Honey time!

Well, it's been a while.  This season of bee keeping has been good.  We started off strong with all of the hives surving the winter.  We also added 2 hives bringing the total number of hives in our apiary to 10. 

Unfortunately, we lost one of the hives mid summer and have had 2 go queenless.  One of the queenless hives we are trying to requeen by putting a frame of eggs from a healthly queen from another hive into the queenless hive.  The bees in the queenless hive know they are queenless and will begin to prepare the open eggs and larva to become a queen by filling the open cells with royal jelly (hopefully). The other queenless hive we are combining with a weak hive that has a queen to try to make it stronger going into the winter.

We have pulled our honey for the year.  We harvested about 4 gallons of honey, and bottles are for sale for $8.00.  All of the honey money goes back into the bee program here at Mill Springs.  If you would like a bottle please send me an email madams@millsprings.org.

The next few months we will be preparing the bees for winter.  The Bee Stangs bee keeping club will also resume.  Honey bees!



After we are done scraping the honey we put the residuals outside. It takes about an hour for the bee from the field to find the residuals and another hour to clean any honey left over.













More Pictures from the 2014 Honey Pull

More Pictures of the Mill Springs Bees

Early Honey

At the last  bee club we were able to extract a little bit of honey (mainly so the kids could participate).  The lighter color is the newest batch.  Notice the difference will the late summer batch from last year.  Different nectar and pollen sources produce different colors (and flavors) of honey.



Sawyer preparing to bee keep!



More Pictures of the Mill Springs Bees

Arbor Montessori School Visit

About a week ago, our bees had a visit from some students from Arbor.  They had just finished up a unit on bees and wanted to see the inside of our hives.  They got suited up and right to work. 



At the end of the visit, we gave Arbor a frame of brood for their observation hive the school has in the library.  Right when we pulled the frame we noticed a queen cell.  Then one of the students noticed a high pitched buzzing sound.  The queen was about to emerge!  The students put the frame in to the observation hive and were able to watch their new queen be born (which is very rare)!  It was an amazing experience.









More Photographs from Arbor Visit

Mill Springs Bees Photographs

Newbees!

Well, its our 3rd season and we are getting bigger once again.  All 4 hives from last season survived the winter and are looking good.  We have also added 3 more hives to the apiary for Jessica, which is super exciting! 

Newbees



Survivors

Bee Club will be starting up after spring break.

Mill Springs Bees Pictures

Preparing For Winter

Winter time is close and the bees are beginning to prepare to winter over (for our second winter).

New brood (or baby bees) are hatching!  Which is an amazing site to see!  Little heads chewing their way out!



We have lost a hive this season.  It looks like Colony Collapse Disorder.  The hive appeared strong, and then all of a sudden the entire hive had disappeared.  Very sad.  However, we transferred the captured swarm from the spring to the CCD hive (that was in the  nuc before).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are looking forward to the spring.  As of now, we hope to have all 4 hives winter over successfully.

We are also looking foward to the release of the documentry More Than Honey.

http://www.ciber.science.uwa.edu.au/blog/

 

Summer Honey!

A couple of weeks ago, some Mark Trail Summer Camp campers and I worked with Mr. D and his family on our second honey extraction.  We were able to extract almost 5 gallons of honey (which works out to almost 60 bottles).

The honey is delicious!







We will be selling our honey for $8 a bottle. All the money goes back into the Bee Stangs experience for our bees, hives, students and members of the community.

If you would like to purchase honey please send me an email.

More Honey Havest Photographs

More Mill Springs Bees Photographs

First Honey Extraction

Our first round of honey! A couple of days ago we were able to extract a small amount of honey from the hive that survived the winter. It is delicious!

Such a neat process.

More photos below.

Honey Flow Photos

Bee Stangs (Mill Springs) Photos