Honey, Honey, Honey

    Hi everyone. I hope you're having a super weekend. So far mine has been busy and the weather has been almost September like  (warm without the humidity). ❤

   Today I'm joining Nicole for Sunday in the Art Room  and Gillena for Sunday Smiles . I have lots of bees in today's post so I hope this post doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies. 

  The other day I went out to do a bee hive check. Both hives are doing really well. Let me share a few photos with you.

    A) I'll start with my new hive, the one where the bees arrived this May:

    For some reason a lot of these ladies like to enter the hive by going under the top cover and under the outer edge of the inner screen cover as you can see in this first photo. There is a small gap there, which is there so bees can go in and out that way. In the 6 years I've had hives, I have never had any that used that opening as their normal way in and out though.   

    The screen  is the warm weather inner cover because it helps air flow through the hive to keep it from getting too hot. In the winter a solid inner cover gets put on.

   When the bees first arrived in May, I only had one box on the hive. But then the bees got busy with laying eggs, raising young and making honey. In order to give them enough room,  the last time I checked them I added a second box to the hive. 

    The bees now use the bottom box for their brood and the top box for making honey. This is the honey they will need for winter, so I will not take this honey. In fact, I won't take any honey from this hive this year.

    I have still been feeding them with a food patty (you can see the wrappers in the next photo), just because there is a lot of bees, and I want them to produce a good store of honey for the winter. Even with that, they seem to go through a patty in about 2 weeks. 

  Here's some of them actually using the front"normal" hive entrance.

   These next 2 photos are looking down into the hive. This is the top box, and you can see all the white comb they are building. This is what they will fill with honey and then cap.

    And what a crowd they have building that comb. 

  B) I'll move onto the old hive, or the one that came in 2025 and made it through the winter.  In this hive the ladies always go in and out through the main hive entrance.

   One thing I find interesting about this hive is how little they care whether I am there or not. Even when I open up the hive. The new hive is not that way at all. The new hive is very curious and a lot of bees come check me out.

   Earlier this year I added a smaller third box to this hive because the second box, where they store honey, was already quite full. This smaller box is called the honey super, and the honey that gets made there will be for me.

   You might remember the weird comb they formed. ( The post I explained about this is here: The Art of Bee Keeping.) Now that comb is pretty much full of honey, capped off and done. They are also building newer honey comb in the frames that are in this box which in the next few weeks should be filled up with honey too. 

    I decided I needed to have a few tastes of their labors, so I poked the comb with my finger a few times.  It was delicious.

   This is the first year I've ever had a honey supper filling up with honey. Now I need to learn about how to collect that honey. 🐝🐝🍯

  I'll finish my post with this funny that CJ sent along to me. I liked it so much I saved the photo.

Have a super rest of your Sunday and start to the new week.

Bumblebees and Second Looks

    Hi everyone. Happy July 2! Yesterday the crazy heat arrived to New Hampshire. 😧 I'm going to miss the beautiful weather we'd been having. 

    I have a few things to share on my post including stopping by Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog for Second on the Second. I also want to mention the last couple of days were busy, so I am once again going to apologize if I missed  any of your blog posts. 

   OK, I promise not to hyper focus on bees every post,😏,  but the other day David over at Travels with Birds made an important point in a comment on one of my recent honeybee posts. Since many of you enjoy a bit of bee info, I thought I would take a moment to share the general gist. (And then I won't keep going on about bees...well maybe I won't. )😉

    Honey bees do help with pollination, and they are important, however, sometimes people get so wrapped up  thinking honeybees can save our food supply that they forget about native bees. Native bees are the various species really in trouble. In fact, some of our foods cannot be pollinated by honey bees. Take tomatoes.

   OK, these are milkweed plants, not tomatoes, but you can see one native species of bumblebees.

    Honey bees evolved in Europe and Asia, and some foods, like tomatoes, that evolved in North or South America, evolved without the help of honey bees. Their flowers are not accessible to honeybees because the 2 species didn't evolve together and honeybees can't get to the pollen. The only ones that can do this are native pollinators. As native bees disappear, so might those foods they pollinate. Therefore it is important to  not to do big whole lawn sprays for insects ( all insects  breath the same way, so if you spray say for mosquitoes, it can effect bees) and to remember wild bees need habitat to live in.  I'm not trying to be the bee patrol, just passing on some information. 😁

  Today's main topic of my post is for Second on the Second  over at Altered Book Lovers Blog. I want to share some fabric art that I posted back in 2015 to go along with Halle's fabrictrim/sewing themed challenge this month at AJJ. . Here's my original post. More Quilting.

   I had a large piece of canvas that I painted, and then I did some stitching on it. Here's a few close ups.

    I'm still looking if I can find  any other photos for you to show the finished piece. It might be still folded up in a box under my sewing table because I know I never backed it, at least not yet. (Even though it's been a lot of years...too many actually.😒)

  I'll keep looking and add in a photo if I can find one.  

  With that in mind, I hope you have a super day!

Sunday Art -Mish Mash

    Hi everyone. I hope you're having  a great weekend. It's already the last weekend of June, which doesn't seem at all possible, does it?

   Thanks everyone for your bee questions and comments.  When I open the hives I do use a smokers, but I don’t suit up.  I do suit up when I put in a new batch of bees because then you get so many flying around all confused.  New bee packages contain 10,000-12,000 bees, and they all have to leave the package and get into the hive so there's a lot of bees in motion at once.

 

   But usually when I go into the hive I don’t get all that many that fly out. Most of them stay inside the hive doing their job and some of them are off looking for pollen and nectar. Those bees are so busy they just ignore you.  It’s just those few guard bees you have to be aware of. However, if you stay calm, you can usually just ignore them, or if they are really bugging me, I have a brush with soft bristles that I use to move bees inside the hive (when and if I need to move them), and I can also use that tool to brush the bees off of me. 

  And not to bore anyone with more bee photos or to give anyone the heebie jeebies, but the wild milkweed growing in my garden is now starting to flower and is attracting all kinds of bees, including my honeybees.

  And  for some reason (which I can't figure out), my new bees would rather enter the hive by going under the outer cover as you can see here

rather than going in and out the main hive entrance like the old hive does. Hmmmm.

   Today I am joining Nicole for her Sunday in the Art Room (SITAR) and also Gillena for her Sunday Smiles.  I'm going to start off this art part of my post with my final page for Matilde's Houses and Buildings challenge at Art Journal Journey. Matilde's challenge runs through this Tuesday.

    This page is part of a homemade journal that I used some music sheets in. Then I created this page on top of the sheet.

     I used a small piece of textured paper for the house itself, and I also used a TH die cut yellow house block to create the roof. There is some of the yellow pieces underneath the textured paper.  I outlined these with a Sharpie. Then I added a die cut butterfly on the roof. The window, flowers and snal are all punch out and/or fussy cut images from 49 and Market. The little white planting pot the flowers are in was a scrap on my table. It's actually from a Greek column die that I had used at some point. 

     The gentleman is also is TH die cut that's been sitting on my work table (the die has 3 of these men and I used the other 2 at some point). Then to finish my page  I used a TH quote rubber-stamp and added a few small flat yellow beads. 

   In this next photo you can see the whole page within the journal.

   And finally, a few views of all the milkweed and also the beehives. This is my wild garden area, and other than a tiny bit of fall and very early spring quick clean up, I don't do anything here. I just let nature take its own course, and occasionally someone gives me some plants and I might add them here because this area gets a lot of sun.

    That's all for today. Have a great rest of your weekend and start to the new week.

The Art of Bee Keeping

 Hi everyone. I hope everyone had a great past week. Other than the morning I spent waiting on hold to talk to someone from the IRS for far too long (the tax people for those of you who aren't familiar with American taxes) and then they cut me off and told me to call back (let's just say I wasn't happy at that point), it  was  a good week for me. Today I am joining Nicole for Friday Face Off  and also Gillena for Friday Lunch Break.

   I also want to apologize if I didn't get by your blog. My last 2 posts were scheduled, and the days got quite busy, so I'm behind. 😖 But today I should (hopefully) be able to watch up. 🤞

   The other morning I did a bee hive check, and I know some of you are interested in them, so if that's you, here's some insect faces for you today.

    Above, you can see how successful the new hive is doing. Not just those on the top, but if you look down between the wooden frames,  you can see all the bees that are there also. 

 The next photo is when I first took the top off the hive. Since these bees are new to the hive, they don't have a huge store of honey to eat, so I put in one of these sugar/pollen patties that you can see. It's about 12 inches/about 30.5 cm square, and usually takes the bees several months to go through. (They go through it quicker in the winter when there is nothing in bloom than they do when there's things in bloom.) However, with no honey store these bees emptied that package in just over 2 weeks.

  My other hive, which was new last spring and made it through the winter, is going crazy making those odd shaped combs from where I left out  3 frames.  You can see the honey glistening in many of the cavities. That honey will be covered as you can see in the bottom left of this next photo. It's the white bumpy part.

   Later in the summer I will remove this comb and take the honey, although with all the work they've done, it does seem kind of mean, doesn't it? 

    This crazy comb is in the smaller upper box.  The next box down is filled with honey that the bees get to keep, and then the bottom box is filled with eggs and brood. This hive probably has in the ball park of 75,000 bees in it.

   This older hives of bees are NOT very interested in me when I open up the hive.  I do use a smoker and smoke them (it covers up their alarm pheromones to keep them from attacking), but very very few of them check me out. They just go about their business.  The new hive however is much more curious about me when I open the hive.  They buzz around me checking me out. 

   However, I haven't been stung for a couple of  years. And when I have been stung, it's been my own fault doing something dumb. The only thing you must do when you open the hive is be totally calm and not rushed. You'd be surprised how relaxing it can be  to open a hive full of stinging and buzzing insects and just to focus on them. 😏

   Some of you probably don't even want to read this post. Grin. I get it. 

   Have a great Friday and start to your weekend. 

   

More Bees

  Hi everyone. Happy Thursday. This week we started off with some  beautiful low humidity weather, but now we are into the heat and oppressive humidity of summer. Oh boy. 

 I'll start today's post with another journal page for Matilde's Houses and Buildings challenge at Art Journal Journey.

   Here's a page I made in my Dina Wakely ledger journal. The writing in the background came in the journal.

   I inked the background with 2 shades of blue and also some yellow ink. Because this page is in the back end of this journal, it picked up some texture from previous pages which gave it an interesting look.

   I created the ground by adding some ticket printed tape, some flower printed tape, and then a thin tape layer of green in between them. Then I fussy cut the 2 birdhouses and the beehive out of some paper.

   I created the poles for the birdhouses from some strips of  scrap paper. I also added some plants and the bird using some punch out images from 49 and Market. I then used a Sam Poole/Creative Expressions stamp set. There's a small stamp that has a little bee cluster. I stamped that image several times around the beehive. Those bees are always busy out on the hunt for pollen.

   The tag at the top (which is not crooked but my journal is almost finished so the pages aren't laying flat) was cut out of a sheet of paper. I stamped the quote from the same Sam Poole set that the bees came from. 

   And speaking of bees, I haven't shared any photos from my two hives as of late. It's very exciting because my new hive is doing great (as you will see), and I can finally say, after 5 years, that I have a second hive going. 😏👍❤.  And as you'll also see, my older hive is making honey in the  super/extra honey box, so it looks like I'll get a good batch this year. 😏👍❤ I don't take honey from a first year hive because the bees have to start making honey and filling an empty hive, but older hives usually have a reserve. 

   First here's one side of one frame in the new hive. Look at all the capped (brown) brood there is.

     That means the queen is successfully laying eggs which are needed to sustain the population of the hive.  In this next photo if you look on the middle-left side of the hive  you can actually see the queen. She's definitely larger than all the other bees and has a black tip of her abdomen/tail. This is a different frame, and it is filling in with brood too.

   I have some funky honeycomb in my older hive. When I went to add the honey super box (the box where bees make extra honey and is the honey I can harvest) there was some honeycomb the bees were creating upward because the other frames were filled. With no space  left, I guess you just go up-kind of like land in a big city. I decided to let them continue their upward creation rather than removing that  comb because I was curious what would happen.  I took a couple of frames out of the super before I added it.

   The bees have continued building this comb, and when I went into the hive the other morning I could see some honey glistening in it. These next 2 photos show that funky honeycomb structure. The last 2 also show it but you can see some honey glistening in the comb if you look carefully.

That's all for me today. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and thanks for stopping by my blog. 

T Stands for Spring Finally Arrives

   Hi everyone. Happy new week to you. And hello to everyone who stops by Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog for T day.

  Last week we had some cool rainy days, and then, when the sun finally came out, spring arrived. ❤ We've had a few lovely days, with sunshine and beautiful temperatures. The last few days I've been busy working  outside, and here's a few highlights.

   Some of you might have seen my post last week when a bear came to visit. He ruined part of the pole where I hang my bird feeders. Luckily it's one of those poles that come in pieces, so I could go get another base part and not replace the whole thing. And luckily none of my feeders were damaged.

    Now my pole  is back together  and ready for some birds.

   Ha ha.  I didn't expect this guy to wander in from the woods and be the first to check it out. 😉

    I later noticed there were 2 lady turkeys down below my gardens on the edge of the woods that he was trying to woo.

   I also built another raised bed for my veggies. The bad thing is that the soil I found on sale was in 50 pound (22.6 kg) bags. They were also damp, so they maybe weighed 60 pounds (about 27 kg), which was quite a chore for me to lift them into and out of my wagon. (Never mind they are almost as tall as me if you hold them up straight.) The good news is a 50 pound bag versus a 40 pound bag meant I could fill the bed with fewer bags. I did get the bed filled and then I planted some tomatoes in it. (And thank goodness for Aleve to help with those sore shoulders and upper arms afterwards from moving the soil. Ha ha!)

   Last week I received a new batch of bees and got my second hive up and going. So far, so good. I went back into the hive a couple days later to check on the queen. She is shipped in a little box that has a cork on one end. She needs to get out of the box so she can start laying brood. However, you have to leave her in the box for a few days for the  hive to really bond to her. Sometimes the bees will even eat the cork out, but if not, a safety pin will easily pull it out.

  There were several frames with this many bees on them. The comb you see behind them is from an earlier set of bees. If you have frames with comb already built on the frame it is good to leave it  since bees can recycle the comb. Plus the comb helps insulate the hive on cooler spring nights (and days).

   The open queen box is put back into the hive so the queen and  her attendants have some time to get out. But here's the cork that I pulled out.

  It's also amazing (as you probably already know) how in just a  couple of weeks everything can green up so much. You can see the difference in my rose garden  between  this past Saturday (May 15) and not quite 2 weeks ago (May4). Here's the now:

     

    And here's the then.

  You might remember I mentioned I've been putting clover seeds into my less than perfect lawn. (Well, it depends on your point of view if a lawn is actually less than perfect.) The clover is growing great and filling in some of the bare spots. One thing I didn't do but seemed to happen naturally is that hundreds of white violet plants have grown there, and it's really pretty right now.

  And here's one of the patches of clover.

   The other exciting thing that happened during our outside spring chore weekend is my husband took the plastic off the screen porch.  To do that he literally takes down some old doors which he covered in plastic and replaced them with the screen doors that make up the screens.

   Then it's my turn to clean it and set it up!  I still haven't moved my inside plants out onto the screen porch, and I still need to move a couple of chairs out into the yard, but that will all be coming.  For T day, you might be able to spot my drink which was a mug of some home brewed ice tea.

   You can see it better in this close up.

     This Tuesday/T Day it is supposed to be quite hot, and my plan is to bring a fresh mug of iced tea and a book out here for some hammock time.  I'll spend the afternoon relaxing and staying cool. Ha ha.

  I hope you didn't find my outdoor "fun" too boring. Wishing everyone a happy T day, and a great week ahead.