Bees & Berries - working with our bees and having them recycle & reuse honey. Take a little walk with me in our very small honey bee yard, and watch our honey bees recycle & reuse” old honey comb in a win-win scenario. We all appreciate reuse and recycle and Mother Nature wrote the book! For a variety of reasons we have some older comb that overwintered in a hive. Sometimes....today too often, hives do not survive the winter. Have some of these frames for fall feeding and using a hive that we wont draw honey from so we are “bringing in the bees” to do some honey recycling. Those at home responsible for the refuse will be cringing now….”honey! the recycling!” may have a familiar buzz! Our bees will have a great time removing the honey and pollen stores in these old frames. Everyone loves a short commute! Placed these approximately 20 to 25 feet from the hive in a “bee line” from their front door! Our bees will clean up these frames and produce fresh honey into their hive will little expense of energy. A win-win situation! :) A better time of year to use these comb might be later in the fall for pre-winter feeding. At this time there are two bottom supers where the queen is rearing her young (brood) and the bees are storing honey. It requires a comb (frame) of honey to produce a comb of brood and a reserve should be maintained as bees plan better than men and women! Short reserves = no child rearing. Providing this feed to the bees is temporary, in order to watch and learn and build up the hives prior to placing super number 3 as soon as possible. Have you ever considered bees as things to be “fed”, similar to any other agricultural beast of burden? The third super, which will include a queen excluder between the 2nd and 3rd supers, will be filled with honey. There is a balance to attempt to achieve with an expanding (growing) hive to ensure they have room...but not too much. We are using commercial sized Langstoth hives holding 10 frames in each super which when full of honey weigh approximately 50 pounds. Our bees would require approximately 40 pounds of honey to successfully survive the winter. So, we are working towards helping them populate and grow strong in order to build reserves for the winter and provide us with some nice freshly made nutritious, sweet honey in the fall. They will clean this comb up in a couple of days and I take them in at night so the racoons and skunks dont chew them up...or a bear! :) Raw honey...minimal pasteurization, contains many naturally occurring enzymes and bio available plant based nutritional substances including antioxidants. .Anyway, there you go and thank you for your interest. Still learning and the bees have been very cooperative thus far! Michael Im certainly no Quentin Tarantino and this video, a shot on impulse B movie :) ....get it? ..... a B movie and bees !? ...... those jokes that make you groan in despair! :) Always make me smile for some reason. :) Peace & Respect Caribou Nova Scotia August 8th, 2014
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 03:11:44 +0000
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