Why now come on out and learn how fun and easy it is to keep honey bees. Be the envy of your neighbours!

We love to share what we know with others. We love to see more people falling in love with nature and all its intricacies. We love watching people’s eyes and hearts light up as they share their experiences with bees.

With that in mind, we are again offering our day long Intro to Sustainable Beekeeping course. The first course date is just a few weeks away on Jan 26th. There will also be a second Intro course date of Feb 23rd.

We are also working on a day long course in March for those that have bees already and have more questions than ever!

More information can be found on our Education page. So come on out and make beekeeping one of this year’s resolutions!

“Marriage, birth, or burying,
News across the seas,
All your sad or marrying,
You must tell the bees.”
- Celtic saying

This always struck me as an interesting story. One that I might keep up just for tradition’s sake. Obviously, the bees aren’t going to leave because I forget to tell them about some news, but because it’s polite. I talk to the bees all the time, as I’m sure most beekeepers do, so telling them the news of the day isn’t a huge stretch.

I had news to tell them a couple of weeks ago. My Dad died suddenly from a heart attack. At the funeral, Greg reminded me to tell the bees (we have a hive sitting beside my parents’ garden). I won’t kid you: I felt silly crouching down beside the hive to tell a bunch of insects about my grief. Suddenly, one of the workers came out. She took off, circled my head a couple of times and went back inside. It was the 8th of November and the temperature was hovering around 5C. The last thing I expected was any kind of activity. I don’t know that I feel so silly now.

An important reminder for all you aspiring beekeepers out there – if you are wanting to buy bees and get started in 2013, GET YOUR ORDERS IN NOW with your local bee supplier for nucs and/or packages. These are in high demand each and every year and you need to get on list now.

We have tentative dates for the Intro course: late January and again in Late February. As we get things firmed up, we will be updating the course page so check back often.

In 2013 we are also putting together a day course for those of you that have bees already, have more questions than before, or simply want to delve deeper into the “secrets” of beekeeping. The course will be held on a Saturday in March.

If there are any topics you folks would like to cover in either of these course, please let us know and we’ll try to fit them in!

Because the location is a bit of a chore to get to, they’ve more or less been left to their own devices. It’s become a true minimal intervention hive and they’ve done very well. Four winters on an island at the East end of Lake Ontario, with minimal shelter from the wind and the cold.
They’re survivors, but they’re also grumpy. We’re working on a plan to bring their winter survival skills into the rest of our hives, but we neex to avoid the aggressiveness.
This was the sight that greeted me when I opened the lid earlier:

Even with the extreme temperatures of July and ongoing drought the hive is full. That bodes well for overwintering.

“Someone could be killed!” quoth the person on the phone who didn’t know what a hive was.

I’m not even going to start on the obvious ignorance of the person she spoke with. I presume his voice trembled with terror when he spouted the nonsense.

I have to confess that it never occurred to me that an insurance company would drop a client for having an interest in bees. I can see them refusing to cover claims arising from the hives, but this is over the top.

I have two pieces of advice in this case:

1. Refuse to take no for an answer and climb the ladder. The first person on the phone could be in a call center or a junior staff member who really doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Ask for a supervisor or manager. See if you can work something out. They might be willing to allow your coverage if you carry a supplemental policy
2. Switch companies. Continuing without insurance isn’t an option, so the only other course of action is take your business elsewhere. Rather than dealing with companies directly, I’d suggest dealing with a broker. They’ll know who to deal with to get the correct information and they can shop around until they find a company that’s not crazy. A lawyer friend of this new beekeeper put it beautifully: “Pay a little more for less stupidity.”

There is supplemental insurance out there that doesn’t cost a fortune. We belong to the Ontario Beekeeper’s Association and they offer Comprehensive General Liability Insurance to their members for a very reasonable cost: $96 or $132 per year depending on whether you have more or less than 50 hives. Membership itself is $85 per year for anyone with under 50 hives. It’s a real bargain and the membership includes a subscription to the Ontario Bee Journal, so you can keep up with the goings on with the industry.

I have one comment about the OBA: if you don’t chemically treat your hives (and why should you?), you will be in the minority. Taking a holistic approach to pest management and colony health isn’t very popular in the quick fix world of the commercial beekeeping industry. The articles in the Bee Journal tend to show that.

 UPDATE

I just heard back from M and the situation has gone down hill even further. She called ThePersonal back and spoke to a supervisor. Initially, he thought that was silly and put her on hold to go “educate” the person to whom she originally spoke. When he came back, everything had changed. Not only would they not cover her property if she had bees, they have given her until June 18 to find other coverage! We’re talking about a 4.5 acre rural, seasonal, property. They flat refused to consider an exception to coverage. This poor lady has done everything right: she took a workshop, she’s registered with the province as a beekeeper and she’s getting her bees from a registered breeder. She spoke to the OBA and with 2900 members, this is the first time this issue has arisen. She spoke to the broker that handles the OBA’s group liability coverage and he’d never heard of such a thing. The only solution seems to be “keep your mouth shut and hope they don’t find out”. It’s too late for that for M, though. On top of everything else, she now has two weeks to get new insurance coverage for her property.

Piece of advice #3: if you have  any aspirations to keep on your property, avoid ThePersonal like the plague. If you already have a policy with them, you’d better get it changed or you could be leaving yourself open to a world of trouble.

Not worry, though: we’re subverting them to our nefarious purposes. No foundation, still no treatments and the focus is still the bees. We just figured it’s time we ran a couple of these and there is one advantage to frames that I really to take advantage of. This year, we’re also getting into raising queens and it’s exponentially easy to harvest eggs from a frame of brood than from a bar of comb. I’ll get into that in another post.

I’ve got two single brood-box langs assembled, painted and ready to go. The rest of my order arrived today. Right off the bat, there’s a big difference in price: two complete hives (I hope) total more than $500:

So, we’re $350 in and what we have are two beeless hives. Nucs are $160 each. What I don’t know is if I actually have enough boxes for the hives. It depends on the season.

Granted, if I built the boxes myself, I could save quite a bit. $35 would buy enough 1×10 pine to make at least 6 boxes, hive stands are easy to build and so are the lids, inner covers and bottom boards.

There’s also a HUGE amount of work involved in setting these things up. The hive boxes all have to be assembled, the frames have to be nailed together and wired. With the cost of the things, I figured I’d better paint them. Two coats.

I’m off to pick up the nucs from Dancing Bee Apiaries on Saturday, so we’ll go from there.

Fast forward one week. I popped out to the yard for quick peek and was greeted with this. That’s about 3/4 of the population of the colony hanging about on the bottom. Scouts were out an about looking for a place to move and the only comb inside the hive was loaded with nectar. No brood, not chance of a replacement queen. I couldn’t do anything about it, though: the bees seem to know in advance how I’m going to be dressed for a visit and act accordingly. I wasn’t about to try to convince an absconding colony to stay wearing shorts and sandals.

Sunday morning, dressed appropriately, I went out again to see what I could do to fix the problem. The cluster was still there, so that was good. My initial plan was to check the next hive over, which Greg had split on the 13th, and take a queen cell for this one and hope it convinced the ladies that this was a good place to stay.

No go. The queen cells had all been torn down. What I did find was a nice new comb of fresh eggs. So, I moved that bar of eggs to this hive. I then proceeded to scoop up this cluster in gloved hands and put them back inside. It was two double-handfuls and around two pounds of bees. I closed up the entrances with grass and left them until yesterday morning.

The plan was to confine them inside with the fresh eggs overnight. Giving the nurse bees something to do and the nectar-filled comb would make sure that there was enough food for the group. Or so I hoped.

Back out again yesterday around noon. No sign of the cluster and one of the grass entrance plugs had come out. There was a good bit of flying going on. I opened the hive and everybody was there! I presume that the queen was in the cluster that I scooped back into the hive, but it doesn’t really matter. If she wasn’t they’ll be able to raise a new one from the eggs.

Open brood is powerful stuff. Loaded with “this is home” pheromones, transplanting a bar of eggs or young larvae can make all the difference in a hive. Calm down grumpy bees, help boost numbers if buildup is slow or convince an absconding colony to stay. I’m just glad it worked.

A beekeeper to the rescue!

Until tomorrow. A good friend of mine attended our April workshop and caught bug, so to speak. She’s picking up two packages of bees (plus two for us) in Peterborough tomorrow and I’ll be meeting her to help hive them. Over the course of the next month or so, we’ll be setting up a number of new hives and re-populating dead-outs.

My family and I are also moving to a country property north of Kingston (the new SFA Headquarters) in June and when you throw that into the mix, it’s going to be a busy summer.