For the first time in Old Blue history, we will be selling honeybee colonies to the wider public this spring. If you’ve been considering getting one or more hives, now is the time to preorder your bees. Here’s our schedule and offerings: (April 1) 5-Frame Nuc with Anarchy Apiaries Queen or Overwintered Old Blue Queen […]
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I’m pleased and excited to announce an upcoming collaboration with Cocotte Restaurant, Seastar Bakery, Nectar Creek Mead, and Old Blue Raw Honey in the form of a honey-centric brunch on Sunday, April 19 in Portland, OR at Cocotte. Here’s the menu: 1st course Sweets: Honey drinking porridge, baked goodness, honey-roasted seasonal fruit 2nd course Toast: Honey-baked beans on […]
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I have about a million photos to share from our recent trip to check on bees in the almond orchards of Northern California, but before I do that, I wanted to pop in quickly with a few shots from a recent honeybee colony removal that Henry did here locally. I’ve written about bee removals a […]
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Henry and I extracted nearly 40 gallons of honey on Sunday. The early honey varietals that the bees produced are quite different from main season flows in many ways. First off, they taste different. As you can see in the photo above, early season honey contains a significant amount of pollen that we don’t filter out […]
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For the last four years, Henry has been adding to and selecting from his pool of honeybee genetics all originating from feral, Pacific Northwest-adapted colonies. In order to propagate those genetics as well as maintain and increase his hive numbers, he started grafting his own queens last year. Grafting queens takes a lot of time, […]
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American foulbrood is a bacterial disease that has plagued domestic and feral honeybees around the world for centuries. Infected larvae die off and then begin to rot in the capped cells, and the disease spreads quickly within the hive and then to surrounding hives. Many beekeepers preemptively treat their bees with antibiotics and other chemicals […]
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Henry’s bees are finally home again after more than two months in California. (More about preparing them for almond pollination here and here.) Henry’s beekeeper/truck driver friend hauled them back north on Sunday, and Henry unloaded them in a local holding yard. Overall, they look really really good. Henry spent most of the day on Monday and Tuesday working […]
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As if Henry wasn’t busy enough with horseshoeing and beekeeping, he also does habitat monitoring and restoration work locally as a contractor for the Marys River Watershed Council and United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). For the past month or so, he’s been spending a day or two a week counting butterflies, quantifying nectar […]
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Last Saturday, Henry and I scheduled a date. We dropped the kids off at his mom’s house, picked up a couple burritos, took a scenic drive out to Blodgett, and then crawled into an uncomfortably warm, insulation-filled side attic, and riled up a couple thousand honey bees. We really are so romantic. […]
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This is my husband Henry refueling our tractor (a rubber-tracked ASV skid steer) with off-highway diesel. He’s using a hand-crank fuel transfer pump inherited from his grandpa that once served it’s purpose on the family’s island property in Minnesota (circa 1940). Henry […]
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