My bee sting is settling down and I can bend my elbow again. I finally figured out that a combination of the homeopathic bee remedy, lots of advil and smears of arnica gel on the swollen area make it so instead of ten days of itching and painful swelling, I get three days of swelling, very little pain and no itch! Magic medicine.

I screwed up on the honey filtering the other day and contaminated about a gallon of honey with water from the anti-ant bucket that the whole contraption was sitting in overnight. It seeped in through the gate valve at the bottom of the bucket. Either it is not watertight or I did not screw the valve shut hard enough. Either way, now I have a gallon of watery honey. I am going to feed it back to the bees as soon as I can get one of those goofy feeders that looks like a mayonnaise jar turned upside down and screwed to a wooden platform. I still can't figure out how sugar water or honey won't just flow out due to that thing called gravity, but somehow it works.

Wild Bee Nest

I just found these photos in my backlog of blog ideas file. Holy macaroni.

Wild bee nest, originally uploaded by Max xx.

Bee Beard 2, originally uploaded by Max xx.

Filtered Honey

After work today, instead of eating dinner, I filtered all the honey we extracted yesterday and made a peach pie just to show off. I fueled myself with an entire bag of Paul Newman mint chocolate chip cookies and a glass of water and the occasional finger lick of honey. Occasional, hah! I probably licked about a pint of honey off my hands during the whole process. Don't worry, I washed them each time with hot soapy water.

Filtering and bottling honey is a little like watching paint dry. You have one giant bucket full of honey straight from the extractor with bits of wax and bee parts and other weird stuff that got in the honey somehow. Then you have an empty bucket with several layers of metal strainers of different mesh sizes and then a few mesh paint socks under that all strapped into a five gallon bucket with a bungee cord so it hangs suspended in the bucket. Then you pour the unfiltered honey into the top of the first strainer contraption, which is only about 2 inches deep, very inefficient, until it passes through to sit in a glob in the paint sock below. The paint sock has a pretty fine mesh so the honey filters very slowly through this section. Finally it reaches the bottom of the bucket and you are ready to open the gate valve in the bottom of the bucket and fill the glass jars with fresh clean honey.

Repeat for about two hours until you finally have poured the entire contents of the bucket of honey through the strainers. It takes forever, I mean it's honey, right? You often have to scrape off the globs of wax clogging the wire mesh of both sets of strainers plus the paint socks, plus you have to make sure there is enough space between the various strainers for the honey to slowly drip drip drip down to the bucket. I had it sitting in the sun all day so it would be more liquidy, but by the time I got home it had cooled off a bit so the honey was pretty thick again. I think warmer honey would go a lot faster.

There has got to be a better way to do this. My first improvement would be to make a deeper first layer of straining so I could wander off for half an hour rather than just having 10 minutes to wait for the two inches of honey to drip down. Second, I would find a way to set the buckets up so I could just open a gate valve and pour the honey from the first bucket into the strainer rather than the current messy heavy method of lifting the bucket up and pouring it in, hovering over it and trying to scoop the drips that are escaping down the sides back into the bucket where they belong with one hand while desperately trying not to drop the whole thing into the dirt in my front yard with the other.


By the end of my filtering process I had filled up about 4 gallons of honey in various size mason jars. There is an unknown amount in the bucket slowly dripping through the filters right now and I may get another gallon out of it. I thought we had seven gallons, but I guess not. Still, it is a LOT of honey.

Stern Grove Swarm

This afternoon I was on my way to Peter S.' house to extract all the honey I removed from the hives yesterday. My phone rang and I forgot until just this second that it is against the law now to talk on a cell phone and drive, so I answered and it was Peter S. He had just got a call from the fire department and he needed to go catch a swarm in Stern Grove that was "on a bench." We agreed that catching a swarm would be more fun than extracting honey so I met him at his house and helped him load up the nuc box and some other stuff for catching the bees.

We arrived at 20th and Wawona, right on the edge of the park, a steep ravine filled with eucalyptus trees bordered by lawns and paths and benches. We drove right in through the service entrance, thrilled to be driving in the no drive zone since we were Official Beekeepers. At first we did not see anything by any of the benches we passed. Then the park gardener rolled up in his red electric mini truck that lucky city gardeners get to drive around in. He pointed out the bees in a tree "over that way" but we still did not see them. We worried they had already moved on but then I saw a long dark arm-like shape dangling out of a holly tree about six feet off the ground. There was our swarm.

The first cut we made was a mistake. The branch the bees were hanging on turned out to be two branches and only half the bees came down. A blob of them fell to the ground in front of the nuc box we had set up under the swarm. The second cut was better and we got the rest of the swarm and laid them on top of the open nuc box to let them make their way in. Meanwhile, the ones that fell were marching right into the box via the landing board. They just know right where to go...right into their new deluxe accommodations.

The gardener hung around and peppered us with questions and talked about how it warmed his heart to see the bees here and how worried he was about them and did we know why they were dying out and he was extra worried ever since he found out Haagen Daz was concerned and people who make candles and how much he loves ice cream and how he got stung by some when he was mowing the lawn and oooweee did it hurt but he tried not to be mad because he likes honeybees. On the 5th or 6th cycle of his speech Peter S. wandered off to his car and I was left to nod and smile and hope the guy would be on his way soon.

We left the box there till dark so the field bees could return to the hive.

It took about 2 hours to cut the wax caps off the super frames, put them in the extractor and whirl it around till all the honey flew out.

SEVEN GALLONS!

Honey Harvest

At the very end while we were loading supers full of honey into my truck, the family and neighbors all came home at the same time and descended on us. Honestly, the whole sharing of the bee kingdom with so many people stresses me out. I like things to be quiet and solitary, but so far, each bee adventure has been shared with at least three other people and sometimes more, all vying for a good view or to hold the frames or to peer inside. People stand in the wrong spots, drop frames of bees, squish them in the boxes while returning frames to the brood. One guy does not like to wear his veil and he has long hair so I worry he is going to get bees in his hair and get stung badly. There is a teen who is forced to get close when she does not want to and she got stung on the forehead last time and now is extra scared. It is very chaotic and not relaxing at all. I miss the days of the quiet hum of the bees, the smell of wood smoke and the clear blue sky as company.

I have to figure out some way to keep it more simple and peaceful and to make space for the family's enthusiasm and interest. I mean, they are so kind and generous to let me put the hives in their garden and they pay for half the equipment, so I need to find a way for all of us to get what we want out of this situation.