September 2019 – Backyard Honeycomb

A new queen is in town and she’s living in a high rise.

The top floor apartment is going to have a queen! That is not all. This 3 floor apartment is becomeing a 4 floor high rise.

Removing the top to check on the queen.

Paul said there are two queen cells. I can only find one in this picture.

That big yellow thing on the edge of the frame is a queen cell. Give it a week and she should emerge!

Since there are two queen cells. The two queens will fight it out and whoever survives will be the new queen.

The four box hive.

Paul had to add a box to the original hive because the hive is growing. We have enough bees that are making honey for themselves, raising their brood, they are running out of space for honey. If we don’t add another box, the bees will leave and find another home.

What do the separate boxes do?

The bottom two boxes with are brood. They raise their young bees here. They have honey on the outside frames for food for them and their brood is in the frames in the middle of the box.

The block above the second box is the queen excluder so the queen can’t go up there and lay eggs. Only the worker bees can go up there.

The third box (above the queen excluder) is a honey box. For us! Mmmm….tasty honey for us!

The top box, the new addition, is the new queen’s apartment.

Back of the high rise. This little hive is doing well!

Harvesting Honey

Went for my run this morning and look who was out? It’s hard to see them, but there were two antelopes enjoying the same field I was running in. .

It was a beautiful morning with clear skies and 44′. A nice day for a run and harvest some honey.

Out of the two hives we have, the big hive has been fun to watch. I don’t know why. Maybe because there are thousands of bees in this hive and only a few hundred in the smaller hive?

Anyway, the end of the year is here and time to harvest our honey. Our honey is in the top box, so we need to remove the top box and shake all the bees out and into the other two boxes.

Lighting the smoker to encourage the bees to move from the top box to the bottom boxes.

This is what a 4 year old does to keep busy 🙂

We have a lot of good frames of delicious dark honey.

Still entertaining himself 🙂

The hive has been reduced back down to a two box hive. The bottom box still has brood and the top box is full of honey for the bees to eat throughout the summer.

A few of the frames.

Look at all that honey!

We cut out the comb from a few of the frames.

Put them into bags. Taped them onto the computer monitor arm 🙂 . Cut a tiny hole out of the bottom of the bag and let them drip.

We let the honey drip into a double sieve. The bottom sieve is finer than the top sieve to catch the wax that escaped from the bags.

The honey drips from the sieve into the bucket that has a spout that will make it easier to drain into jars.

No two hives are the same. Every hive varies in color and had has different tasting honey. This hive has been producing dark, thick, delicious tasting honey. I can’t wait to bottle it up!

Friday Favorites

The first favorite of this week is planning this little boy’s birthday party. I can’t believe he is 5 years old!

It feels like yesterday we were sealed as a family.

I’m so grateful I have the opportunity to be this little boy’s mother. He is the light of our world. He keeps us laughing every day!

My last favorite is getting away with family. We needed a few days without cell signal -except for locking us out of the trailer, I could have used a phone 🙂

Drone bee

I have only heard about drone bees. Never seen one in the wild 🙂

A drone bee is a male bee. The crazy thing about a drone bee is they don’t have stingers.

The purpose of a drone is to mate with the queen.

Unlike hard working honey bees, drones don’t do anything in the hive. They don’t gather pollen, help make honey, or take care of the brood.

We have lots of bees, so the drones have been doing their job 🙂

Monday

Went for a run this morning.

It’s time to increase my mileage. I need to start running long runs and increase my miles again to 25-30 miles a week.

For our Monday lunch, we went to El Pollo Loco. They did make my wrap a vegetarian, the second time :). You can’t go wrong with avocado, vegetables and cheese in a wrap! They did have issues in their restaurant that day. Being an owner, I totally understand! I guess we all have some sort of issue that pops up during the day while running a quick service restaurant!

After lunch we drove down to Vineyard. Vineyard? Yeah, I didn’t know there was a city, Vineyard either. We were on our way to get dessert and we saw this Puppy Store. We had to stop in and see what it as all about.

This store is full of puppies. You can hold and play with as many puppies as you want to. For as long as you want to!

To my surprise, they had a Havanese! I don’t see many of these around. Charlie was a Havanese and we miss dearly. I had to hold her. I so desperately want to get another puppy, but it’s still too hard after Charlie. Some day.

We went next door for some ice cream at Brooker’s.

Yes, This is their work uniform.

The owner of the store. 🙂 They make their ice cream in house and it is really delicious.

Aaron said it reminded him of Ziggy Piggy! You, know, Bill and Ted’s Excellent adventure? This is why it’s so fun to be with my brother.

And…That’s my brother! 🙂

Always a fun time on our Monday lunches!

Bee Apartment Building

Things are getting pretty exciting around here!

The little beehive is getting another box. Paul decided to raise another queen.

The new apartment will have its own entrance at the back of the hive.

This box has an observation window which is kind of fun. You can see in the hive without disturbing the bees.

Here it is. The apartment building. Paul took some frames full of brood from the big hive and transplanted the frames in the top box of the small hive.

We will see in a week or two if they made a queen!

How do you break into a trailer?

This was just fabulous. I managed to lock the trailer keys in the trailer. The truck keys were on the same ring as the trailer keys. No cell phone service. We were stuck.

This is Paul trying to pick the lock with a piece of wood. Yeah, that didn’t work. I walked around the trailer and found that Paul didn’t lock the basement.

Hallelujah! We had a way in. But now what?…

We had to crawl up that little hole. Paul and I won’t fit, but our little Pea would! 🙂

We had to talk him into climbing in. After he would get 1/2 way in, he would crawl back out. He wouldn’t do it. He kept telling us we needed to call the Help Department to help us.

After another talk of needing to be a super hero and save the day, he finally got the courage to climb up and in.

He did it! He crawled through the hole and out the bathroom vanity.

And he opened the door for us!

This is where he crawled out. 🙂

I’m so pleased with my little Pea!

That night he had a plan and had it all worked out to break into the trailer again. We won’t let that happen again. We are headed to Lowes this week to make a spare key!

Day 3 at Mirror Lake

With such a long hike yesterday we stayed at camp and took the kayak out on mirror lake.

Little Pea really enjoyed paddling.

That afternoon, Eli said it was his turn to lead us on a trail today. He picked North Fork Trail. This trail was just a few feet from our campground.

We only went 1/2 mile down. We didn’t want a repeat of yesterday.

We found a pond with lily pads and thought that was a good place to turn around.

Another fun day!

Mirror Lake continued :)

We drove down the mountain to hike Long lake Loop. 2 miles. Well, we thought it was a 2 mile loop 🙂

It was a beautiful day for a hike. We loaded our packs with water, lunch, and snacks.

It has been a very wet year. Saw lots of mushrooms.

Finally! We made it to long lake. It was a 2 mile hike just to the lake!

We ate lunch.

We walked part way around the lake.

Lots of wild flowers up here.

We hiked up to a small waterfall. We decided to turn back and not walk the full lake because…

Eli needed a ride back down.

And another ride 🙂

Our 2 mile loop turned into a 6 mile hike! Eli did VERY well. We had little complaints from him!

No smores tonight, we all went to bed early 🙂

Mirror Lake

Today we drove to Mirror Lake.

We were going to spend a week up here, but since it snowed, we decided to leave a day later.

When we arrived at camp, we were greeted with patches of snow!.

He wanted to save some for later. Into his pocket the snow went 🙂

I need to make a note for next year: They close two of the three sections of the campgrounds on 9/9. Site 69 was the only site big enough for us. So if we want to camp in the other sections- which had trees 🙂 We need to get there a week or two earlier.

Eli LOVED our campsite. Each site had a huge sand pad for tents. Eli thought it was just a huge sandbox. He enjoyed every minute out here digging a driving his trucks.

We walked around the lake.

It’s a beautiful lake. I know why the campground is always full when we have tried to make reservations in the past.

Eli wanted to take our picture. Not bad!

That evening the temperatures dropped and it was quite cold out. Eli had to warm up his patootie. 🙂

We made smores. I like mine like a Norwegian open faced sandwich 🙂 No graham cracker, just chocolate and marshmallow.

This time of the year is just beautiful in the mountains. I’m glad we took the time to get away for a few days.