The Art of Honey Collecting

   Hi everyone. I hope you've  having a nice weekend.  

   I'll also be joining Nicole for Sunday in the Art Room  and Gillena's for Sunday Smiles 

   The past week I had the first time experience of collecting honey from one of my bee hives.* I call it an experience because I learned a lot, and the biggest thing I learned was that I didn't really know much about collecting it. 😉 Grin.

   (*For those of you who haven't been reading my blog for awhile: I have 2 hives. The one that I started this year is keeping all its honey because basically this hive had to start from scratch this past May. The hive I'm collecting honey from is the one that is now just under 1 1/2 years old.)

   First I needed to get the honey super with the honey in it off of the hive. Our winters here in New Hampshire are too cold to leave  the third box on for the bees to enjoy the honey, even though they would probably love to have that honey to eat.  Because of the cold you really can't have more than 2 boxes on the hive during the winter. Bees need to be able to heat the inner hive by wiggling their bodies even on the coldest days, and the more space (3 boxes instead of 2), the more heat they need to make to keep the whole hive warm. 

   I'm also a little late getting the honey super off mainly because of my shoulder issue.  You can see the honey super in the photo below. Before I lifted the box, I took out the 2 empty frames on the bottom. I think this box weighed somewhere between 40-50 pounds (18- 23 kg), and being short with a rotator cuff issue meant I basically lifted and then let gravity help me bring it down onto the ground. The box was heavy, and I didn't want to injure my shoulder any more either.

     You might also remember that I left out a couple of frames last spring because the bees had already started to build honeycomb upward  when I went to put the super on. Isn't that a cool pattern they made? You can actually see the honey there too.

    It ended up not being a honey collecting issue though as you'll read further on in this post.

   And you can also see the honey on this one side of this frame. All the frames I left in the have  honey like this on both sides.

   There was no way I could carry this box very far, so I put the honey frames into a couple of garbage bags and then brought those  bags into my basement. It's cold enough in my basement and obviously not full of sugar loving insects so it was a good place to store the frames for a few days.

    I finally got my honey spinner  assembled so then I was ready to spin out the honey. (And please ignore the mess on the shelves of my laundry area. Eeek. Another day I did get them cleaned out now that I have some new basement shelves, but that was after my honey collecting adventure.)

    

    I now learned the most about collecting honey.  The biggest thing, and the most important when spinning it, is that you want the honey to be warm. OK, so I messed that one up having kept the honey frames in my nice cool basement. But I couldn't put them outside either, which I'll explain in the next paragraph. 

   The other thing I learned is that it would have been nice to do this in an area where I could have put a table. That is because you need to slice off the beeswax that is over the honey, so when you spin it the honey can come out.  I could have put a table outside, and I could have spun it outside, but then the smell would have attracted all kinds of 6 legged and potentially hungry visitors. 😩 This year spinning would be in the basement. With cold honey.  😰🍯

   Or I should say this year spinning would  collect hardly any of the cold honey. The honey was too viscous to come off the frames. It ended up being better to slice off the comb and  then put those slices into some large plastic food storage containers. Then, to warm up the honey, I put those food storage containers  on my kitchen counter near the sunny window. The warmth made the honey drip out of the comb. 

   I have 3 containers like this one. And it's a slow process. This could take up to 2 or 3 weeks for all the honey to drip out. Part of the slowness is that honey only  drips when it's warm, and at this time of year, other than for part of the day when my kitchen counter gets the light from the window, it isn't exactly hot. That's OK though since it's not like I must have the honey right this second. Besides, I'm also leaving later this week for an 11 day road trip, so I wouldn't even be home for it anyhow.

  I also have a few ideas  for keeping the honey warm too, but since I have yet to try them, I'll keep my ideas for another post.

   After that dripping finishes, I'll need to filter the honey before it is ready to use.  If I could have spun it out, I could have filtered it quicker and it probably would have needed less filtering.  I should also add, I did get some honey in the spinner, but that may end up being just a few spoonfuls.🥄

   This process left me with some still sticky hive frames. I could have washed them with soap and water right away, but I decided to give the residual honey back to the various bees. I took the frames and put them outside, leaning them up against a garden wall.

  And you can see the honey bees  and others really enjoyed the treat. ❤

  I'll have more of this adventure to share with you once the honey has dripped and I go to filter it.

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

   

  

    

    

   

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.