Weekends in Dundee

Join us as we explore Willamette Valley Wine Country one weekend at a time!

We Labored on Labor Day, Processing the Honey

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It sure has been a buzzzzy summer…see what I did there? I’m starting to make honeybee humor, I think the bees are finally getting to me!

Over Labor Day Weekend we decided that it was time to remove the honey supers, move the honeybees, and process the honey. Wow that was short sentence, lets just say the process is much easier said than done.

Our first summer with honeybees was a total success! Each hive has two healthy brood boxes on the bottom, and the Noir Hive (left) came close to filling two honey supers, while the Gris Hive (right) completely filled one honey super.

End_of_Year_1_Bee_Hives

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Checking the Health of the Honeybees

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I’ve mentioned this before, but for those of you who don’t know, The Renaissance Man is currently an apprentice in the Oregon Master Beekeeper Program. The program has been a great way to get started with beekeeping, and the best part is that they pair you with a bee mentor! Tom is our mentor, and he’s been an invaluable resource in our beekeeping journey. He’s come out to our house a couple of times to check on the honeybees, and he’s never farther away than a quick email when we’ve had questions. A few weekends back he came out to the house to do an “end of season” check-in on the honeybees.

We’ll be collecting honey from the bees over Labor Day weekend, so it’s important to make sure that the hives are strong so they make it through the winter.

Bee_Mentor

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Honey, Honey

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Our honeybees have been hard at work for the last few weeks, and the honey is coming on strong! The weather has been warm and dry (except for the last two days), and even our volunteer sunflower has started to bloom. I’ve fallen so in love with this sunflower, that I plan to plant a whole row of them in the yard next summer.

But before I get too distracted talking about flowers, let’s get back to the bees.

Volunteer_Sunflower

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Summer Honeybees

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The blackberries are blooming and the bees have been busy! It’s a good thing too, we’ve been pretty busy ourselves and haven’t been able to get into the hives as often as we did in the spring. I think we’re also starting to get the hang of this whole “bee keeping” thing and so we’re not as over-protective as we were at the beginning. When you begin to understand that it’s not about any one bee, but instead about the total organism of the hive, you trust that they know how to keep themselves going with very little human intervention.

The weather was great last week, so we figured it was time to check in on Noir (the left hive) and Gris (the right hive). From outside of the hives things look good! The bees are always on a mission and the crowding at the entrance was starting to get a little crazy, think “clouds of bees” waiting to get in, so we removed the excluder and now the bees can come and go all along the bottom entrance as oppose to just one three inch slot.

Checking_the_Bees

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Adding a Brood Box to Noir

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I’ve been pressing my husband a.k.a. The Renaissance Man to name the hives. We’ve had them for about a month now, and not having names was starting to bother me. I was tired of saying, “You know that hive on the left was really active today” or “The hive on the right had lots of bees sitting on the porch.” In an effort to move the process along, I proposed that we name the hives Pinot Noir (the left hive) and Pinot Gris (the right hive). To my surprise, The Renaissance Man agreed, but wanted to shorten things up, and so we settle on “Noir” and “Gris.”

Left_and_Right Hives

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Removing the Honeybee Kits, and Taking a Look Inside

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Since this is our first time having honeybees we’ve done a ton of reading, and have been following the instructions we were given with the bee kits as closely as possible. However, Mother Nature had another plan this week. Ideally we were only suppose to leave the bee kits in the hive for seven to nine days to make sure the queen bonds with her hive.

However, it’s been raining quite a bit the last week or so, and the temperatures have been on the cold side. I say this because in order to get the bee kits out you have to open the hive and you don’t want to do that when it’s cold or rainy. The hive likes to stay between 93° and 96°F with very little moisture, so we waited, and waited.

Opening-the-hive

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Arrival of the Honeybees

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My husband a.k.a. The Renaissance Man became very enamored with the idea of keeping honeybees. I thought it might be a passing phase, but when he signed up for the Oregon Master Beekeeper Program to become an apprentice beekeeper, I knew things were getting real!

He then came home with the supplies to build three bee boxes. And so we built and painted, and built some more. Soon enough my kitchen table was covered with honey frames, and my garage became paint central.

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