Graduation

It’s the time of the year for students to graduate from one stage of their education to the next. We don’t have students of our own at home, unless you count the cats, but we graduated some 10,000 or so bees! Let me explain.

Since the car accident and head injury in 2016, my activities as a beekeeper had been limited to advising from far away and helping with the honey wrangling. I didn’t trust myself to: (1) not freak out; (2) be able to think calmly and carefully while surrounded by thousands of stinging insects; (3) be able to read a hive and intuit what needed to be done; and (4) not do something stupid, like drop a frame of bees, and piss them all off. It has taken me four years to feel confident enough to dig through a hive again. Yesterday I helped, and it wasn’t like cat help–my help actually made things go faster.

At one point we had bees in three separate apiaries. Over the years we’ve been consolidating, and now all of our hives are in one spot. This makes it a lot easier to keep track of everything and to know where all of the equipment is. Even so, over the past year or so we had let our attention lapse and become rather dismal beekeepers. At the end of calendar year 2019 we had lost all of our hives.

We became beekeepers again when a swarm moved themselves into the Purple hive, which was still set up because we were too lazy to dismantle it. So hey, free bees! That was pretty cool. And the same day, Alex got a swarm call, so we went from zero hives to two hives in the course of an afternoon. That swarm went into the Green hive. Within the next few weeks we got two more swarms, one of which went into the Rose hive and a tiny one that went into the nuc. A nuc is a small 5-frame box for little colonies; some beekeepers sell nucs as starter colonies. Our nuc happens to be painted the same color as the Rose hive.

Fast forward a month of strong nectar flow, and the established colonies (Purple, Pink, and Green) are all putting up lots of honey. Even the swarm in the little nuc was growing; they probably had a virgin queen that needed to get mated, so it would take about three weeks for the number of bees to begin increasing. Yesterday we went through the hives to check on things and provide space. We also took nine frames of honey, fully capped, out of Green. In the next couple of weeks there might be two more full boxes of honey that we can take. All told, there will be close to 100 pounds of honey for us to extract soon. And the early season honey that the bees make at this location is really good–light and buttery, slightly floral but not pungent. We call it popcorn honey because when it’s warm the hives smell like buttered popcorn.

You’ll notice that Green now has two brown boxes? Those are honey supers, boxes where we want the bees to put honey stores. Rose also has two more boxes, one blue and one brown. The blue box is also intended as a honey super. The little nuc, which has grown to about 10,000 bees now, has graduated into the Yellow hive. They now have lots of space to expand into. We left the empty pink nuc on top of Yellow, so any returning foragers can recognize that the home they left is still there and find their way into their new residence.

And yes, we name our hives by color. I don’t remember that it was something we planned, it just sort of happened. In addition to the four established hives, we also have equipment for Blue, Aqua, and Orange hives. In a perfect world we’d be able to keep each hive in one color of boxes in addition to the brown honey supers, but as time goes by we end up swapping boxes as needed and things get jumbled. The bees don’t care, after all.