Swarm inspection at one week.

Checked on the swarm that we hived one week ago.  They had drawn out a about 2.5 frames.  I saw eggs and saw the queen.  So it's looking good.

The frame above has eggs which can be seen at full resolution.  Also saw nectar.

The above frame is the one I added from an existing hive to help anchor the swarm and give them a population boost in a few more days.

Above and below: second drawn frame where I saw the queen.  I saw her in the section below, but can't tell if she's in the picture...  Must try video next time.  Click on the pictures for high res.  You may see the queen and a black bee with no wings.  

Bees on the elder

Found the bees happily pollinating the elder this morning:

Honey Bee Swarm Caught

Homer caught a swarm yesterday 2011 May 21 from an asparagus patch. It was about half the size of a basketball. I gave them a frame of brood (mostly open) from another hive. The frame had a few queen cups.

Thinking I might feed them to help them get started.

Later in the day I checked the four older hives. Two had enough bees to add a third deep. Two were doing well, but still had enough empty space I figured I'd leave them with just 2 deeps for a few more weeks.

Also figure I should've given the swarm a frame of capped brood so they wouldn't need to feed them and they'd have a lot of nurse bees soon... maybe next time.

Whole wheat roll recipe

This is how I make my rolls. You can vary the recipe however you want, but I have found whole wheat works best when the dough is wet and gets to spend some time in the fridge. (Cold wet dough is not as sticky.) Next time I make them I'll add some pictures or videos, but it might be a while because I will probably switch to pitas I can cook on the grill for the summer.

Ingredients:

1700 g fresh very finely ground hard white winter wheat (I use a Wolfgang mill)

(grind extra for shaping the rolls and put it in the freezer)

680g water

680g milk (raw, whole)

170g honey (from our bees)

2 eggs (from our chickens)

140g butter (from raw cream)

2T SAF yeast

2.5 T sea salt

Procedure:

While the wheat is grinding, put the water, milk, honey, eggs and yeast into mixer (I use a Bosch universal with dough hooks.) Start adding the flour. After about half is added, pour in the melted butter and salt. Now make sure you got everything in there :)

Let the Bosch mix it for 10-15 minutes. It should be climbing up the center post of the mixer and very wet! Wetter than you'd ever want to work by hand.

Next put all the dough into a big pot, cover and leave a room temp four a couple hours or until the dough is rising well, then put it in the fridge. Ideally, you want to wait at least overnight before continuing and not more than a few days. The chilling and the time will make the dough less wet and develop the gluten more.

A few hours before you want to eat the rolls, butter your pans, get out the extra flour you ground and the dough. This amount of dough makes 64 rolls. I usually just keep cutting it in half till I get to 64... You'll need to use a little bit of flour for shaping the rolls, but try to use as little as possible. Whole wheat flour needs to be much wetter than white flour products.

Okay, the shaping of the roll is very important: take the dough and start stretching the top of the roll around to the bottom. Your goal is to make the top a stretched skin. Keep doing this until the dough starts to firm up a little (maybe 30 seconds?) If you are not familiar with shaping dough find a few youtube videos on it. The key things for good 100% whole wheat are wetness and shaping, so put your effort there.

Let the shaped rolls rise until doubled. This can take a while since the dough was cold, so be patient. It's not unusual for it to take a couple hours. They WILL rise!

Preheat oven to 350 F. Make sure it is very well preheated. Bake the rolls for about 20 minutes. Let them cool as long as you can stand it before eating.

Let me know if you have questions or suggestions.

Ready to forage and another box

This is the nuc from Lloyd this morning. Just need a sunny day to work the beees.

Okay, managed to get out there yesterday morning (July 7) and give them another box. I was looking through a few frames to check for good brood pattern and actually saw the queen! It was the first time I've seen a queen in real life (honeybee anyway.)

I took one of their frames of capped brood to give a boost to the hive that had lost its queen earlier. I was hoping to see that the queen had started laying by now and she had. Yay again. It was the same feeling I got when I first started gardening and my seeds actually sprouted. Such a shock to see how nature works if you let it.

Now if we can figure out how to get rid of squash bugs easily.

Nature walk

Blackberries (dewberries?) are ripening. I picked about two pounds yesterday. For the thorns, I wore long pants, for the heat I wore a wet towel on my head. Blackberries don't all ripen at once.

Sand plums will be ready soon!

These are called sensitive mimosa or something.

Sumacs are starting to bloom. They are good nectar source for bees, then the berries make a yummy tea high in vitamin C.

And the cat tails that made it into our pond are blooming for the first time. These are one of the highest density edible foods ever!

Queens for everyone!

Click on the pictures to see them bigger. Checked the hives again today.

First: East hive

It's been one week since I added a frame of brood with eggs. That frame now had one queen cell with larva in it... sorry it's blurry. It's on the BOTTOM of the frame. This is looking at it upside down. So it looks like they are on their way to having a queen. They had some honey and still plenty of bees.

Second: Nucleus hive we got 3(?) weeks ago

They had brood, honey and had drawn out lots of the empty frames I'd put in last week.

Previous is capped honey :)

Third: The old big have that lost its foraging force in last weeks position swap:

They had so much honey and nectar, they have no need for foraging. There was a frame of drone brood and a frame of worker brood. Most the other cells were full of nectar.

Fourth: The split from the old have that got all the foragers:

The queen cell was no longer there, so I'm hoping she'll soon be laying. The second deep I added last week was getting packed with newly drawn comb and honey. They were so full of bees, I grabbed another deep and put it in the middle of the two they have. I alternated empty combs with combs from the bottom box.

Looking like a good season!

Picasa wouldn't upload the pictures properly so I had to copy/pasted the embed code from picasaweb. The pictures are cropped (haphazardly) here.. harumph. Changed them all to 400 and it's all better :)