The HaderBee Honey Company

27/10/2021

It’s never fun to lose a colony, but it comes with the territory. At least we have about 30 pounds of particularly delicious honey to show for their efforts. We’ll make a fresh start on that hive next spring.

18/04/2021

After a very tumultuous first year as beekeepers, we just took our first harvest from the surplus our bees didn't need to over-winter. Here are some pics of capping, spinning, straining, pouring, and labeling about 50lbs of honey. Talk about sweet rewards!!

18/04/2021

Here's a video from last October as we went into our first winter with the bees. Things were not looking good for Tressa (one or our two hives), as they had rejected and likely killed two queens we tried to introduce late in the season. With no hope of re-queening, we sent Tressa into the winter knowing they would not likely survive with no queen and no brood to replace the workers when they died. Much to our surprise and amazement, Tressa survived the winter and those bees from last October are STILL busy drawing comb, gathering pollen and nectar, making honey, and creating drone (male) bees because one or more worker bees is laying unfertilized eggs. Pretty bizarre! If any of them are still around in a few weeks when we get a new nucleus colony, we'll add them to that new colony.

Ardie, on the other hand, came through the winter in tip top shape, with a healthy queen who had already filled several frames with brood when we took our first peek inside the hive about a month ago. Ardie had a rough time in 2020 (didn't we all!?), having lost two queens. Local apiarist Ronnie Mason came through with a stellar queen late last summer, and she is gong strong!

Despite all of this, we managed to pull 16 medium frames and 5 deep frames of surplus honey off our two hives this Spring, and harvested ~ 50 lbs of honey!

05/07/2020

Here are three generations working the hives together.

05/07/2020

Beekeeping is not rocket science, but it does require some basic skills, like using a smoker to keep the bees calm. Smoke is thought to block alarm pheromones that could signal the bees to attack that big critter that is getting into their hive. It also causes the bees to gorge on honey and nectar in case there is a fire and evacuation is imminent. Either way, it helps keep the bees calm while you work the hive. Breathing on the bees also makes them move (they don't like human breath apparently).

05/07/2020

One of our major goals for this first season of beekeeping is to help our girls fill up two new hives (at least 30 frames) of drawn comb. New frames have foundation for building comb on, but no comb. The bees must first build or "draw out" the comb before they can use it for raising new bees or storing pollen, nector, and honey. A good way to make speed up the proces of building comb is to feed the bees syrup made with 1 part water to 1 part granulated syrup. Keeping the bees fed with syrup makes it so they can focus on building comb rather than finding necter. Each of our hives is consuming about 1 gallon per day of syrup while they are building out comb.

05/07/2020

Getting Ready…

A beginner beekeeper has much to do and many decisions to make to prepare the apiary for actually getting the bees. One of the big decisions is what sort of hive components, called “wooden ware,” you want to use. The most common hive is a Langstroth wooden hive (named for the man who pioneered sustainable beekeeping, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langstroth_hive). I was looking forward to the fun of making my own wooden Langstroth hive components when I stumbled upon Apimaye insulated beehives while surfing through the thousands of beekeeping video clips on YouTube. Winter losses are a major challenge for sustainable beekeeping, and the Apimaye hives help the colony survive the winter months by conserving heat and minimizing condensation and moisture in the hive during big hot/cold temperature swings in fall and spring (wet bees become icy dead bees in freezing temps). Apimaye hives certainly cost more than the cheapest wooden hive components, but are roughly the same cost as a better-quality hive, and have many great features you won’t find on wooden hives, like latches to connect hive components, divider boards, pollen traps, and integrated feeders. Cost is not a huge factor for me because I don’t plan on having more than 2-4 hives, and I really like the versatility and thoughtful design of the Apimaye hives, so that’s what I went with (see https://apimaye-usa.com/).

Apimaye hives are built to Langsroth specifications, so I still had the choice of using Langstroth wooden frames inside the hive itself. There is something compelling about the memory of the smell and feel of a wooden frame pulled from a busy hive that made me choose to assemble wood frames rather than use plastic. My bee crew and I enjoyed the project of building 50 “deep” frames to fit the larger hive body boxes that will be the nursury and kitchen of the colony, and 50 more “medium” frames for the more shallow “honey supers,” the smaller boxes that are the pantry of the colony where honey is stored.

For protection against stings, our first choice was to get full head-to-toe suits. After we got our bees and learned that they are mostly docile, Wendy and I got well-ventilated jackets with hoop-style veils, and they give plenty of protection on days when the bees are calm. We still have the full suits if we need to work when the bees will be grumpy (rainy days, for example), and the extra suits means we can have extra helpers.

The most excited part of all this is sharing the experience with my family. My sister sent us wonderful bee paraphernalia to fuel our enthusiasm, and our granddaughters are cheerful helpers. My mother and other siblings, and my in-laws too, take interest in our beekeeping and ask about it often. Even family members who have passed on are present in our beekeeping enterprise. I named our first two hives after my two grandmothers, both of whom died in the months just before I was born. I think about them and the legacy of industry and dedication to family that they left us whenever I go to work the hives.

In modern beekeeping, a Langstroth hive is any vertically modular beehive that has the key features of vertically hung frames, a bottom board with entrance for the bees, boxes containing frames for brood and honey (the lowest box for the queen to lay eggs, and boxes above where honey may be stored)....

05/07/2020

21/06/2020

Father's Day and Beekeeping

What is the connection? I became a beekeeper for three main reasons:

1 - My dad kept bees back in the late 70s in a field across the road from our home on Good Medicine Way on the south end of Bozeman, Montana. I loved going to inspect the hive with Dad, and helping him extract the honey. I didn't really know much about beekeeping, but I loved being with Dad, and the smells, sights, and sounds of the hive, and of course, the honey!

2 - In 2005ish, I was killing time waiting for one of my boys to finish a camp of some sort in the main lodge at the Eastern Nebraska 4-H Center near Louisville, and I picked up the book "First Lessons in Beekeeping" by C.P. Dadant. The subject matter and the great writing pulled up good memories and planted the idea in my brain that I could be a beekeeper like my dad. I must have told Wendy about it, and we added beekeeping to the list of things we wanted to do "someday" when my Air Force career was over and we were settled somewhere. I have since learned that C.P. Dadant was the second generation of a beekeeping family that largely pioneered and championed beekeeping in North America and continues to do so to this day, with the 6th and 7th generation still running the Dadant company (you can see their 150th anniversary video at https://youtu.be/qhns_NSCFzI). I think there is something about beekeeping that can tie one generation to the next.

3 - In 2017 I received my final Air Force assignment that would take me to 30 years of service and mandatory retirement, to the Pentagon in Washington DC, and we bought a lovely hilltop home in Stafford, Virginia. It was time to start thinking about doing some of the things on that list of things we would do "someday." For Christmas, 2018, Wendy signed me up for beekeeping classes with the Rappahannock Beekeeping Association and set up a budget so we could get started on our beekeeping adventure. I took the classes, and Wendy learned right along with me as I would come home and share all the amazing information I was absorbing from Kim's excellent instruction. Meanwhile, our oldest son, his sweetheart and our three granddaughters, moved here to Stafford, and we quickly saw the opportunity to tie the generations together through beekeeping.

So here we are (three generations of us) in our first season of keeping bees and loving the experience!

Happy Father's Day!

18/06/2020

17/06/2020

Wendy and I formed the HaderBee Honey Company today with our three granddaughters. We have two hives here in Stafford VA, and big plans for the future!

Our company goals include:
- learning about our amazing honeybees and how to help them thrive
- sharing our adventure and experiences with interested family and friends
- selling surplus honey to defray expenses and provide income for our
granddaughters

We will occasionally post photos and videos of our adventures, and interesting bee-related information for your entertainment and enjoyment.

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Thanks, and have a Bee-utiful day!