As things warm up around here, Henry’s been starting to schedule 2013 honeybee extractions. (I’m using the term “honeybee extraction” in this post to mean the act of removing unwanted honeybees that are living on their own in people’s barns, garages, rotten trees, etc.) The next month and a half or so is the best [...]
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Honeybee’s comb is about the coolest stuff ever. It’s beautiful, functional, symmetrical, and it smells good to boot. Comb is also a wonderfully multipurpose substance. It provides structure for a hive, the right nooks and conditions for rearing brood, and storage space for pollen and of course, honey. Bees have four pairs of glands on their [...]
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Phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia) is native to southwest North America. It typically grows in alluvial fans or areas prone to flash flooding. When mature seed falls from the plant onto the surface of the soil, it remains dormant until seasonal flood waters cover the seed with moist soil. Once phacelia seeds break dormancy, the plants will [...]
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Around 5 PM last night, Henry and I were hanging out in the driveway talking when he suddenly stopped and started looking around. It didn’t take but a minute for him to locate small swarm of honeybees. I had been hearing a buzzing in my subconscious, too, but had ignored it because there’s always a lot [...]
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I was at home with kids about a week and a half ago when around 1:00 in the afternoon, I started hearing a loud buzzing. I’ve seen and heard enough honeybee swarms in my day (including this one) to know right off that I was hearing bees on the move. I ran up to the [...]
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Remember how I explained our honey extraction method a couple weeks ago? Well…forget all that. We’ve got a new system, and it’s way faster and easier. As far as I know, this method was “invented” by Henry’s stepmom, Joanne, after Henry dropped off some chunk honey at her house a while back. She’s a smart [...]
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We ran out of honey recently. I know. It’s bizarre. We have dozens of hives right outside, but we didn’t have one bit of honey in the house for a few days, and it was a real crisis. Henry did a pretty complicated bee removal last week involving several ladders, power tools, and boxes of [...]
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On Mother’s Day, we took a little family beekeeping excursion out to check on Henry’s hives that he had dropped off in the heart of the Willamette Valley about a week earlier. Seed farmer, Cody Younger (one of Henry’s friends from college who I wrote about last summer in this post), contracted Henry’s bees to [...]
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Henry went out early yesterday morning to catch a swarm of honeybees, and he came back looking like this. I took one look at him and almost died laughing. Apparently he got stung right in the middle of his upper lip, and [...]
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On Sunday, we went out on a little family beekeeping adventure. My long-time friend Kelly who lives in the heart of Oregon’s wine country contacted me months ago about the possibility of having Henry remove an established hive from the wall of a porch on the back of her home. Kelly’s young son has pretty [...]
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