Bee Update...

We have really enjoyed having the honeybees on our property this year.  Even more so when we came home one day to a box of honey sitting on our front porch!  We ended up with a gallon and a half of honey.  The kids have been enjoying honey, in moderation, on many things ever since.  It was funny, shortly after we got the honey, the kids all commented how they just don't think they could go back to store bought honey, we are spoiled now.  They said store honey tastes artificial somehow and that our honey tastes richer.  Interesting observation.

The honey we got likely wasn't from only our bees on the property, it was probably a combination of many hives from the local area but still it has to be better at least being this local than what you can get in the stores.

We had very few negative interactions with the bees the entire time they were here May-October.  We respected their space and they left us alone for the most part.   I really enjoyed seeing them on all kinds of blossoms in the garden, in fact that is probably why we had such great yields of a lot of the crops.

Someday I'd like to learn to keep bees, but this arrangement worked out perfectly for us!  Free honey, and the education in watching them tend to the bees.   I'd like to learn more, for instance, where do they store them over winter?  How often do they collect honey and how do they know how much to leave the bees to get through winter?

I haven't heard if they plan to bring more back next spring.  I sure hope they do, we look forward to more tasty honey!

Bees for Sweets...

Yesterday we had a busy day of errands in town.  When we arrived home we found a note on our front door.  It was to tell us to please not irrigate anymore tonight, that they'd be by later that night to deliver the bees. 

Are you wondering how we came to have bees coming onto our property?  Are we becoming bee keepers?  No, not really, you see my parents have had bees set up on their place, and they shared a quart of the honey with us for Christmas last year.  On the quart jar was the contact info for the company with the bees.  So I contacted them to see if I could buy some honey from them because it was really good!  Local honey is supposed to be very good for you in moderation of course, plus I always like supporting a local business as well.

When I contacted him, he informed me they only sell commercially at this time, in large 50+ gallon barrels.  Whoa!  Ya I didn't think I needed that much honey! Ha Ha.  He said that they just give the land owners where they have bees set up a case of honey as "rent".  So we talked a while and I asked him if he thought setting up bees on our 5 acres would be a good idea, or if we had the right kind of location for his bees.  He ended up coming that same day to evaluate the site.  He was very nice and it seemed like a good fit so we decided to go ahead and try having bees here.  It felt like a nice way to add one more resource to our pantry from diversifying our property.  This is nice because it is a passive thing for us, these people will do everything with the bees when they are here and we get some honey at the end of the year.  Works great for us, because while I have a small interest in keeping bees one day I really don't want to take on anything else this year.  This gets us some experience around bees, a chance to learn from professionals, and all the benefits we really wanted from them...the

honey.

We think they will like this....

This morning at 2 a.m. we woke up slightly when we heard the truck rumble up into the driveway.  Thankfully, they knew where they were headed as they had scoped it all out earlier, even set a way point on the GPS, and they moved the irrigation pipe and hoses out of the way to be prepared for the late-night drop.  I assume the only way to move bees is at night while they are sleeping and calm.  We are learning already!

You can see they are a ways out in the upper corner of the field, thankfully!

We got brave and went to investigate a little closer.  There are quite a few!  You can see they are all strapped onto pallets.  They had a forklift on their trailer and they unloaded them with that.  Pretty neat set up really.

The zoom lens closed the distance some but it is a little fuzzy.  You can imagine I wasn't feeling real brave to want to get a close up here huh?

We discovered they appreciate the small leak in one of our irrigation risers near their hives.  They were covered all over the wet ground.  They will also likely appreciate the wet grass from irrigating but I am not sure how the kids and I will do when we go change pipe.  This might be a one time only season of having bees if it proves too painful!  Sturdy boots are a must as are long pants. 

I hope to capture a few pictures of them in various places as the summer goes on.  Maybe even some close ups on sunflowers or something.

Are you scared to come see us now?  I would totally understand if you were.  So far they aren't an issue for us and no one except the dog has gotten stung.