It's Hive Time!

So being off of school for a week definitely lends itself easily to starting new projects! Like this one: bee keeping.

My grandfather, Otto Braunohler, was a bee keeper in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. He had a little shed for honey extraction/packaging, gifting jars of honey to friends and family at Christmas. It is in my blood.

With Chris's birthday fast approaching, I decided it would be the perfect gift for him. Plus, this would mean that when it came time to smoke out the bees and collect their honey, Chris could don the white suit and bee hat while I stood a safe distance away and took photos (for the blog, of course!)


So I purchased all the bee hive equipment one needs, according to "The Backyard Beekeeper" and a very expert woman named Jenn, who works at Biofuel Oasis. I bought two boxes, or supers, of wax frames for the bees to inhabit. I got a queen excluder, which is a nifty metal screen that allows all smaller bees, and not the queen, through its slats. That way, she can't leave the hive with the rest of the colony following her. That would be what is called a swarm of bees - bees on the lookout for a new home. And that is ONE way (the most exciting one) to acquire a colony of our own. Last week, I put our name on a 'swarm list,' and if we get a call that a homeless community of bees is found, we get to say "Yes, we'll take them!" There is a whole chapter about how to actually go and tap the swarm off of a branch into your bee box, but I am thinking that we'll have a more experienced apiarist do that.


One cool thing happened last week as I was unloading our bee boxes and carrying them up to the house: I ran into Enoch, a friendly neighbor I'd never met. He has apricot and lemon trees and proposed a trade: Honey in exchange for fruit! It is one of our first true signs of being a producing urban farm (Chris always points out that I use this term too loosely). We'll have a surplus that we can provide to members of our community!

P.S. The chicks are thriving! Souffle, Streetlight, and Blow-Blow all got a thorough butt cleaning this evening and settled down for a cozy time. Here we are reading a chicken magazine that decidedly has too much information about backyard chickens. Basil definitely is curious!