

Another frame of beautiful organization. The queen starts laying in the center of the frame which is to the left of this picture. so the capped brood is the oldest, followed by larvae in various stages, and finally the eggs on the right hand side in the fresh comb that is still being constructed. That means the cell wall s will be made higher as the eggs hatch and the larvae grow fatter.

Meanwhile, the honey house continues to make good progress, thanks to Clair meticulously working on it as he finds time:

Well, that’s the update for now. Happy upcoming Mother’s Day to all you Queen Bees out there!!