the baby beekeeper takes to the field

The Baby Beekeeper is about to give up her title, as we expect a new baby beekeeper next week.  If you need honey or beeswax, please contact us ASAP so we can get that out to you in a timely fashion – there is no maternity leave for the self employed, but we do intend to count all the baby’s fingers and toes before resuming shipping.  Thank you for your understanding!

Last week, to celebrate the last days of her reign, Baby Beekeeper took to the fields with Daddy for the first time, wearing a precious pink daisy printed bee suit her Grandma Sarah made for her 2nd birthday.  I could not believe that Daddy wanted to take her to work with him, as we were/are in the midst of potty training.  And in general, the attention span and patience of a 2 year old is famed, and for all the wrong reasons.  And bees sting.  And etc.

But Daddy is quite a guy.  And Baby Beekeeper is quite a gal.  And off they went, while I “baby mooned” with my mom, shopping for “antiques” (i.e. junk furniture for Baby Beekeeper’s new Big Girl Room), getting ahead of paperwork, stocking the freezer, setting up the nursery and doing all those last minute baby things massively pregnant women suddenly find imperative to accomplish.  Biology is a beautifully mysterious thing.  Hilarious texts from Daddy as the week wore on included: “being Mommy is hard.”  Thank you for providing a patch of calm before the storm, Honeydew.  Much appreciated.

Anyway, here are a few shots of Maggie Rose’s first day as a working gal.  She’s yet to be stung and can eat her weight in honey straight from the comb.

Arriving in the bee yard.

Helping Uncle T.

Very busy and important.

First lessons in hive tool-ery.

Is it lunch time yet?

She helped catch her first swarm, too.

We’re mighty proud of our girl.

2013.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

announcing: Chief Mountain Honey + Glacier County Honey

As y’all know, Honeydew is a 2nd generation beekeeper.  In the 1970s, Honeydew’s dad, Bob Fullerton, started what eventually became Chief Mountain Honey Co., and as a result Honeydew grew up keeping bees, packing honey, and making beeswax candles.  Eventually, Honeydew worked for Chief Mountain Honey and started Chief Mountain Pollination.  When Honeydew and I were married, we founded our own company, Glacier County Honey Co., and Bob carried on with Chief Mountain Honey.

This spring, Bob decided to retire from the retail aspect of Chief Mountain Honey — though never from beekeeping! — and he passed the Chief Mountain retail torch to us.  We are so proud to offer honey under the label that Honeydew grew up with, a label that has enjoyed a 30+ year relationship with the folks who flock to Glacier National Park in the summertime and the folks who live here year round, too.

Under the Chief Mountain Honey label, we offer 12oz honeybears, 1# squeeze skeps, 2.5# tubs, and 5# tubs.  All of these containers are available for purchase at www.glaciercountyhoney.com, along with our Glacier County Honey stix, 8oz, 1#, 3#, and 5# squeeze bottles, and 12# and 35# buckets.

Chief Mountain Honey is also available all over Glacier County and Glacier National Park.  Please look for our “new” label at Thronson’s in Babb; the Leaning Tree and Two Sisters near Babb; Johnson’s and Park Cafe in St. Mary; Faught’s, IGA, and Glacier Family Foods in Browning; Albertson’s in Cut Bank; Glacier Park Trading Post in East Glacier; and more!   A complete list of our retailers is available here.

Here’s to the next generation!

2013.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

2013 Supering

Beekeeping is like any other profession in that generally, everything happens at once.  This time of year, the phone rings off the hook with retail orders — we are lucky enough to be located next to not just a national park, but GLACIER National Park! — at the same time all of the flowers burst into full-hearted bloom and the bees start going gangbusters working said flowers.

Dandelions.  If you need a reason to leave them undisturbed in your yard, tell your neighbors how tasty the bees find them in late spring.  A very important food source for the girls!

Beekeeping is not like any other profession in this way: if we beekeepers are not quick enough to expand the size of our hives by adding what are called “supers” (the boxes that sit on top of the existing 2 boxes that make up the hive — they are called supers because they are for the storage of superfluous honey), our workers will say Sayonara and hit the trail.  There will be no meeting called for their union, or for upper management, to discuss the situation and its solutions.  They will simply round up their Queen and head for a roomier tree trunk to call home, i.e. they will swarm.

What this means for us: when Honeydew determines that the time is right for “supering” the hives, he doesn’t mean when the crew gets caught up on the candle pouring and the hive painting and the oil changing.  He means right then, and he intends to work until the work is done.  Beekeepers’ hours ain’t bankers’ hours.

So Honeydew and the crew spent the end of last week and half the weekend supering the hives.  And they look mighty purty now, all supered up, and so filled with promise.

May it be a good honey year.

2013.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

red pollen and other mysteries

Earlier in the spring, Honeydew brought a couple of hives over to Flathead County, mostly for my amusement purposes.  I love to watch the bees.

And Maggie loves to check on “her” bees.  She’s got a great bzzzzzzzzzzzzz noise, too.

While we were inspecting the gals on Sunday morning, we saw a worker hauling a huge load of bright red pollen.  Now, what in the world do y’all suppose that could be from?  It seems as though everything over here is currently in bloom, so it’s hard to say, but it sure makes for a pretty picture.

The bees bring pollen back to the hive, using pockets on the sides of their legs that Honeydew and I like to call their chaps.  The technical term is pollen basket.  According to Karl von Frisch, it takes a honeybee between 3 and 18 minutes to fill her basket.

On a related-only-in-the-craziness-of-my-mind-note, have y’all heard the new Pistol Annies song, Loved By A Workin’ Man?  This shot of Honeydew’s hands, endlessly abused in beekeeping, brings it to mind.  It’s a simple song that people who enjoy making fun of country music will probably have endless fun with, but it resonates with this country girl.

Other interesting observations from Sunday morning … they’re starting to make honey!

Uncapped:

Capped!

All of the equipment in this hive is brand new (some of our stuff is about 40 years old) and it’s been amazing to watch the bees create all that gorgeous wax comb – they start from scratch with new frames.

The queen lays her eggs in parts of the comb.  The workers store honey in some areas, and pollen in others.

See the pollen, stored in the comb?

The bees secrete flakes of beeswax from a special glands in their abdomens in order to form the hexagonal comb — hexagons being nature’s perfect, space saving shape, of course.  Researchers have estimated that bees have to fly about 150,000 miles — or about six times around the Earth! — to produce one little ole pound of beeswax.  In doing so, they’ll eat about eight times as much honey by mass.  What does that mean for beekeepers?  Roughly, for every 10 pounds of honey we harvest, we harvest about a pound of wax.

I never get tired of learning about bees.  Hope y’all feel the same way.

2013.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

snapshots of Memorial Day weekend near Babb

This is normally what happens in Montana — or at least near Babb — over Memorial Day weekend:

Columbia Falls, Montana: May 23, 2013

Happily, the snow blew itself out before the weekend began, and I snuck off to Babb for my last pre-Dos Ittles sojourn.  The weather was sublime.  I’ll try not to rub it in verbally, but I will share a few of my favorite shots of Maggie learning about summertime.

Putting in our first garden at the Warehome.  

The topsoil looks promising, we’ll see what the weather holds for us … but it’s easy to be optimistic this time of year.

Like the farmers we are, Honeydew and I bubble over with enthusiasm about the potential of this year’s honey crop this time of year, every year.  THIS is the YEAR, we say to each other!

And it could be, y’all.  Collectively, our bees look better than they ever have, thanks to endless hours of painstakingly detailed work by Honeydew and the crew.  Moisture levels are good so far.  We’ve had some heat.  You never know.  As my Pa Pa would say, “there ain’t never been a normal year yet,” as far as farming goes.  This year could be off the charts in a good way.  I think that sort of optimism is pretty essential to life in agriculture.  By August, we’ll probably be singing a tale of averages, or woe, but for now optimism feels mighty fine.

Hello, Many Glacier!

Glacier County’s nod to Ireland doesn’t last long, but its verdancy fills up all the green color receptors in my retinas in a most happy manner.

Walking the swamp road to go check on her bees.

Fearless.

Honeydew and I will not be able to give Maggie Rose everything, but space and freedom to run will not be a problem.  Sometimes I’m amazed by how far away from us she will go by herself.  And then I look in the mirror, and at Honeydew, and think, No, no, Miss Independence is no stranger to us.

Checking on the Home Bee Yard.  

Despite the abundance of dandelions — a favorite snack for bees this time of year — the girls were feeling feisty on this gorgeous Sunday morning, so Maggie and I kept more of a distance than we normally do.  I have this thing about wearing sandals whenever the weather allows in Montana, so I was foolishly walking mostly barefoot through a field filled with dandelions, and bees working those dandelions, so of course I got stung right in the arch of my foot.  Dumb.  Don’t do as I do.

Mighty Chief, keeping watch over Gretchen’s Mirror and its resident loons.

We heard the loons screaming at “every other living thing,” as Brother Dear puts it, many times over the course of the long weekend.  Honeydew sometimes call the loons bullies, but I love to hear their silvery call, the sound of the wilderness, which I’ve expounded on many times before.

Walking, talking.

We’re about 95% certain we saw a juvenile red headed pileated woodpecker on our walk.  Very cool, as neither of us thought the species inhabited our part of the world.  Maggie Rose has sharp eyes, like her daddy and her Nan.

There!

May you always be on the lookout for the new, Mags.

Hope y’all had a nice long weekend.  We worked during most of the weekend, and felt privileged to be able to do so.  Our hats, as always, are off to all those who’ve served and are serving, so that we may keep our bees and our baby on an international border in peace.  Thank you.

2013.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

shaking bees

As modern beekeepers with employees and mortgages to pay and babies and dogs to feed, we can’t just manage our bees to make a decent honey crop and call it good.  Under that scenario, we’d be writing this from debtors’ prison!  Instead, we seize opportunities that sometimes present themselves over the course of the year to make a few extra bucks.  In years that our hives are strong and healthy enough to handle what is called “shaking,” we shake extra bees from our colonies and sell them by the pound to other beekeepers who are trying to build up the strength of their own hives.

This is one of those years, and so Honeydew, Darling-Brother-in-Law, Keith, and Neil are as busy as, well … you get the idea … down in springy California, shaking bees for sale.  Here’s a few shots of the process that DBIL sent to keep me in the loop near Babb, Montana, where snows still blanket the ground and the wind was howling in a tortured fashion last night.

Neil, smoking bees.  Did you know that the reason smoke calms the bees is that the bees are gluttons?  When they smell the smoke and think that their hives are on fire, they don’t evacuate.  Instead, they stuff their bellies so full with honey that they become lethargic, as though they’d just eaten Thanksgiving dinner at Big Mama’s house, and they loll about on their smoky couches.  There’s your fun fact for the day.

When a beekeepers orders bees-by-the-pound, he or she generally provides his own “bulk bee boxes.”  We fill them with “shake bees” – this picture is the screened top of such a box.

Here’s a panoramic view of such bulk bee boxes.

It’s warm in California, and our colonies are strong and healthy enough to be hanging out in front of the entrances to their hives – we are feeling very grateful, as the current state of commercial beekeeping is not so rosy for many for our colleagues.

Honeydew and Keith, discussing the next course of action for shaking bees in a holding yard.

Honeydew.

I miss him.

Has any beekeeper ever looked more handsome in Wranglers and collared shirts?

Too much information, you say?  Or was that, “Steve Park” I heard instead?

Huh.

Good work, Honeydew and crew.  Shake-shake-shake!

2013.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All photo credits to Travis Looney.  All rights reserved.

 

a glimpse of spring in Northern California

For those of you who read this Honey Company’s blog for the love of beekeeping, and not babies, hospitals, and Glacier National Park, you’re in luck – Keith, our California Summer Help who morphed into a full time beekeeper with us, had a few moments to e-mail me a few shots of what the bees are up to right now.

A quick recap: we shipped the bees, via flat bed semis, to California in late October. They’ve been hanging out, munching on manzanita and nectar margaritas, ever since. Keith followed them in November to supervise their activities. Honeydew and Neil arrived in January to work through them all and determine which hives were strong enough to provide almond pollination services. The first week of February, most of the hives were moved into the almonds, just before their bloom.

In the last few days, that bloom has turned about a million acres north of Sacramento, California, the prettiest shade of pink, to an almond grower and to a beekeeper:

Isn’t it lovely?

Hi girls. Good work.

Around the first of March, Honeydew, Neil, Keith, and Darling Brother-in-Law, who is joining our crew as of today, will remove the bees from the almonds, and put them back into the fields of manzanita and nectar. Then, the processes of requeening, splitting, shaking, and the like will take place.

More on those later.

Welcome, Spring!

2013. Glacier County Honey Co. All Rights Reserved.

 

shippin’ season

In October, all around Glacier County, trains and semis roll.  They’re in the far north country to pick up boxcars filled with wheat, sugar beets, and hops; honeybees on pallets headed for their annual pre-pollination sojourn in California; and cows, destined for market via tractor trailer.

Our bees won’t go until later this month, and so over the weekend we found ourselves with a little extra time to help a neighboring rancher sort and ship cattle.

These particular neighbors are good friends of ours — in addition to allowing us a few bee yards on their land, they let us gather all of our bees together in one of their pastures and bring our semi in to load them! — and they’re moving next month, so it was a nostalgic morning, as they introduced us to the new managers of their spread and hellos and goodbyes were made.  The new managers, by the way, are delightful young parents, and Maggie Rose was thrilled to make a new friend in their young daughter.  Me, too!

Honeydew and Keith left in the icy pre-dawn, and when Maggie Rose and I arrived at the corrals a few hours later, the work of sorting cows and calves was nearly done, and the ranch bottom echoed with mournful bovine cries.

Cows have got the market cornered on their whining noise – boy, is it ever pathetic!  I grew up with a tiny herd of Simmental cattle, and my Pa Pa was a big cattleman, having an especial fondness for his “Holy Boys” — Holsteins — near the end of his life, and so the cattle’s bawling did not make me sad, but reminded me of childhood afternoons, watching my parents run our girls through the squeeze chute for ear tags and shots, and Pa Pa cheerily hauling a cattle trailer down the red dirt road, off to market, window rolled down, and his dog in the pickup bed, supervising it all.

It made me very happy to have Maggie Rose with us, and to think that while she might never be a cattlewoman, hearing cows make a ruckus on an October Sunday morning will surely remind her of her childhood.

We let her eat oversize marshmallows and fresh steaks for lunch.

Y’all already knew that we’re destined for the Parents of the Year Award.

Shippin’ season’s nearly done, and soon we’ll all have time for coffee and visitin’ … or I will, anyway, until the holiday retail season heats up.  Which I’m looking forward to!

2012.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

what is wrong with this picture?

Ah, what a beautiful sight, you may be thinking — healthy hives, sparkling on the snowy Rocky Mountain Front.

But look more closely.

A little right of center, do you see that hive missing a lid?

And above it, the hive missing its second story?

And to the far left of the picture, said missing second story?

When Keith went out to check this yard last week, it was clear to him that something was very wrong with this picture.  That something wrong?  A grizzly bear, on a last ditch effort to fatten up for winter, which is clearly en route.

We have about 50 bee yards — each holding about 32 hives — throughout the greater Glacier County area.  A lot of those yards are fenced to keep out grizzly bears, which are native to the prairies and seem to be making a comeback, trekking far from the shining mountains in their modern travels.  Defenders of Wildlife helps us pay for these expensive electric fences, in an effort to keep grizzly bears from becoming a problem for farmers and beekeepers, preserving the bears and our bees, too.  It’s a good partnership.

But our fences don’t work too well when a foot of dense snow falls on them, tangling their wires and knocking out the ground that keeps the electrical current flowing steadily enough to set an adult grizzly bear down on its rear end upon contact.

This picture is of a yard where the fence worked – see the griz tracks leading up to the fence?  But the bees were just fine!

The Griz that got into the yard in question last week damaged 10 of the 32 hives, completely destroying three-and-a-half of them.  A half, you ask?  Yes, Griz ate half of one hive, but when Keith arrived, he found the other half of the hive balled up in a shivering cluster, so he put their frames back into one of the hive bodies, added a lid, and wished them well.  Somehow, a week later, they’re doing just fine.  Bees are amazing.

Bears get into bee yards – it’s part of beekeeping in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.  But we sure hate it when bears get into bee yards filled with hives that Glacier County Honey Co. doesn’t actually own.  Remember Jackie?  Those are her hives, and we feel pretty rotten that ole Griz decided to pick on her girls and not ours.

On the other hand, Jackie’s got some pretty amazing claw marks in her frames now:

Wow:

Beekeepers do like their stories.

But this was one we could have done without telling.

Bee sweet, Griz.

2012.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

a virtual tour of extracting honey

Honeydew has been beekeepin’ all his life, but Glacier County Honey Co. is just over three years old, as we incorporated it together shortly before our marriage.  In the years since, each month has brought a few more folks dropping by World Headquarters.  If we’re extracting honey, and the visitors don’t resemble ax murderers, we always offer a tour, as we’ve found that most people are curious about how stuff works — we certainly are.

So, for all of you that haven’t yet dropped by World Headquarters, here’s a little virtual tour to tide you over until the 2nd Annual Fill Your Own Bucket Day  – Saturday, August 10, 2013 — when we would love for you to come by, tour the extracting plant, and taste the real thing!  After all, it’s hard for your taste buds to appreciate the freshest and best honey you’ve never tasted through a computer screen.

This is the Warm Room.  In the summertime, when Honeydew and Keith return at the end of the day, they unload all the honey supers — boxes filled with frames of honey — that they’ve harvested into the room, where it waits in the 90-100F heat — about the same temperature as the hive — to be extracted.  Each morning, and all day long, I come into the Warm Room with a hand truck and grab a stack of 7 honey supers that Neil and I will extract.

I bring them into the Extracting Room, and load the stack onto the Super Elevator, the machine pictured in the left portion of this photo.  As I empty each box of its frames, and move it aside, this machine keep the boxes coming up, so that my back hurts a little less at the end of each day.  Honey is heavy stuff!

The job that I do is referred to at Glacier County Honey Co. as “the Loader” position – I am the one who loads the frames onto the conveyor belt, and decides whether or not they need to go through the uncapping machine.  In addition, I do a little work with my hive tool to clean up the frames and boxes, so that they’re easier for Honeydew and Keith to work with, out in the field.

Above is a picture of a full honey super — you can see the tops of each of the 9 frames, and the fact that the bees have been extra industrious and built more honeycomb on top of the frames for even more honey storage!  Good work bees, but that extra comb will create a heck of a mess over time, and make the frames not fit very well in the boxes — so part of my job is to take my hive tool and scrape this extra wax/honey off of the frames and the insides of the boxes.

All clean!

Once the loader has the frames cleaned up, it’s time to make an important decision: does this particular frame of honey need to go through the uncapping machine?  The bees secrete flakes of beeswax from glands on their backs, and we’ve read that it takes about 850,000 flakes to make half of a pound.  Wow.  Anyway, the ladies take the wax and create the beautiful hexagonal comb.  They tilt each hexagon slightly upwards, so the honey doesn’t run out.  When they’ve got the comb filled with honey, they secrete more wax and “cap” the comb off.

Above is a mostly-capped frame of honey.

The uncapping machine is essentially a set of bicycle chains that take the top layer of wax cappings off of each frame that so that the honey can flow freely and be extracted into drums and bottles.  Here goes:

So, here’s the frame after it’s been through the uncapping machine:

You can see that all of the cappings have been removed, along with some the honeycomb, and that the frame is dripping with honey and wax.

However, the frames don’t need to go through the machine if they haven’t been capped and/or if the comb hasn’t been fully drawn yet by the bees.

Other times, there is so little capping on a frame that it makes more sense to uncap the frame by hand:

In this instance, the frame doesn’t need to go through the uncapping machine  and hand scratching — which protects the depth of the otherwise uncapped comb from the uncapping machine’s chains — is sufficient.  After I hand scratch these cappings, I’ll throw the frame over the top of the uncapping machine, where it will probably hit Neil, because I have very poor aim.

At any rate, whether the frames are thrown over the uncapping machine, or sent through the uncapping machine, the frames of honey travel down the conveyor belt, where they are greeted by Neil, who loads them into one of our two spinners — each holds about 120 frames of honey, loaded vertically.  When they’re filled with frames, Neil turns the spinners on, and they start spinning, gradually increasing in speed and literally whirling the honey out of the honeycomb.

Neil’s position is referred to around here as “the Extractor,” since he’s the guy loading the spinning extractors, but he’s also in charge of pretty much everything else in the Extracting Room, since the Loader’s job is to send as many frames through/over the uncapping machine as fast as possible.  While the Loader is loading, the Extractor is also keeping an eye on the equipment, tinkering with the pumps, cleaning out the wax spinner, moving full pallets of supers out into the storage bay, etc.

Neil, standing in between the 2 spinners, and behind the uncapping machine/conveyor belt.

When the spinners are done, it’s time to unload the empty frames, putting them back into the honey super boxes.  If it’s early in the season, we’ll put them right back out into the field for the bees to again fill with honey; if it’s late in the season, we’ll stack them on pallets and store them in Warehouse #1, until the next year.

Meanwhile, the honey and wax slurry has drained out of the spinners and into our stainless steel sump, where it is sucked up by a big pump and pushed into a flash heater installed on the wall.  Inside the heater are copper pipes — the kind you might use for a plumbing project — filled with heated vegetable oil.  The honey and wax tumble over the pipes and are warmed to about 100F.  We’re pretty picky about the settings on this heater — to sell raw honey, like we do, you need to keep temperatures as low as possible.  The bees keep their hives around 100F, so this temperature is acceptable.

Now that the honey and wax are again warm, and easy to work with, the heat exchange dumps them into the wax separator – Honeydew and I are not entirely certain how this piece of equipment works, but we can’t do what we do without it, and we love it dearly!

Somehow, as the honey and wax slurry is spinning in this machine, the wax, dirt, dead bees, and other detritus dumps out of the bottom, and the clean honey goes over a baffle and into another stainless steel sump, where it is then pumped into one of our 1,000 gallon tanks, to be barreled and shipped, or into the bottling machine, to be bottled for your enjoyment!

And that’s how the honey gets from the frame to your table.  Hope y’all enjoyed the tour!

2012.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.