Tis the season

I've been pleasantly busy with the practice at my new space in Bodhicitta on Lower Queen Anne and haven't taken much time to write lately. Plus, the weather for bees and keeper alike has been ghastly!

I haven't been able to inspect my hives in quite the way I would like. Partially due to this is the result that both of my hives swarmed in one week with a second swarm from one of them a few days later! Through my research I have learned that spring and early summer are prime swarming times and that it probably wasn't so much my fault as just the nature of the bees themselves. Through swarming they are able to proliferate their population and spread the glory of bee-ness to the world. This is great in and of itself but is a bit of a pain for those of us who must find and retrieve said swarms.

When a beekeeper orders bees for the year, they usually come in a package of #3. Three pounds of bees. It struck a funny bone for me when I heard that. Three pounds of bees, it turns out, equals roughly 8,000-10,000 bees. These bees fit into a surprisingly small space. They come in a box with mesh sides that looks like a shoebox with mesh sides. If they come in the mail, which sometimes they do, I've heard that the post office will give you a call first thing in the morning saying, "Come pick up your package." in a gentle yet urgent voice. This also tickled my funny bone. My bee-arrival was not quite so dramatic.

My point here though is not their arrival but how quickly they multiply. After about two months I believe my bees had more than doubled their population. I tried to be proactive and give them an extra hive box at the right time. I also attempted to get through full inspections, making sure that everything looked ok and that the queen was laying well.

Then I started noticing queen cells. Lots of queen cells....



So I started to suspect something might be brewing.

But then this happened....



And then it happened again. The first two times they swarmed the swarms landed in a spot that was not too difficult to reach, though they did take some fancy ladder placements. Luckily for the first one, which happened while I was at work, Kirk had the help of a more experienced beekeeper to show him how it was done. For the next two we were on our own.

When bees swarm they usually look for a spot to go rest not too far from the old hive itself. The queen and about half the bees from the old hive pour out from the hive and find a branch or somethings like it usually 50-100ft away from the hive entrance. The bees cluster around the queen to keep her safe and warm. The cluster looks something like a basketball of bees. Once settled they will send out scout bees to find a new suitable home. The cluster will usually stay in place for anywhere from 3-4 hours to a couple of days. While in the cluster they are surprisingly docile and gentle. Their sole purpose at this point is to keep the queen safe and warm. They've just filled themselves up on honey and have nothing else to guard.

Thankfully catching a swarm is not that difficult of a process. Simply find the swarm, put on your protective gear if you feel you need it, climb precariously up into the tree (if it's in a tree...sometimes they chose nice low areas like under a picnic table or hanging off a hammock), take your medium sized cardboard box and hold it directly underneath the swarm, and give the branch a good solid tug. Wait a minute or so for the bees to settle again and give another tug. Repeat until most of the swarm is in the box. The goal of this is to safely get the queen into the box and to put her into a temporary hive. Once the queen is in the new hive whatever bees are left over on the branch or spot they've been clustered on or around will fly to the queen and happily make their new home where ever she is.

And so went our swarm retrievals. We passed the swarms off to a couple of new friends in the beekeeping community and now my thoughts turn to keeping the remaining bees healthy and happy. I went in to inspect one of the hives a couple of days ago and saw some amazing queen activity but I'll save that for my next post....

The Queen is in the House

I opened up the hives today. They're drinking down sugar water like it was going out of style. I'll be getting a couple of hive top feeders soon so that I don't have to disturb the hives every time they need food.

The difference between the two hives remains. West Hive is mellow and fairly easy to work with while the East Hive is a bit more of a challenge. I did try inspecting the West Hive without my gloves today and discovered what I imagined I would....it's much easier. I had gone into the East Hive with my gloves and, unfortunately as usual, squished a couple of girls and generally made them a little upset with me. I think that it's in part due to the fact that they've been drinking down sugar water from the frame feeder and then, once it's empty, they build comb inside it. So I have to extract the frame feeder, knock a whole bunch of bees out from inside it and scrape off any comb they've created inside before I can refill it. After all that knocking around the girls aren't too in the mood for a show and tell. But I think I've got it down now.

After checking the East Hive and feeling like a big oaf charging through their delicate work, I opened up the West Hive, as I said without my gloves, and it was a whole other experience. I was able to easily gently brush the girls out of my way, I got through inspecting all of the frames (which I hadn't before), and .... I saw the Queen!!! She was lovely and so big! So much bigger than I had expected. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to spot her but she was right there!

This was in the hive that I had to set back a little bit after scraping off the comb they drew out from the inside of the inner cover. They appeared to be doing pretty well. I think I'd like to see them a little further along but I'm sure they're on their way. The last frame had nothing on it yet and the next to last two were pretty sparse. Every other frame was looking pretty good though and I think that if I add the top feeder on instead of the frame feeder, I'll be able to feed them more, more often and not have to be so intrusive.

After finding the queen in the West Hive I desperately wanted to open up the East Hive again and have another go of it but my intuition tells me just to hold on. The weather looks like it won't let me into the hives again until at least next weekend. I'll have a friend in from out of town at that point though who I'm sure would love to take a peep inside. That will give the hive top feeders time to arrive!

In other exciting news...

I'll be moving my office this week to Lower Queen Anne at the Bodhicitta Healing Center. It's a wonderful and diverse group of practitioners and I'm looking forward to my opening week. My hours will be changing slightly. In-office days will be Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. I also now file claims with most large insurance companies. Visit my website at www.nectar-acupuncture.com for more information! Also check out the Bodhicitta Healing Center's website at www.bodhicittahealingcenter.com! Here's to my new hive!

Back to square one for the West Hive....

I call this one "Oooops!".

This is the inner cover of my West Hive. I opened it up today to do a recon mission. The plan, to open the hive, deftly send the girls down into the frames below, and easily scrape the rogue comb off the underside of the inner cover. Mostly, this was accomplished.

I got the smoker going well with the help of K, had my syrup ready to refill the frame feeder (which even though I don't like very much, I've decided to keep for now since using the other method of feeding I'm prepared for would mean leaving the extra box on top. The girls would probably just rebuild up above. So frame feeder it is.), and got down to business. It went surprisingly well. I gathered about maybe 3-5 lbs of comb from the lid and put it aside for inspection, sent the girls down into the frames where they should have been drawing out their comb, replenished their syrup, and closed up the hive.

I felt terrible dismantling all their hard work but they'll only be set back a bit. We'll see just how much of an impact this made in the fall when we extract honey. I'm hoping that the queen moved down into the frames and didn't get smooshed in the process, but I'll have to wait a week or so to find that out.

The good news is that even with the unusual circumstances, if I haven't killed her by accident, we have a healthy thriving queen. In the comb I collected there was a really good looking brood pattern I think. Eggs were all throughout the comb unless it was being used for nectar or propolis, they were evenly distributed and some larva had begun to form. So barring anything else setting this challenged hive back, I think they'll do great. I stuffed up their entrance reducer with a bit of grass to make the opening a bit smaller still so that they don't have to work so hard to defend the front lines. Now I just need some patience to wait for Sunday.

Interestingly, the East Hive, despite having a similar set up, has done nothing like their sisters to the west. They decided to go ahead and draw out their comb in the frames provided and, even though they also had an empty western on top of their deep with the inner and outer covers on top of that, they decided to head on down and make themselves at home. What a relief that was! I was absolutely expecting to open them up and see much the same thing. So instead, I did a quick check to make sure there were eggs, refilled their syrup and closed them on up.



Once again, big lesson about letting what is, be. It was just fun to be out working with the girls and seeing what we could do for them. Who knows what will happen with them, but there will be many other hives and plenty of chances to help them thrive. Patience with myself and with them will be one of the keys to really doing some good with them.

Lessons of a young beekeeper

Well, I'm officially a beekeeper now. And with that title come experiences and lessons. One of which I learned today. I'll start at the beginning.

Or at least, at the beginning of last week. The packages of bees, "the girls", arrived very late last Saturday night. Being in class all weekend and having company in town prevented me from retrieving them very early on Sunday morning so we went and picked them up Sunday night. Two packages. My first bees ever! I was nervous and excited and just thrilled to finally be holding the packages in my hands. They were clustered tightly together around their heart, the queen, to keep her warm and safe. Each box was an electric buzz of warm bee life but even at that point the two boxes seemed to have different personalities.

We brought them home and, after an appropriate amount of time gawking and K taking a few pictures for me to share with people, we put the bees to bed in my office, covering them with a sheet to make it dark and a bit warmer for them. We let them be for the night. I went to work the next morning, glad to be giving massage, but also excited and eager to get back to put the girls in their hives.

I finally got home, set everything up outside, got my hive tool, a spray bottle filled with sugar water as well as a matching feeder for each hive with sugar water in it, and got my trusty epi-pen in hand. I went and meditated for 15 minutes then donned my bee suit and veil and went outside where I had put the boxes.

Hiving the girls went pretty quickly and with little incident. I decided to leave the core boxes in the top part of the hive with an empty box over it, thinking that this would give the stragglers time to wander out on their own time. Then I took the core boxes out but left the empty deep on top with a syrup can upside down on top of the frames thinking this would give them another source of food. Good, right?

Note to self.....NEVER DO THAT AGAIN! This is my first real lesson as a beginning beekeeper. If I had left the core boxes outside of the hives, the remaining bees would have found their way to their own hive based on the pheremones being released by their sisters and the frame feeders would have been plenty for feeding as long as I replaced the syrup. As it was, I left the empty deep on the hive for 6 days, which was more than enough time for the girls to draw out their beautiful new bright white comb from the underside of the inner cover, instead of going down into the waiting frames.

Upon further inspection I noted that there were eggs in this lovely yet wrongly placed comb which means that the queen is indeed laying, which is good, but she's laying in comb that I'm going to have to scrape off. I hope that my girls aren't too upset with me. This will set them back a ways, but it should be okay.

This is a great lesson in lessons. To remember that sometimes, falling flat on your face, picking yourself up, and starting again is one of the best ways to learn. It's such a joyful thing to be working with the bees. What a great practice and great thing to learn; making mistakes can actually be enjoyable as long it's approached with curiosity and the desire to keep learning.

We'll see what happens when I try to fix it all tomorrow!

Welcome to Nectar Acupuncture's Blog!

In my blog I'll be discussing articles, studies or books I have just read and how they are impacting the world of acupuncture as well as practice at Nectar Acupuncture and life. I'll be writing about my thoughts on taking care of ourselves and how we fit in to the world around us or just sharing thoughts in general.

I hope you enjoy my posts. Feel free to share with friends if you'd like!