#26. A beekeeper's New Year's resolutions.

New Year has come and gone, and 2 of my resolutions for 2013 involve bees.  I resolve to be a better beekeeper, and to be a better bee blogger.  I can't believe I have not posted since last May!

One of my goals in writing this blog was to use it as a sort of diary so that I could track my successes and failures and learn from them.  I had hoped that this would be of some value not just to me, but to other beekeepers.  I also wanted to have enough material of general interest to keep non-beekeepers entertained.  Well, I've pretty well screwed up the diary aspect since there's no way I can succinctly reconstruct an entire summer and fall of my beekeeper's year.  What I can do, however, is summarize where I am now and try to reinstate my old blogging schedule.

Last Spring the bees hit me with challenge after challenge.  They swarmed, and swarmed again.  The property was lousy with swarms, stray queens, and chaos.  I tried to make sense of it, and I have some theories.  My feelings of inadequacy were mitigated by the fact that so many Long Island beekeepers were going through much of what I was.  The unusually warm winter last year certainly played a part, but I think there were some things I could have done to control the situation.  For starters, I didn't go into the hives early enough in the season to be able to affect swarm conditions.  I also didn't put supers on early enough to keep the bees sufficiently busy.  The upside is that I was able to capture enough swarms to double my beeyard.  The downside is that the bees were so busy colonizing that they produced far less honey than the previous year, when I only had 3 hives!  The original superstar of my yard, Team Red, remained the top honey producer, even though they threw at least one swarm last spring.  I think I extracted about 40 lbs. of honey from the red hive.  Team Purple, which started as a swarm in 2011 turned out to be a pretty nice hive, and they produced about 20+ lbs.  Team Yellow, the original bad-boy of my initial two hives, remained problematic, throwing swarm after swarm after swarm, and ultimately producing no honey.

2011's 3 hives are now joined by swarm hives Orange, Blue and White.  I now have 3 hive stands instead of two, with 2 hives on each raised wooden platform.  I am using a 4-brood-box model instead of the 3-box hives I had last year.  Having said that, only 3 hives - the original 3 - were populous enough to warrant the 4th brood box I'd planned on.  The other 3 hives have between 2 and 3 brood boxes apiece.  So far this winter, there are live bees in all 6 hives.  This is more of a coup than I had realized:  at a bee meeting last week I found that most of the beekeepers in attendance had lost colonies already this winter.  

Some of the season's highlights are worth noting:

• I had the pleasure of having a queen bee hatch in my hand - by pure happenstance, I must add:  I was inspecting a hive and decided to remove a capped queen cell to see if I could reduce swarming.  I removed the wax cell and placed it in the palm of my hand, when the top popped open and a beautiful queen emerged.  I set her up with a few subjects, along with a frame each of honey and capped brood, and she thrived.   
• My life was changed for the better last summer when I broke down and bought an actual bee suit.  Until then I had been using a veil plus an army surplus flight suit one-sy.  Now I know that some of my beekeeping brethren use no protective clothing whatsoever.  My bees, however, are just not that warm and fuzzy.  And now that I don't have to worry about getting stung, my concentration can be directed 100% towards the bees instead of being distracted by wondering when - and where - I will be stung.
• I have taken on a beekeeping client.  It turns out that a summer resident who lives less than a mile from me has 2 hives.  He loves his bees but cannot devote any time to them since he lives in Manhattan and his business demands are such that he can never really know when he will be here - or for how long.  In November my buddy Woody and I moved Richard's hives to my yard for the winter.  So for now, at least, I'm up to 8 hives.  I expect that I'll be moving those colonies back to Richard's sometime this Spring.  Working with Richard's bees has broadened my experience immensely:  each of his colonies is in 10-frame double-deep brood boxes, compared to my puny 8-frame brood boxes .  Richard's are very well established, muscular hives, and each takes 2 honey supers, which I had to extract more than once during the season.  I think I extracted a total of about 120 lbs. of honey for him this past year, and I still had enough honey to leave both hives with a full super of honey for the winter.  The experience with Richard's bee has made me realize the importance of drawn comb; the bees can spend all their time making and storing honey instead of spending a lot of resources making wax and building comb.  My young bee colonies are all still in the build-up stage, with me constantly adding new, undrawn frames for them to work.  Next season I will help them out by using wax foundation on wooden frames in the honey supers.  The bees really do not seem to like drawing out the plastic Pierco frames that I have been using exclusively up until now.
• I made a few entries at the Long Island Fair again this year, and did much better than last year.  My honey - in 2 classes - won first prizes.  And I entered a block of beeswax this year as well, and also took a first.  All of my vegetable entries took prizes, a few of them firsts.
• I also participated in the LIBC (Long Island Beekeeping Club)annual honey judging contest, and took a couple of ribbons, although a first place escaped me.  I did, though, take first prize for the second year for my 'gadget entry', this year's was a devise to capture swarms that I cobbled together from a one-gallon plastic pretzel jar mounted on a piece of PVC pipe.  It worked great for me during the last swarm season.

One of the highlights so far this winter has been using hive products to make soap.  My friend and fellow beekeeper Tricia hosted a workshop at her home and a group of us made several kinds of soap using natural ingredients.  My favorite was the goat milk soap that incorporated honey and beeswax.  It's creamy, dreamy stuff.

The new and improved, enormous vegetable garden did not disappoint.  It is definitely a work in progress, but the freezer is packed with delicacies, like pestos, soups, and tomato sauce.  And I'm still working my way through the garlic and potatoes.