Project Homestead

The bees are back!

We're starting over, again. We lost our last colony of honeybees this winter. Unlike the year before, we fed them sugar water, and we protected their top bar hive from wind by surrounding it with hay bales. But we had a hunch that half swarmed and left while we were out of town last summer, leaving behind a weakened hive that didn't make enough honey to sustain them. 

So we have a new plan. And a beautiful new hive: a Warre.

We were racing daylight and raindrops. But everyone helped—from preparing the site and planting thyme around the base to assembling the boxes and waxing the bars. Just like with our top bar hive, we had to level this hive so the honeycomb they build will hang straight down from the bars inside.

 

The package of bees seemed fiesty—and that's good. They buzzed and bunched up all around their queen, who was suspended in the center. Despite their long journey from the South, the thin layer of dead bees in the bottom of the box were the only casualties. 

Michael removed the candy cork that keeps the queen segregated from the rest of the colony and replaced it with a bit of marshmallow. (Genius!) Now, the worker bees will eat through it as they get settled in their new cedar digs, which I treated with Tung Oil. By then, they'll all know eachother. And the queen will be free to give orders.

The rain finally stopped, and the apple tree is blooming just over their heads. Their new, more sheltered, spot is lovely and makes keeping an eye on them that much easier. Now I can't wait to see them fly.

 

Honeybees, welcome home.

They came a week ago—all 10,000 of them—in a screened box. Their queen was hiding in plain sight, inside a small screened box of her own. Michael poured our new honeybees into their new top bar beehive on Sunday. And by Thursday, they had eaten through the candy plug to release her, and get to work.

And I mean work. Their family is only one-sixth the size they will be. Yet in four days, they'd built four bars' worth of virgin beeswax honeycomb. When we checked in on them, they were clinging to the comb they had built in a catenary curve, and moving over and under each other with ease. There's nothing frantic or frightening about it: Michael and our great beekeeping friend, Winnie, naturally wore mesh hoods when they opened the hive. But the boys and I can open the hive's back window anytime (with no protection at all) and take a peek ourselves.

Bringing home a colony of honeybees is hard to describe in the way bringing home a baby is. We have been planning for the arrival of these delicate little ones for months. But they are not cuddly and sweet and completely dependent on you. (And they don't grow up and help you tend to projects you all love.) They're the opposite, in many ways. From the get-go, they know where they live. They're already collecting plenty of nectar. They're making their own home.

Yet watching an intelligent, cooperative community thrive, when it can live as nature intended, is kind of awesome. These acrobats hover around blooming honeysuckle and again right outside their one-inch wide front door—telling the others where the good eats are. Honeybees each have their role, and they work together to keep the colony healthy. They're so good at it all that their sweet honey feeds us, too.

Truth is, they give me hope: Another living connection to all that grows in the ground reminds me that life is good. And bees are great.