It’s Friday morning. I awake at 6am from bleeting cats. After letting them in for their breakfast, I boil the kettle for French press coffee while I could hear my husband stirring upstairs. After bringing him a steaming cuppa’ java, and checking my email, I put on a huge pot of water to boil for making sugar syrup. It’s August and this means there are far less flowers for the bees to suck on. So the feeding begins. Did you know that Costco 40kg bags of sugar cost approximately $33. And in full feeding time, that may last me a week for 23 hives. Greedy bees!

Then I pull my bee-suit on over my growing belly and my pjs and tromp out to the hives behind the house. I crack the first lid open with my fancy new hive tool.

This is my cool new hive tool. It works great. I got it from Bees ‘N Glass. I try them for my every beekeeping need. This is not only because they give great service, but they have become friends, they are teachers and they host a herd of barn cats where we managed to procure our lovely balls of fluff.

The smell as you crack a hive lid is intoxicating. Especially in the Summer when the bees are drawing their wax comb and filling it with sweet honey. In the early morning sun, there are few smells that compare to the warm golden smell of honey wafting from a calmly buzzing hive.

After checking on my flower-girls, (the beehives behind my house are all named after flower names) I have second breakfast with my husband and perhaps a cup of tea. Then I proceed to the blueberry field hives. They are 4 in a row, Rapunzel, Lucy, Beatrix and Adelaide.

After spotting Rapunzel and her very extended backside, (Rapunzel let down your golden bum…..?) I load up the truck with the supplies I need for my outyards. I have 10 hives that are not on my property. Sometimes it’s inconvenient to drive to all these different spots on the island and it would certainly be faster to have them all in one spot. But I don’t believe that it’s best for the bees on Pender. I don’t think that there is enough food in one place. And I like the fact that if one hive gets a disease, it doesn’t automatically mean it’s spread to all the other hives.

Plus, I get such different scenery at each of my outyards. I have one on the ridge of a cliff that looks out onto the San Juan and Gulf Islands. It’s so peaceful there I can hear the tiny feet of the bees pattering against the frame as I examine them for mites, check that they are making babies and that they have food.

After finishing my rounds, I am exhausted. The baby is kicking and hungry and I’m ready to head home. I have this great idea for a luscious pizza with extra mozzarella.

After fulfilling this craving and sitting down to home-made pizza crust topped with golden bubbling mozza, like a blanket over the chard, mushrooms, olives, artichokes and green-striped cherry tomatoes, Marc and I sit down for a re-run of Dr. Who.

Sometimes life is sweeter than honey. Just by the company we keep.

Just wanted to recognize that Summer is a very busy time. Make sure you’re making time for yourself and what you love. Time is the most precious currency we own!

Slow down and stop smelling so many flowers!

My family and friends have been very patient with me in my eccentricities. When I first brought up my interest in beekeeping, they were cautiously encouraging, not sure their required level of participation. As I’ve delved deeper and deeper into the art of apiculture, they have become more encouraging and enthusiastic, and I suspect this is because they saw “sweet things” on the horizon.

I got my first beehive 3 years ago, on July 1st. I knew I’d have to wait at least until the second year before I’d get any honey from her. But she had a rough first year. Not only because of my inexperience, but also because of the problems with her location. She was in the shade, she was bought late in the year, she didn’t have a lot of natural food. It was rather rubbish for her really. So I was just happy she survived her first Winter.

Finally on her third Summer, I opened up the top super to have a peak and found it was wall-to-wall honey! Well, the box weighs at least 55 lbs, I cannot lift it, especially with my protruding tummy. (Go Baby!) So my Honey helped me and got suited up and lifted the super for me, and found the next super down was also 10 frames of beautifully capped honey. Yeepee!

This is my first official extraction. Last year I tried to extract 6-8 frames but I made the mistake of leaving them where the bees could find them, hoping they would clear off. What? Abandon their honey? Never! Yeah, they took it all back and all I was left with were such chewed up empty frames.

There is a story about a beekeeper, he took his honey supers off his hives, took them to his basement. He spent all day extracting the honey from the frames, and went upstairs in the evening to take a break and watch a film. Meanwhile his well-meaning wife came home and went to the basement. She found it very stuffy and humid. Unknowingly, she opened a window to air out the basement. That night, the bees found all the honey that had been stolen from them and stole it back! All of the beekeeper’s hard work was for naught. He woke up in the morning to find not a drop of honey left in his basement. So the story goes…

Well folks, I’ve seen it happen and was much disappointed last year too.

Anyway, this year, I was more careful. It’s amazing how fast we learn when our sweets are stolen!

This fancy cylinder is an extractor. You can put two frames in and then you spin the basket inside and using centrifugal force, it flings the honey to the sides of the cylinder and drips out the bottom spigot.

The honey is capped with wax, and that’s how we know it’s done. Honey has a “water activity of 0.6.” This basically means that there is not enough moisture in honey to allow fermentation. So honey cannot go bad. If we take honey that is not capped from the hive, it may not be evaporated enough. Thus you could have honey that ferments in the jar. You may notice that if you have honey in a jar for a really long time, it crystalizes. This is not your honey going bad, it just needs to be microwaved. Or you can stick the jar in hot water and the honey will melt again and become liquid. Most micro-organisms cannot grow in honey if you extract it when it’s capped. The “cappings” -wax- on honey is also pure white and makes excellent candles.

Anyway, you have to uncap the honey prior to extracting it.

It’s a sticky process. It’s best to have a bucket to do this in.

Then you put it into the extractor, spin it, then you let it drain into a container with a filter. We used a cheese cloth as a filter to get out unwanted beeswax, bee legs, pollen etc.

This picture shows really clearly how the honey is sometimes different colours depending on the flowers that the bees take from. We found that we had some really light honey and quite dark honey in this extraction.

The next time is either to pasturize it (heating it up) or you can bottle it straight from here.

We have yet to pick up our jars so in the bucket it stays for now.

And now you have learned more than you ever wanted to know about the process of honey extraction. Of course on a commercial scale, it’s a little different but the principles are the same.

In other news, we’ve been planting our Winter garden here this weekend. Peas, beans, cabbage, kale, and leeks among other things. We’re getting ready to harvest our garlic. The curly scapes are straightening up, letting us know they are just about ready to be plucked from the Earth. Since planting them in October, it seems like a wait well worth it.

I just have to mention this, I L-o-v-e gardening in a dress!

And sunhats….

Go on, call me a “Fashionista.” I can take it…..

The saying goes:

“A Swarm in May is worth a load of hay
A Swarm in June is worth a silver spoon
A Swarm in July ain’t worth a fly.”

Well, guess what month it is? It ain’t worth a fly! That’s what month! And we are having swarms upon swarms. In fact, Marc just called me less than 2 minutes ago and said “Guess what?” and I said “NO!”

-Yup, another swarm! I’m running out of equipment! I picked up $1800 worth of used equipment in the Spring and I’m down to my second to last bottom board, and my last outer cover. Just to clarify,

You have a bottom board, a super (at least one, perhaps several) with 10 frames each, then an inner cover and an outer cover.

Alright, so the bees and I are going to have a little pep talk. Bees, it’s time to settle into your homes and enjoy. You have plenty of room, you have food. You are happy, I promise! With all this swarming, you are going to make your keeper go out of business buying sugar, off her rocker trying to assemble new equipment until well after her bedtime! Besides that, you’re going to break the bank buying all this equipment to house you!

The reason they say that a Swarm in July ain’t worth a fly is because the hive has to have enough food and enough bees to get them through the Winter. You need -they say- 100 lbs of honey in the hive so that the bees survive the Winter. Now that’s a lot of honey. Anything in excess of that is mine as the Greedy Beekeeper!

To be honest, we had such a mild Winter last Winter, and our weather is not as extreme that I am not as worried about a swarm’s survival here as I would be in oh, say, Saskatchewan. I mean, heck, my bees were flying all through January and February last year which is a bit ridiculous.

Speaking of ridiculous, we have been trying very hard this year to grow cabbages. We planted the seedlings when it says on the package (March 1st), we tried to provide them with a warm environment and lots of water and they are seriously 1 inch tall. Perhaps it wasn’t warm enough.

But then we have this cabbage bit of root that we pulled off our old cabbages from last year’s garden. It was forgotten about in a bucket of weeds all Winter. It had no love, no nurturing, I did not once sing over this cabbage to encourage growth.

And we were told it won’t make a cabbage ball this year, they do not form “fruit” two years in a row. But it was sprouting leaves so I stuck ‘er in the ground and thought we could collect seeds off of it or something.

This is the cabbage that could not be. The unlikely cabbage, the inadvertent cabbage. The miracle cabbage. I think it’ll make a fine cole-slaw, don’t you?

Alright bees, wave good bye to the dear readers!

… now if you’d just behave, I’m sure we’d all get along beautifully… this means no more stinging me in the back of the head….

Just wanted to draw your attention to a wonderful post done by Backyard Feast on a journey into Self-Sufficiency.

Her and her husband live in the Cowichan Valley, which is on Vancouver Island, (often referred to as “The Big Island” when we feign attempts to imitate Hawaii…..) and they are successfully gardening and growing their own veggies!

It’s encouraging when you find people in your area doing similar things to what you’re doing. But I find in general, the blog-o-sphere wonderfully encouraging at attempts to grow your own veggies, take advantage of the land and really connect with nature.

Dear readers, your enthusiasm you share with me as I learn how to catch swarms or have garden failures keeps me going! I am so grateful for your comments and enjoy sharing your worlds as Marc and I bumble along here on Tiny Pender Island.

I said to him the other day, “We are trying so many new things. Gardening, Sailing, Beekeeping. And we don’t know anything about any of them. It’s amazing we have an success at all!”

Oh and to give you a taste of what is to come, Sunday morning found us catching yet Another Swarm! This one even bigger than Miss Marilyn!

Photos to follow…