Final Flowers of Fall 2011

Final Flowers of Fall 2011, a photo by D.Broberg on Flickr.

Red Dahlia

Final Flowers of Fall 2011

Final Flowers of Fall 2011, a photo by D.Broberg on Flickr.

Pink Hollyhocks

Final Flowers of Fall 2011

Final Flowers of Fall 2011, a photo by D.Broberg on Flickr.

Yellow/Red Dahlia

A perfect fall day in the garden

A perfect fall day in the garden, a photo by D.Broberg on Flickr.

Fall Inspection 2011

HoneyBees, a photo by D.Broberg on Flickr.

A warm October day is ideal for a fall inspection. This image shows our new colony of Minnesota Hygienic bees. They are usually quite aggressive and today was no exception. They were crawling all over themselves on this frame, but we didn't see the queen.

They had a number of empty frames, so we ended up replacing them with five frames mostly filled with honey that we held back from our harvest. Their winter stores should be in good shape otherwise. We did see some brood and pollen, but not a lot.

The survivor colony was far more mellow today, not too bothered by our inspection. They had good stores with the top box almost 100% filled and capped with honey. Below had some honey along with the brood and pollen. We didn't need to add anything to that hive. Let's hope they survive another winter.

Honey Harvest 2011

We completed our honey harvest over the Labor-Day holiday weekend again this year. The weather cooperated and we received a moderate harvest from the two hives, one of which was a brand-new colony this year. The first video shows the decapping process where the wax caps are removed, exposing the raw honey for harvest.



The next video shows the raw honey coming from the centrifugal extractor and dropping into the straining bag that removes any leftover wax or bee parts. We use a rather large screen so that all the pollen passes through to the honey. Everything is done at room temperature. This year our total harvest was 81 pounds.

Vegetable Harvesting

Fresh yellow pear and sungold tomatoes

Fresh and canned roma tomatoes

Fresh peppers, green beans and romas

Inspection - August 20, 2011

Honey frame - August 20, 2011, a photo by D.Broberg on Flickr.

This frame is from super #2 on the new colony. That box is about 30-40% capped. Hope they can complete their work before Labor day when we come in and steal it all.

The 2-year-old colony has 2 full supers - all capped. We put an empty frame on a few weeks ago to give them more room, but they haven't got around to even pulling the comb yet. Looks like 2 will be their limit this year.

Inspection, July 23, 2011

Inspection, July 23, 2011, a photo by D.Broberg on Flickr.

Let the nectar flow! We have honey from the new colony. Over the past two weeks they have filled this super and have it about 40% capped.


We added another super to give them room for August nectar. Looks like it could be another bounty year for honey.

There are now five honey supers on our two colonies. If the nectar flow continues in August, we could end up with more than 200 lbs of honey this year!

4th of July Honey

4th of July Honey , a photo by D.Broberg on Flickr.

The "old habits" are now fully broken and the bees are content with the bottom entrances again. Based on our inspection this morning, it looks like we will have about 50 to 60 lbs of spring honey this year! We could harvest it now and it would be that wonderful light amber that won the Blue Ribbon at the Boulder County fair a few years ago, but we will wait and harvest it together with the late summer honey around Labor day.

There are now two supers of capped honey on our 2010 colony and they are going strong. We added a third super to the hive today to give them more room for the late summer honey.

The new 2011 colony seems to have a strong brood chamber, but hasn't made much progress in storing the honey up top. They will do good to fill one super this year.

Old Habits are Hard to Break

"Don't worry about the bees loosing their entrance, they'll figure it out." That's what I said last week when the bees were still clustering at the top of the hive where we blocked their top-entrance for the summer. Well, they figured it out all right. They pried the duct-tape up and went underneath it this week - a break-in.

So this weekend we added the first honey-super for them and installed the queen excluder. I also re-taped the top-entrance cover more securely. Later they are still clustering near the place of the original top entrance while the bottom entrance is wide-open! How long before these bees break their old habits?

The picture below was captured from our web-cam today as we were installing the honey-super. The "bee-cam" provides a fresh high-resolution image every 15 minutes and can be seen directly at this link anytime:
http://brobergs.us/Weather/weathercam.jpg

Teaching Old Bees New Tricks

Can old bees learn a new entrance procedure?



We covered the top entrance to the beehives yesterday. After the problems for the last two years with spotty honey stores and pollen inside the honey supers we decided that this top entrance would be limited to the winter season only. It was fairly cool yesterday and not many bees were out, so when we covered it, not too many were confused.

Today they all left from the bottom entrance (no reducer), but when they return they still seem to be lost and can't find their way back in. Notice the big pile near the black duct tape covering the upper entrance on the hive on the left. This hive is our survivor colony from last year. (They have never known anything but a top entrance.)

The new colony is in the hive on the right. They were installed one week ago and have an entrance reducer. The top entrance was open for the first week, but they seem to have adjusted quickly.

Installing the Bees

The video is in 3D. If you don't have 3D glasses you can view it in 2D by selecting the "3D" pop-up in the lower right corner and selecting "Other Options", then "View video with no 3D device". Once that preference is set, go back to the 3D button and select "Left Only" or "Right Only".

Snow on the Beehive 3/29/2011

January 29th Inspection

A warm end to January was an opportunity to open up the hive and do a brief inspection. We found a large colony was in good shape and still had plenty of honey stores in the upper box.

The lower box was quite light and mostly empty. We've saved a few full frames of honey from last fall that we are ready to give back to them if they seem to be running low, but they weren't ready for it just yet.



Just after this inspection the weather turned very cold and we had quite a cold spell with temps dropping to -20 overnight. Today the we were back in the 60s and they were once again out flying. We'll check again in late February or early March and see if they need the extra honey.

The Fable of the Bees (updated)

A hive of bees is in a field,
Within a climate sunny.
It will survive to multiply
If work supplies the honey.

The queen supplies a stream of eggs
Which soon turn into workers.
Except for one dependent class
Who live full-time as shirkers.

These are the drones, and every hive
Supplies them with a living.
They dance and sing and whoop it up,
Consuming, but not giving.

The drones spend days and nights enthralled
By pleasures of a season.
Convinced that life is far too short
To waste on prayer or reason.

They are supported by the queen,
The mistress of seduction.
She has a plan to make them wish
They’d labored in production.

But that comes later, this is now.
Each drone, content, relaxes.
So, worker bees work extra hard
And grumble at the taxes.

And so, drones while away their time
In games and food and squander.
That is her plan, because she knows
That drones are prone to wander.

The drones play on and on for weeks,
Oblivious to hunches
That there might come a time to pay,
For hives have no free lunches.

To serve the drones, some other bees
Supply a range of vices
That only queens can subsidize
So high are vices’ prices.

But where, you ask, does cunning queen
Accumulate the treasure
That celebrating hordes of drones
Can waste in weeks of pleasure?

The hive itself, without a plan,
Produces streams of honey.
The system runs on payments made
In liquid golden money.

The queen has passed a law of iron
That drones must gain a portion
Of honey gold, which they will spend,
Which workers think extortion.

So, in the hive two classes form
Which scheme like rival brothers
To profit from the hive’s output
Without the claims from others.

One class grows rich by selling goods
To drones, who live by spending.
The other class works day and night,
In labor never-ending.

The drones grow fat, and specialize
In ever-greater pleasures.
While worker bees begin to plan
A host of counter-measures.

The workers come before the queen
Ten thousand wings a-humming.
She says to bide their time instead;
Payday is surely coming.

They are not sure she speaks the truth,
But great is their devotion.
They give her time to prove her case,
Suppressing dark emotion.

The merchants of the drones grow rich.
For honey flows like water.
The hive’s economy hums on,
And drones foresee no slaughter.

The drones resent worker bees
Who grouse about the favors
Displayed to drones, who spend the wealth
Produced by others’ labors.

They set aside some honey sweet
To hire a solution.
A group of masters of the arts
Of specious elocution.

These hired experts write reports
That show that flowing honey
Can only be preserved intact
If drones are spending money.

They say that worker bees do not
Perceive what makes hives wealthy.
To stop the flow of funds to drones
Is fiscally unhealthy.

You see, they say, the flow of funds
Must without drones be severed.
Without our drones, the stimulus
Can’t save the banks, full-levered.

Without the banks, which serve the drones,
As well as worker legions,
The wealth of all will disappear
Into the nether regions.

So, we must save the hive without
The envy-driven blaming
Of useful drones who make us rich
By partying and gaming.

The worker bees do not perceive
How this concatenation
Of arguments implausible,
is valid explanation.

But these are experts with degrees
From famous institutions,
Which get their funding from the queen
And rich bees’ contributions.

Therefore, the worker bees begin
To doubt their own suspicions
That drones are liabilities
Not worthy of provisions.

The hired experts collect their pay
For having duped the masses.
Then chortle in contempt of those
Whom they regard as asses.

They take their graphs and charts and chalk
And go back to their places
Of tenured and secure success
With academic graces.

And so the drones indulge themselves,
Which they find stimulating.
For that’s what stimuli are for:
“Let’s not be hesitating!”

Whenever their accounts run low,
And bankers grow suspicious,
The queen expands the flow of funds,
Which bankers find delicious.

And so the lending class gets rich,
For drones have endless shop lists.
To lend to them is safe, they think,
The queen will never stop this.

The lending class then borrows short
To lend long-term to spenders,
Short rates are low, long rates are high:
The system has defenders.

The experts back on campus see
The many permutations.
They think that they may strike it rich:
Computerized equations!

And so the tenured quants come forth
To serve the lending classes.
Who borrow even more from fools
Who wear rose-colored glasses.

And so the permutations spread
Throughout the hive’s insiders
Complexity now reigns supreme,
With kooks the sole deriders.

And then, one summer’s day, the queen
Calls forth her close attendants.
She lays the eggs that will decide
The future of descendants.

Each egg is fed, at her expense,
To test the heirs’ survival.
One will emerge first and impose
A death sting on each rival.

Then up she flies, drones in pursuit
In hope of one last action.
A few achieve what all would like:
Their last full satisfaction.

“Payday has come,” the queen declares.
“Free lunches now have ended.”
The worker bees blockade the hive,
The golden fund defended.

The drones, now spent in every sense,
Beg for continued feeding,
But worker bees ignore their pleas:
The new hive needs no breeding.

Word spreads among the lending class:
The formulas so splendid
Have crashed the flow of funds outright:
Liquidity suspended.

And then the sellers who rode high
On drones’ relentless spending
Discover they must switch careers:
Their sector is descending.

The money that the drones had spent
Will now be spent by others.
The queen cuts taxes and declares:
“You now can have your druthers.”

The flow of funds continues on,
Though drones are not surviving.
The experts with their charts and graphs
Were wrong: the hive is thriving.

The lending class must now survey
The shape of new conditions
Without the hope of queen-backed funds
To guarantee ambitions.

The tenured experts, still employed,
Release a memorandum.
They all insist that these events
Were all black swans and random.

And so we see that scarcity
Asserts its jurisdiction.
There’s greater wealth for workers now,
Due to the drones’ eviction.

The worker bees survey the scene
Of greater wealth for labors.
There’s always more down at the store
When drones are not your neighbors.

One worker bee begins to think
About the drones’ defenders.
The tenured masters of the charts
Who justified the spenders.

“It seems to me,” declares the bee,
“That other drones are living
High on the hog, beyond the rules:
They’re taking without giving.”

Considering consumption by
Those bees in tenured splendor,
The other bees begin to doubt
Their claims to legal tender.

Why should these experts with their charts
And graphs and dense equations
Be paid by all to generate
Post-crisis explanations?

What is the use of expertise
When experts tell you little
Of what will happen next, and why?
They’re always noncommittal.

And so a wave of terror spreads
In tenured education.
To meet a market on your own:
A frightening innovation.

They live secure from having to
Explain their public errors.
Without the queen’s own guarantees,
The world is filled with terrors.

And so they send a delegate,
A master of compliance,
To once again persuade the queen
Against their self-reliance.

She welcomes him into her court,
And smiles at his submission.
She loves to see her experts squirm
When facing competition.

“My queen,” he says, “you must beware
Of worker bees’ complaining.
You still get value for your grant
Of pay for all our training.”

“We serve the court, and serve it well,
Delaying that dark day.
When worker bees at last decide
It’s time to disobey.”

“I see your point, and see it clear,”
She says to feckless minion.
“You serve me as the shapers of
The climate of opinion.”

“And so I’ll still extend your pay,
To guarantee the ridding
Of competition’s terrors,
But you all will do my bidding.”

“We’ve always understood the deal,”
Is his firm declaration.
“When it comes time to praise the court,
Expect no hesitation.”

And so the minion brings the news
For academe’s elation.
Between the market and the school:
A wall of separation.

So now I end my poem short
Of hival operations,
Of politics and pay and deals,
And queenly expectations.

But this one fact I hope prevails
From concepts you’ve now seen.
There’s always value rendered sure
For benefits from the queen.

Author: Dr. Gary North

Gary North received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Riverside in 1972. Gary is the author of over 42 books including "The War on Mel Gibson: The Media versus The Passion," "Unconditional Surrender," "Conspiracy: A Biblical View," and "Crossed Fingers: How Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church." Gary is one of the most insightful and thought-provoking historians and economists in modern times.

http://www.garynorth.com/

Upside-down Beehive!

It was harvest day and we went about our business of harvesting the two honey-supers we were hoping had been filled by our new colony. We were using our usual procedure that makes use of a leaf-blower to clear the bees from the frames as we move them to a closed container near the hive. As we were moving the frames from the edges toward the center, I noticed there was brood in the honey super! (This is bad, since we were using a queen excluder, designed to keep the queen out of the honey boxes.)

We had already blown a lot of bees off these frames and they were quite mad at this point. We stopped in our tracks and pondered what to do. If there was brood upstairs, it could only mean the queen was up there. There was a good chance we had already blown her off the frames.

We put the brood frames back into this box and proceeded to carefully blow off the rest of the edge frames that were capped honey for harvest. We went to the next super and only took the edge frames, leaving the brood frames in the center alone. We combined these two partial brood frames to place them back on the hive. But we wondered what was going on downstairs?

Had the original queen simply migrated to the upper boxes through the top entrance? Or had they requeened in the upper boxes? There was no immediate signs of queen cells, so we began to inspect the lower boxes to see what was going on below. We found more honey down there than was above, but we also found empty brood chambers with no sign of brood. We pulled a few more of the honey frames from below and replaced them with some of the partial honey/nectar cells from above.

After all this mess, the bees were quite mad since we were doing this inspection without any smoke and they were already agitated by our honey raid. I even got stung through my clothing! We put it all back together without the queen excluder and headed for safety.

The harvest turned out to be a total of 36 lbs, which is not really a bad year for a first-year colony (we've done worse.)


But the excitement wasn't over. We took the empty frames from our harvest and put them back into the hive to be "cleaned" by the bees. Need I say they were not at all glad to see us return? After that they formed a huge beard/ball on the front of the hive near the top entrance. We couldn't really tell what was going on and why they wouldn't go inside.

Normally as the sun goes down they will eventually all go back inside, but not that day. We went out to observer the entrance after the sun went down and they was still a very sizable ball on the outside. Was it a raiding party? Was the queen inside that ball? Maybe there was actually a second queen now and she was being attacked? We watched and saw a few bees circle and fly off to the south, but most stayed put.

By the next morning this group sitting on the porch was still there! I took the photo below at about 8AM the next day. This is most puzzling and we're not sure what happened here or what we might have done wrong.


Any speculation on the situation is welcome as comments.

Bright Green Bees!

I saw some of these collecting pollen from the Ecinaceas. It might be augochlorella species.

New "South Garden" update

The new garden is going full bloom. Here is an updated photo:

New "South Garden"

Not because it has any southern style, but because it is on the south side of the house. Anyway here is our new garden with the white picket fence, finally completed.

The next picture shows just before the fence was added.

Pathways and beds completed and ready to plant.


The fountain installed and the pathways started:


Starting to take shape: