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.

 

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.

 

on bee stings

Very few people actually have a true allergy to honeybee venom, where they experience anaphylaxis as a result of a sting, but “allergies” aside, no one likes getting stung by a bee, not even Honeydew, who can get stung literally hundreds of times per day when he is pulling honey or splitting colonies.

But bees don’t like to sting you, either. Unlike wasps, hornets, and other mean critters, a honeybee commits suicide when it stings you. It leaves its stinger behind, and its guts are ripped out as a result. Fare thee well, little bee. May there always be blooming alfalfa in Bee Heaven.

I’ve never gotten a picture of a honeybee actually stinging, and I understand that such an image is pretty rare. But blog reader and sweet friend Maie Hatcher sent me this award winning photo from the Sacramento Bee (how appropriate!) this week.

Pretty cool, huh? Here’s a link to the accompanying article.

Honeydew was actually truly allergic to bees as a kid – this is common in beekeepers’ families for various reasons — and traveled to Calgary for venom therapy. Obviously, today, he has no lingering issues, but we keep adult and kid sized epi pens in the Warehome, just in case someone else has a bad reaction. If there’s anything true about life — it’s full of surprises!

2012. Glacier County Honey Co. All Rights Reserved.

 

supering!

That’s a mighty pretty sight, my friends: a bee truck, loaded with the first honey supers of the season.

Although at first glance all the bee boxes in this picture look to be the same size, upon closer inspection you can see that the bottom two boxes of each hive are bigger than the boxes on top of them.

These bottom two boxes are where the bees live, all year, in Montana and in California and on the flatbed semis in between.  They are called brood chambers.  The queen lays her eggs in the frames of beeswax in the brood chambers, and the workers raise and care for the bee babies until they are ready to be workers.

The boxes on top of the brood chambers are only part of the hive this time of year, when the conditions are right for the bees to make honey.  These boxes, called honey supers, are slightly more shallow than the brood chambers.  Before adding the honey supers to the hive, we place a “queen separator,” a white plastic grate, on top of the brood chambers.  The spaces in the grate are large enough for the workers to pass through, but not large enough for the queen to do so.  This keeps the queen in the bottom of the hive, which is good for several reasons.

First, keeping the queen out of the honey supers means that when we pull full honey supers off the hives and add empty ones, we’re not taking the queen home with us.  She’s the lifeblood of the colony, and an expensive lady, and we don’t need to worry that we’ve accidentally sent her through the extracting equipment and left her workers behind to fend for themselves.

Second, keeping the queen out of the honey supers ensures that our honey stays as light in color as possible.  Laying eggs turns the honeycomb in the brood chambers dark brown, and we like white honey, as do so many of our customers.

So, the queen stays in the brood chambers and the worker bees pass freely back and forth, making honey in the supers, and we check in periodically, pulling full supers off and giving the bees empty honey supers to fill.

We have about 1,000 hives of bees, and another truck of hives arriving this weekend, so we have a lot of supering to do!  We hope we’ll be extracting honey from the full supers by July 15 … keep your fingers crossed that we get a little more heat and a little less wind … and that this is The Big Year!  You never know, and as farmers we have to have boundless optimism.  Which serves us well in many aspects of life.

Fingers crossed!

2012.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

feeding bees

We woke up to snow this morning.

Not uncommon in Glacier County, in June or anytime, but not exactly a happy event, either.  The maxim that “every drop of moisture will be a drop of honey” does eventually reach its saturation point, shall we say.

Cool, chilly weather will keep the bees in their hives, and while they’re lounging about on their beeswax sofas, watching The Bee Movie, they’ll be doing what most couch surfing Americans do: eating!  Eating honey!  And this time of year, their honey reserves are low.

So Honeydew and I spent most of yesterday preparing to do what we really hate to do: feed the bees.  It’s time consuming, it’s expensive, and the sugar syrup we give them will keep them alive but is not optimum nutrition, in our opinion.  But if the bees are going to live long enough to make honey — for them and for us — a little sugar syrup snack is a necessity at times like these.

Here’s how we feed them:

First, we pull the two 1 ton trucks fairly close together in the Warehome lot.  The Dodge is loaded with empty feeder buckets and a huge tank of fresh sugar syrup.  The Chevy is empty and waits to be loaded with filled feeder buckets and lids.

Maggie and Bingo, the newest dog around here, supervise.

The syrup tank has a fairly lengthy hose that Honeydew uses to fill the syrup buckets.  As he fills, I follow along behind with the lids and a rubber mallet that I use to pound the lids shut.

Luckily, Maggie finds my hammering and swinging the full buckets on to the Chevy, in stacks three buckets high, very amusing.

Every now and again, I get up on the truck and push the stacks to the far edge, packing as many as possible on.

Once we’ve got the feeder buckets on, we load the hive lids that the buckets will be inverted on.  There is a small, suctioned opening in the top of each bucket lid, and the effect is that the sugar syrup drip-drip-drips down into the hive of bees.  Being the fastidious critters that they are, even when they’re tired and hungry bees will clean up the mess.  And while they’re cleaning, they’re ingesting the syrup that will tide them over until sunshine and nectar flow.  Which we hope is returning tomorrow!

Loaded with feeder buckets and lids and ready to go out.  Hang in there girls, summer’s coming!

2012.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

a moment of spring in the kitchen

Friday afternoon, Honeydew and Keith finished up the scraping as I worked in the kitchen, preparing for a Beekeeping Barbeque that we’re hosting to celebrate that the bees (all of ours, and most of our friends’) are in the orchards!

Mmmm … pork shoulders brining … all hail the pig.  I could be a vegetarian if there were a porcine exception, like there is for fish and shellfish … and for beef ribeyes …. and quail, duck, and pheasant …. and elk … and moose.  Yep, I could do it for sure.  We could call it: nochickenism, for short.

Anyway, I digress.  As I measured cider vinegar, chopped oranges, and separated eggs for deviling, another worker joined me in my cheery over-the-sink windowsill, the kind I’ve always dreamed of having, and the kind that will be very hard to leave come May.

Isn’t she lovely?

Perhaps she was curious about the almond branch that is now in full on bloom?

But whatever her reasoning, between the almond blossoms and the honeybee in the windowsill, it’s hard to feel like it isn’t spring in Northern California!

2012.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

scraping frames

Excellent reader e-mail this morning: What, exactly, are you bozos doing down there in California if you’re just waitin’ around for the orchard owners to call and say, “Bring ‘em in!” ?

Well, we did a little sightseeing over the weekend.  But starting Monday morning, Honeydew and Keith have been scraping away at empty frames and boxes … there’s plenty to do in the beekeeping business that doesn’t involve bothering the bees.

Right now, we’ve gone through all of our hives — back in the fall in Montana, and down here in California, too — and pulled out all of the hives that were dead.  That means it’s time to clean up the hive bodies and frames those bees were living in, to prepare them for the new hives that we hope to make once almond pollination is through.

When the bees come out the almonds, Honeydew will pick out the best colonies for breeder queens, and start “grafting” new queens.  I can’t wait to show y’all how that’s done – it involves a dental-looking-implement, sharp eyes, and a very steady hand.  He and Keith will eventually requeen all of our existing hives to give them a young and vibrant queen who can lay lots of eggs and build up the hive’s strength for the coming summer honey flow.  But don’t think of the bees as needing a trophy wife – the female bees do all of the work of the hive, from the gathering of nectar, to housekeeping, to nursing new bee babies, to disposing of dead elders, to bringing back pollen.  Male bees, or drones, are just around to mate with The Queen, and in times of stress for the hive, the female workers will kick the males out to preserve resources.  Huh.  The original feminazis, or just plain smart?  I’ll leave that for you to decide.

Anyway, in the midst of all of this, Honeydew and Keith will be “splitting” strong, healthy hives into two – this replaces swarming, nature’s way of creating new bee hives, and gives us more colonies to make honey with this summer.  Those “splits” will need a new home, and honey to eat, and by scraping all the excess beeswax and propolis from the old frames and hive bodies, we’re rolling out the red carpet for them.

Not to mention that summer bee work will be much easier if all the frames aren’t already stuck to each other and the hive bodies.

So, that’s what we’re up to ’round here.

2012.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.