Designing the Label

I'm selling honey and can't keep handwriting labels. Diane, a friend from college, offered to help design the label and now I need to get off my butt and think about some styles and images. Here is what I have so far.

I am torn between retro signs, circus sideshow, elegant botanical drawings or medieval woodcuts and manuscripts. Thoughts?

Dead Hive

I went out to check on the bees today. It has been cold and raining a lot this month and last year I almost lost a colony because their top blew off and they got all wet and cold and moldy. I wanted to make sure they were OK and it seemed warm enough today and sunny to open them up and make any adjustments they might need: more empty frames, reduce them down so they are warmer, treat for mites, feed them, whatever.

I have five colonies. Well. Now I have four. Hive Four is dead. No activity, dead bees all over the place. I am heartbroken. It was one of the swarms from the super productive colony, Hive Two, and we caught it when it swarmed on the fig tree last April. This means that Hive Four had the original queen from Hive Two and perhaps she was old and died this month. I also remember being a little hurried with them last time I opened this hive and I worry that I might have had something to do with their demise. Tempting fate, I lifted the top off even though I did not have a veil on to protect me if they were still some bees left in there. Nothing. No activity. Plenty of capped honey, just no bees. I had to hold back tears. I love these bees and want them to do well. This is my first dead hive. I am taking it hard.

Hive One, the ones that are my special favorites because they are the ones that swarmed into my house after my invitation, is weak again this winter. Hive Two is still a mini volcano of bees, not sure what their secret is. Hive Three is also a bit weak, not a ton of bee activity. Hive Four is dead. Sigh. Hive Five, another swarm we caught from Hive Two is doing fairly well.

It is funny how the stronger hives and weaker hives perform in winter. I would not have thought Hive Four would have failed since they were doing pretty well up until I left in early December. Hive Five, which is doing medium well, was fairly weak when I left. That is the one I was worried about but it is doing fine. And Hive One was pretty strong when I left and now it is barely putting along.

I wanted to open the hives up and see what was going on in there but decided to leave them alone since it really disrupts them and makes them use a lot of energy to put things back in order. Energy they do not really have to spare. Right now there is very little food for them. San Francisco is a great place for bees since something is blooming for them almost year round. November and December may be warm and sunny some days but it rains a lot and nothing is blooming for them. I understand that in a few weeks the eucalyptus will bloom and the bees will happily break their winter fast and fly out to collect the eucalyptus nectar.

Bees Want Their Honey Back

I extracted about 4 gallons of honey on Friday. I am getting the hang of it and it is going a lot faster. 2 1/2 hours from start to final clean-up. This weekend while I was filtering honey and managing all the wax and making candles I had to open the kitchen window because all the heat from the oven and space heater was making me feel faint. As I opened the window a bunch of honeybees came flying in and more were headed my way. I screamed a little and shut the window as quick as you can when covered in honey and wax. I guess they could smell it cooking and homed in on their property. I caught all the inside bees in a glass with a postcard over the top and let them back outside. I could see them all hovering outside my windows looking for a way to get in to take back their honey.

Molded Beeswax Bars

You think these are so cute? Me too. But look what I had to do to my kitchen to make them.

Procrastination Defeated

I managed to get my honey sold to Mission Pie yesterday despite trying every known self-sabotaging procrastination trick in the book. Biking it down there was not so bad, it was not as hot as I thought, it was a beautiful day for a bike ride. I had the two boxes of honey jars wrapped in a bag and then bungeed to within an inch of its life to my bike rack and then I tried not to hit any bumps as I swooped down 20th street hill at 100 miles per hour. I sat in Mission Pie and made little tags for the jars since I could not find any suitable stickers on such short notice. They are handwritten with too much info for a hand written tag. I got 80 bucks in pie credit and I am so happy to magically change extra honey into pie made from locally grown wheat, fruit and eggs...on a farm where my friend works! I love this town. And now I am started in the honey business!

Lacking Labels

I am trying to figure out how to sell my honey to Mission Pie. Actually, I am procrastinating. I lack labels. And since my truck is in the shop I can't get any before the 2pm meeting I have with the owner. And I can't figure out how to get the honey over there. It is heavy and all I have is my bike. It is hot and I do not want to get sweaty. Guess I'll break out those shorts again. It is noon. I have to get to the grocery store to find an average honey price, to use their scale to find out how much each jar holds, to find labels that fit the jars at the lame-o office supply shop, and then to bike all the way from the store to the pie shop all before 2pm.

So I am blogging instead. Classic.

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.