First Honey Harvest of 2009

Good News Everyone!!!

We are over the moon on Sasserfrass Hill. Mr. Charlie and I extracted the first of my honey today. We put a bee escape screen on three hives yesterday. Mr. Charlie came over this morning at 10am. He picked up the three supers ( they are too heavy for me to pick up) and took them to his honey house. Mr. Charlie has a 9 frame power radial extractor and a air conditioned honey house. I have a four frame hand crank extractor and no air conditioning in my bee shed. So needless to say I was fortunate when he offered to let me use his well equipped facility.

I drove over to his house so he would not have to drive back across town. When I got to his honey house he had the supers unloaded and the hot knife plugged in. He asked if I would like him to do the honors or do it myself. Of course I was happy to watch a master work. He had all three supers uncapped and ready to return to the box they came from (The bees like to get there own frames back) in less than an hour. It would have taken me twice as long to get the job done.

I brought along three five gallon buckets or holding tanks as they are called in the catalogs to bring the honey from his extractor back to Sasserfrass Hill. I ended up with a little over 100 pounds of sweet golden honey. I had to replace eight queens this spring. I was afraid I may not have much honey to harvest this season. I was delighted with the quality and quantity of my honey.
I will let the honey sit in the holding tanks for a few days before putting it into jars. The bubbles will rise to the top. Mr. Charlie says.... You should skim it off and feed it back to the bees.

We are very grateful on Sasserfrass Hill tonight for all our many blessings and our bountiful harvest.

Thank you Mr. Charlie for making this harvest smooth and easy.

Bee Well and Stay Cool,

Deborah

Happy Summer !

Tomorrow is the first official day of Summer. It is the hottest day of the year with temperatures racing near 104 degrees. It is going to be a super hot few days. I don't think we can expect anything but more hot smoldering days. The bees seem to take it in stride. I did put up their colorful umbrellas to help shade them from the scorching afternoon sun. I also put out some ice cream salt. Mr Charlie said....the salt will provide some of the minerals they made need in this heat.

Happy Birthday Sarah!!!! Hope you have a wonderful day and many many more!!!

Try to stay cool and we will do the same.

Deborah
and the "Girls" on Sasserfrass Hill

Greetings Everyone,

With temperatures heating up well into the upper 90'ies, it has slowed the production on Sasserfrass Hill down a bit. I am trying to keep the plants watered. The tomatoes and peppers are producing very nicely. The wildflowers in the garden are beautiful and after being staked they are standing up and showing their faces. We have the intense Georgia afternoon sun with no shade to help with the broiling heat. I bought umbrellas last year to help shade my girls. With summer fast approaching I think it is time to put the umbrellas up over the hives again. (My neighbor says it looks like a roadside stand when the umbrella go up.)

We have had a bit of a setback. On Saturday Rick and I went through seven of the hives, to check for queen cells and to check for brood and pests. To our disappointment we found four MORE hives with NO brood. Four hive with NO babies and no Queen. Remember we had to put three queens and brood from Mr. Charlies hives in last week. To find we have four more queen less hive is a big set back to us on Sasserfrass Hill. This will slow honey production down to a crawl.

Mr Charlie ordered more queens and we are going to pick them up from Wilbanks Apiaries in Claxton on Wednesday. I hope these queens are strong good layers, so we can make it through the summer and get busy making honey for Sasserfrass Hill. I am learning many new things everyday about the bees. This is a hard lesson but, a part of beekeeping.

I will keep you posted on our progress.

Bee Cool,

Deborah

Mr. Charlie (my mentor) and I went through my ten hives last week. We expected to be harvesting honey this week, but to my chagrin I will not be harvesting this week. We found three hives with no queens. I have no idea what happened to them. Yesterday Mr. Charlie brought frames over with queen cells and lots of brood. (babies) to replace a frame in all three hives. We are hoping the queen cell will emerge about the same time as the baby bees, so the queen will have bees to care of her and get the hives working and productive again.

When there is no queen in the hive the bees chill out and don't do much work. Spring is the most plentiful time of the year. They should be bringing in lots of pollen and nectar. This is a set back and I will miss out on lots of honey production, but as Mr. Charlie says... This is a learning experience and a part of beekeeping.

I met a fabulous lady, Carla Grayson a few weeks ago at a holistic fair. She linked my sasserfrasshill.com website onto her becomeonewithspirit.com site. She is a renowned web designer and has an interesting and informative website. I am very grateful she added sasserfrasshill.com to her site. Check it out.

Mr. Charlie and I will go through my hives again soon to see how the queens are progressing. I hope we will be back in full production in just a few weeks.

Bee Well,

Deborah

No Honey yet!

Mr. Charlie (my mentor) and I went through my hives last week. We were expecting to start harvesting honey this week, but to my chagrin I found I was not ready to harvest honey and even more disappointing was three of my hives did not have a queen. I am not sure what happened. The purple, green and aqua hives had no brood (babies) at all. Mr. Charlie came over yesterday and brought frames with queen cells and lots of brood from his hives. He replaced one of my frames with one of his, in each of the three queen less hives. We hope the brood will hatch around the same time as the queen, so they can take care of her and get the hive working and productive again.

The spring is the busiest time for the bees. This is down time for these three hives, when they should be working the hardest. When there is no queen the hive slows production instead of going like gang busters. This is disappointing but as Mr. Charlie says.... It is a learning experience and part of being a beekeeper.

Also I met a fabulous lady, Carla Grayson at the holistic fair a few weeks ago. She put our web site sasserfrasshill.com on her site becomeonewithspirit.com (We are under the news letter portion of her site). She is a renowned web designer and has a creative and very interesting website.

I really appreciate her adding Sasserfrasshill.com to her site. Check it out.

Bee Well,

Deborah

Harvest Time

It is almost time to pull my first honey of the season. 2009 has been a wonderful spring. With temperatures cooler than normal and lots of rain. The nectar and pollen flow has been plentiful. The bees have been very busy. Every trip the forging bees make yields lots of protein and carbohydrates.

Mr. Charlie is coming over tomorrow and we are going to check all the hives for queen cells again and see which hives need escape board (the bees can get out of the honey super but they can not get back in). We will be ready to harvest honey on Tuesday or Wednesday. I am anxious to see how much liquid gold my girls will produce this spring.

We met beekeepers Sue and Jim Gertis while on vacation last week. They were wonderful friendly people that told us a lot about how they keep bees. Their honey and beeswax was used on several recovering turtles at The Georgia Sea Turtle Center on Jekyll Island. They gave us a jar of their Jekyll Island honey and it is fabulous.
I will let you know how many pounds of honey we harvest.
Bee Well,
Deborah

Happy Mother's Day

We have had a busy week on Sasserfrass Hill. We have been planting lots of plants and seeds. I planted more Black Eye Susan Vines, Hummingbird (Cypress) Vines and lots of multicolored morning Glory vines along all the fences in my yard and garden. We transplanted cuttings from April's Lady Banks Rose and pulled lots of weeds. (I am not using any chemicals on my lawn) We got about an inch of rain this week. Everything is lush and green and looks so nice. It will be hot and dry soon enough.....

April (my sister in law) and I rescued lots of Easter Lillie's from the dumpster.

We believe in recycling, reusing and reducing land fill waste. I must plant them in my garden next week. I will also share some of the bulbs with my sister.

I found lots and lots of ants in the Aqua Hive yesterday. The most I have ever had in a hive at one time. The ants were into the frames taking out the honey. This indicates a weak hive...A strong hive would keep them out. I hate killing ants but they CAN NOT be in my hives. It took almost all day ... I squished a million ants, wait an hour and go back and squish more. Today when I checked there were only a few ants in the hive.

Mr Charlie administered Bee Venom Therapy to our Multiple Sclerosis Patient today. She had about fifteen stings.

I have two nephews graduating from college in the morning. We are having a family get together at my brothers in Millen to celebrate their accomplishments in the afternoon. We will enjoy our family and friends. We will give thanks to God for blessing our family with these two fine young men, that I am sure will make the world a better place. We will also celebrate Mother's Day, while we are all together. All my siblings will be together. Our mother, has seven kids...she loves nothing more than having all her chicks in one place. She is a wonderful mother and my biggest fan.

Happy Mothers Day to mine and all mothers out there....I wonder if the bees think about their mother? The queen be can lay 1000 to 2000 eggs in a day. You thought you had a lot of kids to keep up with!!

We will be taking a break on Sasserfrass Hill for the weekend. We will look for and pull queen cells again on Monday, until then...
Bee Well,

Deborah