Charlotte's sweet beekeeping adventures at Bluebird Gardens
Honey dippers are designed to easily transfer honey without getting honey, well - over everything.
To use a honey dipper, dip the spiral end into honey and turn to coat. Move the dipper to where you want honey, then slowly twirl, allowing honey to drip.
Use honey dippers to drizzle honey over breads, fruit, salads, even tea.
Wash as you would a wooden spoon. Pat with a dish towel to fully dry; then allow to air dry.
Charlotte
Wild bees are as important to our garden and food diversity as European honeybees.
Recent research confirms wild bees are major contributors to pollination, and they are also dying in record numbers. Wild bees are pollinators that keep plants genetically-diverse while plants produce vegetables and fruits we enjoy eating.
Did you know wild bees pollinate tomatoes and peppers?
Butterflies are also part of the pollination cycle, moving pollen as they flit around flowers. Although they don't make honey, wild bees have a major part keeping our environment healthy, and delicious.
Charlotte
Bees also have natural predators, such as this red spider that spun her web next to one of my bee hives.
As bees flew in and out of the hive, they got caught in the web. The spider wove webbing around them until she could eat them.
I moved the spider once, only to find her back.
The second move was to the other side of the garden. Bees have enough of a challenge without becoming a spider's McBees right outside the hive.
Charlotte
If you've ever been tempted to keep bees, find your local beekeeping group and start to attend meetings.
You will meet a range of beekeepers from beginners to experienced, and get a sense for what it takes to successfully raise bees.
Members will also be sharing beekeeping adventures, which will also give you a forum to ask questions. I enjoy Mid-Missouri Beekeeping Association meetings because I can take my challenges to them and get a variety of possible answers.
It's also fun to spend a few hours with a group learning and enjoying bees.
Charlotte
Do you see what I first spotted after taking this picture?
Bottom right, at the front of the hive - a lizard. At first I thought oh no, another predator eating my bees!
After watching it for awhile, the lizard went back to its clean up patrol, eating dead bees along the front porch of the hive.
My bee mentor confirmed later that lizards play an important role around a hive, keeping the area clean.
Charlotte
One of the larger wild bees in my garden is the carpenter bee. The carpenter bee literally drills holes in wood to lay eggs and raise brood. About as big as a bumble bee with a smooth black back, these large, solitary bees flit from flower to flower with acrobatic grace, moving quickly, and sometimes dizzily, until they find a place to light.
This carpenter bee spies a nice grove of Missouri wildflowers Virginia Cowslip, or Bluebells. I'm guessing these lovely wildflowers would look like giant trees to a carpenter bee...
Do you see carpenter bees in your garden?
Charlotte
According to US Department of Agriculture, beekeepers loose about 30 percent of their hives during winter. Although there are a number of theories why honeybees are dying in record numbers - one out of every three fruit or vegetable we eat is courtesy of honeybee pollination - not having enough good pollen sources is sometimes mentioned as one of the factors. After getting my two honeybee hives settled in, I thought I would find a list of favorite honeybee plants and start adding them to my garden. It wasn't that easy.
Honey is very versatile. One of its best properties is attracting, and retaining moisture.
One of the best treats to give yourself after a hard day is a warm bath with 1/4 cup honey. I just pour it out of one of my little recycled jars with the gold tops.
Considering it took 12 bees a lifetime to make one teaspoon, honey really is very precious. Soak for 10-20 minutes.
Bring along a book - I'm currently reading "The Secret Life of Bees."
Charlotte
My friend Paul in Washington DC has a wacky sense of humor. When he led one of his recent emails with "don't look now but your honey has been laundered," I thought he was sending me a link to some weird news story about a beehive making it through a car wash. The link was to Food Safety New's early November 2011 findings that 3/4rths of imported honey sold in grocery stores doesn't qualify as honey. As I understand the issue, it boils down to having detectable pollen, which means the honey source can be identified. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration says any product that's been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn't honey.
If you're tempted to keep bees, order a few beekeeping catalogs to get familiar with terms, products and prices.
One of the best tips I can share is pick a company relatively close to your home. Beekeeping equipment is heavy and shipping prices can be daunting.
You can usually order catalogs online through major beekeeping companies like Dadant, Walter T. Kelly and Brushy Mountain.
Charlotte
My neighbor Rudy used to keep bees. He would periodically come by to retrieve them when a swarm would settle into one of my Chinese maple trees. He said they couldn't resist my garden, a mixture then of native Missouri wildflowers and garden center sale perennials.
Years later, when I put beekeeping on my bucket list, I thought about Rudy and how he would dress to get his bees - rubber boots, a stained white space suit, chicken wire veil. Those were his best tools.
My beekeeper's best friends include a veiled hat; good leather gloves; smoker; hive tongs and hive brush. I think Rudy would approve.
Charlotte
My assignment was to find one of my honeybee queens and (sigh) kill her. One of my two honeybee hives had been struggling. The verdict from more experienced beekeepers was that my queen bee - she's the only one in the hive of 40,000 plus honeybees that lays - is not laying her 1,200 eggs or so a day so she needs to be removed. Normally a queen bee will live 4-5 years, as opposed to a worker bee's 6 weeks of life producing 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.
There's nothing wrong with honey that has turned cloudy and become thick.
To return crystallized honey to liquid form, place honey container in hot water for 5-7 minutes. Be careful of how hot you get the water; it can destroy some of honey's natural antioxidants. Do not heat honey in the microwave because it alters the honey taste.
It only takes a few minutes for honey to turn back into its original liquid form so every couple of minutes pull it out of the water to see if it's liquified.
Charlotte
Want to help honeybees?
Stop using pesticides and plant a wildflower, or three. Purdue University researchers have found nicotine-based pesticides are contributing to 1/3 of honeybees - and wild bees - dying each year. Lack of habitat has also been a factor so plant a variety of native plants so bees will have something blooming all year.
Why?
Besides all the benefits of having honeybees in a garden, bees - both honeybees and wild bees - are also responsible for pollinating 2/3 of all of our food.
Eye-opening, isn't it?
Plant yellow and blue flowers, those are bees favorites!
Charlotte
This is burr comb, a glue like substance honeybees use to seal up bee hives. It's covered in fresh honey but I'll get to that in a minute. When I spotted this honeybee drone appearing to be broken in half in front of Gertrude, one of my two honeybee hives, I was worried.
In addition to being a great natural sweetener, honey has a multitude of benefits that many people don’t know about.
Manufacturers have used honey in everything from hand lotions and moisturizers to bar soaps and bubble baths. One reason they use honey is for its wholesome, all-natural image; more and more consumers are demanding cosmetics and personal care products made from natural ingredients.
Honey is a humectant, which means it attracts and retains moisture. This makes honey a natural fit in a variety of moisturizing products including cleansers, creams, shampoos and conditioners.
Look for honey in store-bought beauty products or simply add a squeeze of honey to your moisturizer, shampoo or soap at home. For some extra pampering, try whipping up a simple beauty recipe yourself. I will share some of my personal favorites!
Charlotte
Americans consume 1.5 pounds of honey per person annually. They don't guestimate how much bees eat a year.
There are more than 300 types of honey in the United States alone although I wonder how they count it because my bees have never made the same tasting-honey twice.
We all know a drop of honey in tea is good for a sore throat, but you can also add honey to most drinks for an extra energy boost.
How do you like to eat honey?
Charlotte
Honey is made by bees in one of the world’s most efficient facilities, the beehive. The 60,000 or so bees in a beehive may collectively travel as much as 55,000 miles and visit more than two million flowers to gather enough nectar to make just a pound of honey!
The color and flavor of honey differs depending on the bees’ nectar source, the blossoms. In fact, there are more than 300 unique kinds of honey in the United States, originating from such diverse floral sources as Clover, Eucalyptus and Orange Blossoms.
In general, lighter colored honeys are mild in flavor, while darker honeys are usually more robust in flavor.
Charlotte
When I started keeping honeybees in 2010, I had no intention of falling in love. Bees, I thought, would be fun to add to the garden to help plant pollination.
I now teach and lecture on beginning beekkeeping and started a bee club to help beekeepers share and learn from each other.
I’m also developing my own lines of honey and bee-related products, not to mention being hooked on my own homemade whipped honey.
Have you tried it yet?
Beekeeping Information & Tips
