Building New Hive Supers

You would think a snowy winter would be a quiet time for beekeeping but it's a surprisingly busy time.

While my bees are keeping warm and eating stored honey, I'm getting ready for the next, relatively short honey producing season.

In Missouri, the season runs from May to July. Some high-producing hives may produce a second, much smaller honey crop in early fall.

One of my chores this winter is to make new supers with new frames. The supers will be added to the hive tops as extra honey storage room. Each hive needs to store around 70 lbs of honey to make it through winter. Once they get that much honey, anything extra is honey I can harvest without taking winter food away from the colony.

After glueing and nailing four super sides, I painted only the outside and started to fill them with brand new frames where bees will make wax comb and store honey. Only six more to go!

Charlotte

Custom Bee Pillow

Before I ever had honeybees, I found this charming unfinished vintage crewel embroidered pink clover and honeybee  sampler at an auction.

I have always loved pink clover, which has the three-lobed leaves and usually blooms from spring into summer.I try not to remove anything growing in my garden, even transplanting some that were getting trampled on during house repairs.

The sampler sat for years in my project basket until I had my first two bee hives. To celebrate, I decided to make a custom throw pillow out of it. I didn't change the sampler size, I just cut a complimentary green cotton fabric for a backing and stitched the two together inside out. Leaving a 4-inch opening, I turned it inside out, filled it with stuffing and hand-sewed the opening closed.

It now keeps my favorite chair company where I often sit to read books on, what else - honeybees!

Charlotte

Say "Beeswax"

One warm fall day I was taking garden pictures while feeding my honeybees sugar water. When I got back  to wipe off excess "bee juice" where my fingers smeared the camera, bees had beat me to it.

My honeybees are a mix of Minnesota Hygienic Italians and Carniolans, bred locally to be disease-resistant, easy to handle and high honey producers. Some have solid black lower bodies; others like these two have a striped lower section and an upper thorax that appears to be fur covered.

I left bees cleaning up the camera. It took them about half an hour to remove every remaining drop of sugar water.

Charlotte

How to Pack Hershey Hug Honeybees

By using broken toothpicks for antenna, you can easily serve Hershey Hug Honeybees as finger food. After taking these to several events, however, I would recommend, in addition to toothpicks, pack them in mini cupcake papers. Some people don't know to pick them up by toothpicks so mini-cupcake papers make it easier to move them to a serving plate.

If you are using Hershey Hug Honeybees as cupcake, cake and pie embellishments, break a toothpick in half and insert in the bottom of the chocolate-covered cherry. Leave half the toothpick exposed. Then you can easily add the Hershey Hug Honeybees by inserting bees on left-over toothpick pieces and they won't fly off!

Nice little bee gift for any occasion.

Charlotte

How to Make Hershey Hug Honeybees

I developed these for a garden club meeting. I was teaching basic beekeeping classes for them and thought a bee theme gift would be very appropriate.

To make: Remove papers from Hershey Hugs. Drain maraschino cherries on paper towels. Heat white chocolate in microwave covered dish in microwave until melted; 1.5-2 minutes on high. Every microwave heats differently so try it first in 30 second increments until you know how long it takes for your microwave.

Spread melted white chocolate on Hershey Hug bottom; add two almond slivers for wings. Allow to dry.

Stick maraschino cherry with a toothpick; dip in melted chocolate and place on wax paper. Place cookie sheet in refrigerator until cherries and chocolate are firm or wait 10-15 minutes for the chocolate to dry.

Spread more melted chocolate on Hershey Hug with almond slivers; attach flat side of chocolate-covered maraschino cherry to the flat end of Hershey Hug. Allow to dry.

Break toothpicks into 3 pieces; stick two through top for antenna. Toothpicks also work well as holders to pick up bees as finger food. Add two dots of black icing for eyes. You can also use melted dark chocolate dots for eyes.  Allow to dry.  Store in sealed container until serving.

People seem to love them, they tell me they are so cute, they don't want to eat them!

Charlotte

Hershey Hug Honeybee Ingredients

One of my gardening friends asked if she could make Hershey Hug Honeybees out of all white chocolate. The Hershey part won't have stripes so I think the delectable treat will look more like a bug than a honeybee.

You can use plain white bark or special white chocolate bark like Ghirardelli chocolate. When shopping for Hershey Hug Honeybee ingredients, try to keep all the parts relatively proportional to each other.

When looking for maraschino cherries without stems, select a jar with cherries about the same size as the bottom of a Hershey Hug. I have found maraschino cherry sizes vary so I now the bottom of cherry jars to get cherries about an inch wide.

Also make sure the sliced almond slivers are a healthy size for honeybee wings. I went through several almond sliver bags before finding the larger size.

Most people don't use toothpicks in their kitchen staples anymore so pick up a box of flat wood toothpicks you can easy cut into one thirds each. You can easily pick these up by the antenna but I also like to give them their own mini-cupcake papers.

Don't forget a little tube of black decorator icing for eyes.

Charlotte

Hershey Hug Honeybees

We were asked to bring "something special" to an evening gardening meeting welcoming neighboring gardeners. It was the kind of event that required something more than cookies but less than a cake or pie.

I thought about making cupcakes with flowers on top but I didn't have all the ingredients. I had brought a bag of Hershey Hug kisses home by mistake so I pulled those out and started to unwrap them.

They are similar to Hershey Kisses, which I use to make chocolate mice, only Hershey Hugs are white chocolate with brown stripes.

The chocolate stripes reminded me of my honeybees so I started to play with the Hershey Hugs and melted white chocolate to see what I could make out of them. Reminded me of when I go shopping for custom wedding ring quilt fabric, sometimes the fabric dictates the pattern.

Adorable, don't you think?

Charlotte

Merry Christmas!

During winter 2011, I wrapped my honeybee hives with insulated styrofoam to help keep the hives warm.

Bees winter over by grouping themselves in the hive center keeping the hive at their favorite 90F temperature. Some colonies die when temperatures get so cold they can't move their wings to get to the surrounding honey stored towards the outside edges of the hive.

The styrofoam isn't pretty. The day before Christmas,  two junkers came by and offered to haul off the" two white refrigerators" they saw sitting in my garden. After they left, I quickly made honeybee stockings for each hive just in case Santa Claus might pass them by.

From all of us at, and in, Mildred hive,

May you have a warm and sweet Christmas.

Charlotte

Making Bees Wax

Older bees make the wax that houses new bees and honey.
Bees eat about 8 pounds of honey to produce 1 pound of beeswax.
Settlers brought honeybees with them to the new colonies in 1622 as an inexpensive sweetener, to make candles and to use beeswax as insulation between log cabin cracks.

Uninvited Winter Tenant

Gertrude hive was host to a mouse over winter. The mouse nest covered 5 of the 10 frames and discouraged bees from using the hive entrance. It's another reason beekeepers put entrance reducers on hives in fall, it's an attempt to discourage mice and other small creatures from moving but there's no guarantee.

Refrigerators?

There's usually an ongoing debate about whether or not to winterize bee hives. During winter 2011, I added a styrofoam coat to my hives, leaving an opening around the hive entrances. Right before Christmas, two pickers with a truck stopped by and asked if I needed the "refrigerators" hauled off.

It wasn't until they left that I realized they were talking about my hives!

Honey for Sale at Route 66 Antiques

When I ended up with extra honey in 2011, I decided to sell it at a new antique and pre-1970s collectibles store off Interstate 44. I packaged the honey in 2 oz. glass jars so people could sample strained raw honey and honey with comb just as it comes out of the hive. Honey is also a wonderful hydrating facial. Each jar contains enough honey for 6-8 facials.

Bee Bopping Birthday Card

Friends in my master gardener group gave me this charming card for my birthday. See the three-dimensional bee at the top of the card?

Love it!

Charlotte

Hanging Bee Bar

When temperatures broke records in 2011, leaving bees without pollen, they started to visit hummingbird feeders for sugar water.

I turned several hanging bird baths into "bee bars" by adding gravel and sugar water, 4 parts water to one part sugar.

Charlotte

New Queen Added

Once I determined I was missing a bee queen in Gertrude hive, it was time to add a new one.

The queen travels in a plastic container with a worker bee and a marshmallow stopper at one end.

Once placed inside the hive, it will take worked bees a couple of days to eat through the marshmallow to release the queen. By then, they should be familiar with her smell and open to accepting her into the colony.

Long live the queen!

Charlotte

Bumblebee on Ajuga

Ajuga, or Johnny Jump Up, is another favorite perennial spring flower.

Missouri bumblebees  establish ground nests and like Ajuga because the flowers grow low to the ground.

Bumblebees can repeatedly sting but only do so if their hives are threatened. They are also partial to yellow and blue flowers.

Charlotte

Packing Pollen

Honeybees live to collect pollen, which is the basis of bee bread, which feeds young bees, and honey.

Bees pick up pollen on back leg hairs, which when full gives them the look of saddle bags. Depending on what flowers they've visiting, their "packed pollen" will be different colors.

Charlotte

Gertrude Hive

One of the most frequent questions people ask me when I'm talking bees is how do I know which hive is which.

Frankly, I cheat.

My bee hives have initials painted on the back side - G for Gertrude, M for Mildred - so I can keep track of the colonies.

It also helps bees find home when they return to their hive.

Charlotte

Bees Need Water Sources

Besides pollen, bees also need a source of water.

I have several birdbaths around my property bees regularly visit. I added rocks and twigs to give them a safe landing spot.

They also seem to prefer water with flavor, such as leaves and other garden debris.

Charlotte

Be Back by Sun Down!

Bees have schedules. They are usually out foraging by 9 am and back to the hive by sun down.

Bees from the same hive visit about 225,000 flowers per day. One single bee usually visits between 50-1,000 flowers a day, flying an average of 13-15 miles per hour.

A hive entrance can look very much like an airport take off and landing strip!

Charlotte