The Carolina Bee Blog

This is a good week for The Carolina Bee Company. We have been busily feeding the girls, trying to help them build up their food stores; making soap and other goodies for all of our upcoming festivals (another post to come, to include all festival dates); and getting ready to attend *the* bee conference of the year, EAS, which will be in Boone, NC this year. We will write up another post after we return from Boone, to tell you all about the wonderful time we had at the conference.




Also this week, we were informed that we are a featured farm on the Certified Naturally Grown website. Go to www.naturallygrown.org and you'll see a picture of the bee bearded lady. Click it and you will be directed toward our page.

UC San Diego - studying the effects of sub-lethal doses of pesticides.

Article:Scientists Researching Vanishing Honey Bees

Excerpt below.

Ralph Orlowski / Getty Images

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Imagine a world without apples, almonds and broccoli. It takes honey bees to pollinate most of our favorite fruits, nuts and vegetables -- but the bees are mysteriously disappearing. Some commercial beekeepers in San Diego have already been affected by this phenomenon.
"""

"""
UCSD Professor James Nieh.
 [...]
The UCSD biologist is trying to determine if certain pesticides affect the bees ability to communicate.

"Because this is a large part of how bees actually pollinate our crops," said Nieh. "A bee finds an almond tree, she actually will go back inside the nest and tell her nest mates where to go to find the almond tree. And if that communication is disrupted, which we think it may be, and some studies suggest it is, that could also have an impact on the health of the colonies."

Nieh said sub-lethal doses of pesticides have been used to kill pests that threaten honey bees but those pesticides may be affecting the bees too. When bees find flowers, a food source, they return to the hive and do a dance to indicate where the food source is located


Nieh said pesticides may disrupt the process.
"""

The Carolina Bee Company is now officially a Certified Naturally Grown beekeeping operation!

Hi all. Just a quick note to let you know that we will be in Greensboro tomorrow, July 3rd, 2010 for the Fun 4th Festival. If you happen to be in the area, stop on by to see us. We'll have our observation hive with us, will be talking all about bees and answering all of your bee related questions, and of course we'll be selling all our The Carolina Bee Company goodies: soap, lip balm, body butter, honey and more!



We hope to see you there, but if we don't have a safe and happy 4th of July weekend!

Last week was National Pollinator Week. Our NC governor got into the spirit while working her beehive at the Governor's Mansion. The younger guy with the dark hair and no veil is our illustrious state bee inspector Will Hicks. He visits TCBC a couple times a year. Good stuff.


News & Observer article:  http://tinyurl.com/27yrp68

We are getting all the girls ready for the next big flow, which in our area will be Kudzu. Yes, it is invasive and terrible for surrounding trees etc, but it's here so we may as well do what we can with it. We hear that you can eat the leaves the same as you can eat spinach, but have yet to try it (they say the younger, smaller leaves are more tender). We have, however, collected a bunch of the little purple flowers (for those who do not know, they are there in clusters hiding behind the leaves) and made a tea out of the nectar and turned it into jelly. It has a wonderful light "grapey" flavor.

Anyway, we're going to try to catch some kudzu honey this year. The nectar is extremely attractive to the honey bee, so we plan to find a large patch of it and stick some hives around. Hopefully, this will give us a nice honey haul that we can both extract for our personal consumption and sale, and use for their winter food stores. We're really tired of buying sugar!

Happy June!

Sourwood!

We are in The Dearth period with our bees. Luckily, we do have some sourwood trees, and they just started to bloom. It's not enough to fetch that prized honey, but it certainly is welcome food for our bees. If only a little.

Swarms!

We have had a few swarms. We witnessed two swarms today. One we caught, but the other... they seemed to have made an attempt, and then went back home to the hive. I suppose we have to watch more carefully.Swarms are healthy and natural, but if the bees fly off... well, they are on their own. We felt fortunate to catch the first one.

The Carolina Bee Company has been... very busy of late. Installed a pile of packages in time for expansion. Monica has been grafting a bit. We've had a lot of visitors, and of course, we are juggling supers trying to catch as much of the flow as possible before it ends hoping to have a decent harvest, but with fewer hives than expected due to a particularly challenging winter. Oi!

And on top of that, Todd, who is still working a zillion hour job outside of beekeeping, travels quite a bit.

We're trying to keep up.

But! It's a good busy. If you are busy, you are living! And we love what we are doing with the bees.

The girls look healthy, we may actually get some honey this year, and it looks like we have expanded to a more sustainable level... a level that doesn't allow us to slow down though.

Beekeeping can be tough. There are so many things attacking the hives these days, it is hard to keep up. Alas! We are trying to do it the clean, natural way. With that, you take your blows to the chin and move on.

We really appreciate all the support we have been getting from all our bee friends out there. The season has been a good one, if nothing else, if for building new ties, new friendship and cementing the great friendships we already have.

Check out the website for all our natural products. Products that may be landing in a store or two here and there, and at some local festivals (and online of course) as we spread the good word about honey bees!

-todd and monica

TCBC is crazy crazy crazy right now! We are full into the bee season. Monica is grafting queens; we're fighting swarming tendencies; the tulip poplar is blooming; and we are doing crazy amounts of work in the name of expansion.

Oi!

But we love it. When you love it, it makes all the difference.

Keep buzzing! as our friend, fellow beekeeper, and storyteller Doug Elliott is apt to say.

Spring is prime swarm season for bees. They are coming out of winter, the days are getting warmer, and they are in full swing trying to expand the population of the hive to prepare for the upcoming nectar flows.

For those of you who do not know much about bees, a swarm is how a hive reproduces themselves. They essentially split into two. The queen from the original hive will lay eggs in special "queen" cells, that the bees will feed and nurture to become her (the original queen's) replacement. Once those cells are capped over and ready to become the replacement, the original queen will leave the hive with up to 75% of the bees from that hive.

Typically, this "swarm" will find a nearby tree or some other place to "hang out" until they find a new suitable home. While the majority of the swarm stays in the temporary position on the tree, they send out certain bees called "scouts", to find a possible new home. Once the scouts come back to the swarm, they communicate what they found. The bees will then decide which place is the best option, and they finally all take off to their new home.

Yesterday, April 19, 2010, we got a swarm call. Somebody has a beehive that became so overpopulated due to this build up, that they had to swarm. We took our bee vac (a vacuum built with just enough power to suck up the bees in a swarm without causing them harm) and headed out. When we got there, we found a nice sized swarm of bees on the side of a tree. We got a ladder, placed up to the side of the tree, and "sucked" all the bees into the cage inside of the vacuum.

It took around 30 minutes or so, and we were all done. We brought them home, and gave them a new place to call home. We hope they will be happy here.

This weekend marks the start of a 10 day event called Herb Fest, here in Wake Forest, NC. They will see approximately twenty thousand people over the next ten days, most of those people coming this weekend and next.

The Carolina Bee Company has set up a booth, for the weekends only (Fri-Sun) to sell our soaps, lip balms, body butters, wax blocks, and candles, as well as discuss bees and beekeeping in general with the public. The first day was today, and it was fairly quiet. We sold a few things, but mostly talked bees. Most folks are starting to learn about bees because they are all over the news because of CCD. It is sad that it took this to bring awareness, but it is also very good that the general public is starting to gain a better appreciation for our friend, the honey bee.


So, if you live in or around the Wake Forest, NC area, stop on by and see us. There are plenty of other vendors you can shop from as well, and the most wonderful array of organic herbs, vegetable plants, and flowers for you to purchase, all at very reasonable prices. Hope to see you there!

We finally purchased a video camera and have begun filming some bee related stuff.

For the first video, I figured folks might like to spend a comment-less 30 seconds with the honey bees. :)

Folks south of us have seen the tulip poplar pop (begin blooming) weeks early, there are reports of ornamental holly blooming, and we are only a couple weeks away from the official big necar flow anyway so....

We just put our supers on. We don't have a ton of hives that will be that productive this year, but we hope to get some honey regardless.

We will post a picture when we get a chance.

-tcbc

The weather here has been beautiful lately. We've had 65 degree plus days for about a week now. The girls love it, and are flying around like crazy. Since it has been so nice out, we have been able to do some digging in the hives. We recently cut out 2 established hives from the top of an elementary school gymnasium that had been there for over 17 years. They came with tons of bees each, a whole bunch of comb, and a lot of honey. We are still extracting it. It takes a while when you are crushing and straining everything ;)

When we cut those hives out, we brought them home and put them in their new homes. Today, after they have been here for about 2 or 3 weeks, I checked on them. Both queens seem to have made it through the ordeal no worse for the wear. They are busily laying eggs, and the workers are busily bringing in food stores, building comb, and seem to be very happy. We are of course happy to now have their genetics (remember they have been "feral" for at least 17 years...which means they lived through the mass die off's of feral bees in the late 80's early 90's), in our bee yard. As a queen breeder, this will be a valuable addition to our business.

As I write this, the bees are flying all around. Spring is here, and we will hopefully have more and more days like today; 74 degrees and the sun is shining.

Here in North Carolina, just north of Raleigh, we are fortunate enough to have warm days every month of the year. Well, the other day, March 9th, the temperature hit 72 degrees and the honey bees were loving it!

All of our neighbors love our honey bees, but they seem to visit one neighbor in particular more often than not. Or at least we hear more stories from them. :) They and their kids find them as enchanting as we do.

On this particular day, our neighbor snapped a lovely picture of one of our ladies cruizing a just blooming crocus flower. If you look carefully, you will see the crocus pollen collecting on the back legs of this honey bee. A pollen collector will get pollen stuck to her body, or collect it directly, and then comb it down to a special carrying recepticle on the back legs called a pollen basket. When they finally come back to the hive, these pollen-laden honey bees will look like they have multi-colored leg warmers on their two back legs.

If you see this, you have found the blog for The Carolina Bee Company. We intend to use this blog to inform our friends about news and views relevant to us. So far... all is experimental.