September 1st! It was a very productive week. Most of the honey is off the hives, and most of them had one or two mite treatments in August. I’ve had much greater success with hive strength and overwintering if we begin the major knockdown in August rather than September. If it waits until October, I […]
We continue to truck along with the 2018 honey harvest. The barrels are filling as the pressure mounts to stay on top of the parasite loads. As we were working in the extracting room yesterday, I spotted some pink “honey” in a frame we uncapped for the extractor. My first thought was that the bees […]
We made another voyage to Des Moines for the famed Iowa State Fair a few days ago. The Iowa Honey Producers Association had lots of folks to entertain while preparing honey lemonade for the masses 🙂 The second floor of the Agricultural Building brings bees and honey to the people every year. One of our […]
Off we go into the depths of harvest season! Now we’re getting a bit of rhythm and fatigue all mixed into the seasonal recipe. Here Andrew is making a run at some of the honey pallets with the jack. We spent a good thirty minutes moving around pallets this morning 🙂 Now we just have […]
We have some wonderful frames like this one that make every load of the extractor provide quite a lot of honey. Let them spin! Andrew woke up the other day and asked, “Hey Daddy, want to go extract for a little while?” Little did I know that he wanted to get his stool and run […]
We squeezed in the first load of honey pulling yesterday! There were some very heavy boxes on this load, so it will be fun seeing how many barrels we get filled up from this first effort. It is rainy and cold today, so we have a good afternoon to see if the extracting equipment is […]
Good news, there are quite a number of hives that gathered a few boxes of honey already. Harvest should start this week. Then we will know if the extracting equipment is really ready to run–at least it is cleaned up, plumbed together, and looking primed for action! Monday or Tuesday the first boxes should […]
I passed the recent week of rain in a fairly anxious state. The clovers were just starting to yield when several days of significant deluge and cool temps struck. Some hope remained with higher temps in the forecast with less rain. Our dreams seem to be coming true, if only we can hold the trend […]
Milkweed entertained me when I was several years old, in the usual toddleresque and destructive manner. It seemed fascinatingly odd that the firm little leaves oozed milky white fluid, so of course many of them were sacrificed for my entertainment. There seemed to be plenty of them around. A couple of decades later, it didn’t […]
The newly distributed bees in the last post reminded of some of our earlier adventures that did not get shared earlier this spring–or extended winter as it turned out. Generally images of bee transportation in an Iowan late March don’t have snow as the featured background. I guess they are still pretty in their way! […]