What's For Dinner?

Bee Larva!!!! YEAHHHHHHHH.  Bee Larva!!!! YEAHHHHHHHH... - old school crank yankers joke... come'on somebody out there gets it... Yeahhhhhhhhhh.  Ok just me, thats fine.

And just kind of kidding about bee larva for supper, although, in some countries to do.  Yeah, they do.  They fry it like stir fry and eat it up.  They make excellent health claims about eating bee larva ( baby bees not devolped, similiar to caviar if you will), claiming its low in fat and high in protein.  Well, unfortunely that will be one bee product I will not be putting into to my body.  I need my baby bees to grow up and make me some honey!  I really wanted to post some links or pictures of this dish... lol... but I thought I would be nice and not do that to ya'll.  Google eating bee larva for all those curious who want to be like the cat.  Oh, how about this disneynature movie out now called African Cats - I want to see it!  Looks good. 

Why are we talking about bee larva???  YES, there is purpose.  Today's goal was to open the beehive (safely, implied) and search for bee larva ensuring that Queen Ortensia is laying eggs.  Now, serveral things have to happen before this can be, new baby bees that is.  Honeycomb must be built in order for the Queen Ortensia to lay the egg in the cells, Queen Ortensia must have mated with the drones in order to produce these eggs, and nature's process must naturally occur encompassing many aspects.  My family was in town for this exciting event making it all the more special.  My father, my main man Max (my nephew), and myself suited up for the event.  Others watched from outside the fence with holes in it...As if that would protect them in an all out attack of 10,000!  We opened up the hive, pulled out one frame.  Nobody can see anything, just chambers of honeycomb sealed - but what is in that?   Honey? Eggs? Of course, the side with stuff on it is facing my father and nothing on my side.  It's very difficult to turn  and view.  I put that frame back, grab another.  Again, the side with stuff on it is facing my father's side, just bees on my side of the frame I am looking at.  Nobody see's anything.  I now am a little nervous.  And I now realize that having my father looking for this bee larva may have not had been the best idea since he cannot see that well and we are looking for tiny eggs/larva.  At the last second, my sister chimes in with "Ben, put that in the other way."  I did forget, the frames go in a certain way and need to be put back in that way.  How she saw and knew that from a far I am not sure? - but I was thankful.  I grabbed a third frame.  This time there was stuff on my side, and bingo, I saw bee larva.  It was abundent and obvious.  YEAHHHHHH, we got bee larva.  I started to show my family when shouts of "there's the Queen" came flying in.  I didn't see her, and believe it was just a drone ( a bigger bee).  Today's mission was complete and boy was it crucial.  This, as far as I know, ensures I have a fully functioning healthy beehive and will soon have new bees.  I can't wait.  Possible video to follow........ STAY TUNED.   

BEE PIX's

This Queen comes in this cage, really neat.  You have to uncork the end with candy blocking it, insert into bee hive and then she eats from one side while the other bees eat from the outside in, whats that old song, "We meet in the middle..."  haha.  Once the candy is clear she can escape.  Good stuff.

Let me tell ya bout today.  Today's Goals:  Extract Queen cage to examine to insure that Queen Ortensia has escaped(if not have plan to encourage Queen to get out), Remove original bee box from hive and insert other frames in place.  In addition, put inner cover the bee hive.  Sounds easy right.  Well first we smoked the bees a little bit, opened the bee hive and grabbed the Queen frame out.  I was just simply holding the frame looking at it, when the weight of the comb and bees flopped out of position downward.  Round about the same time I noticed the Queen's candy appeared to still be not eaten completely.  Just great.  Now I got a situation... A few aggravated bees buzzing around didn't help.  I decided, to focus on the Queen cage.  I put the now bent frame back into hive and pulled the box out at same time.  Put cover back on and throughly examined the Queen's cage.  There were tons of bees on this cage I couldn't see anything and we had misplaced our bee brush we use to brush them off.  Finally, a breakthrough, I could see the candy was not eaten through entirely, but a path had been eaten and cleared.  Yes, my Queen had escaped into the hive.  Perfect, what a relief.  I was starting to think irrationally at the time so this was good news.  Now what to we do with bent frame?  I wanted to leave it and get out of there.  The main goals had been accomplished.  Dad pointed out what if that Queen works that frame first is on the frame?    Hmmm, yeah we should fix it now... So we did, not exactly easy to fix something when roughly 1000 little six-legged insects are crawling on it, thats 6000 legs, 2000 wings, and 1000 stingers you have to watch out for.  We were able to repair the frame the best we could.  We put the remaining frames in along with the repaired frame some comb on it already :) back into the hive.  Put the inner board(custom built by the way!) in the hive and walked away.  Mind you the mood of this procedure was tense, and there was an elevated level of concern at one point.  When the weight of the frame pulled it out, it was a strong jerk on those bees, they were cool though - but that could have been a bad situation.  I learned today, the you always hold frames vertically until you know for a fact the are complete and solid and eligible to be held horizontally.  Next check up for the bees will be in 2 weeks.  Will be observing if Queen Ortensia has been laying eggs.

Queen Ortensia Takes Her Throne

At 6:00 am this Monday Morning, I received a phone call from my local post office.  "Ben Temple this is Donna and I just wanted to tell you that your bees are in and..." before she could finish I said half still asleep I will be right there.  Now last week I stuck a deal with mom in which I agreed I would have a "real" beesuit instead of my homemade version I wanted to do.  I had to rush order it to get here in time last week, except it did not come last week or Saturday like it was supposed too.  It was also going to rain this morning, it's not advised to put bees in hive while it rains.  Not too mention I had ordered a smoker w/ my beesuit and I needed that to smoke out the ants that had invaded my bottom board of my beehive ( I got most of the ants out with honey, ahhh the irony :) - thats a different story for different day ).  Needless to say, I had a couple of problems on my hands this morning and I thought the bees would come on tuesday or wednesday.  I had to get my bees though, as I was driving into town praying to God to bless my bees amongst other things, I was HAPPY.  I haven't been this excited about something in a long time.  The preparation, the research, the hard labor, so much as went into this day, this moment that was coming, the moment of holding these bees.  I remember when I was still in California, I vividly remember ordering these bees.  A myriad of thoughts ran through my brain...
I got to the Post Office.  I knocked, hollered, and peeked through the crack.  No one was there.  Knocked again.  I remained calm, I know they would come.  I finally saw them and knocked and shouted again.  They said, "just a minute."  It seemed as forever...patiently I waited.  The lady goes, "oh, and this box came to for you so I grabbed it for you."  Perfect, that's my beesuit!  Then she gave me the bees.  Of course, as all men do I tried to carry both boxes at once to the car still in my flip-flops still waking up.  I thought to myself as I braced the bee box up to my chin walking to my car, this would not bee good if I dropped this box.  Made it home, sprayed some of the bees with sugar water as many had died on the journey.  Put them in storage while it rained.
I was very unprepared for the main deal.  The main deal is I have to stick my hand in the bee box pull out the queen box, release the cork(ever so carefully), put the queen into bee hive safely, dump the rest of bees into box, shut the door.  Sounds simple, it's not.  First of all, my beesuit barely fits, but it fits.  It's difficult to see with the veil on.  Luckily for me, my father had all the odds and ins all ready to go.  The corkscrew to pull the cork, the sprayer to spray bees, the sugar water already made, pliers to pull can out with, rubber band to hold queen cage in place, and he even built an entrance reducer.  So we got ready to put 10,000 bees ( now about 300-500 less) and one Italian Queen into their future home.
We opened the lid not knowing what to expect, dad said, just rip it open as it would be sealed by the can - which I think is normally actually correct.  However, I opened it slowly and took a peep and sure enough one bee popped out and started crawling around.  Named him Charlie.  Nevertheless, we had a situation on our hands.  What had went wrong here?  Why were the bees able to get out?  And if I opened this lid all the way were all my bees going to fly out?  I had no choice.  I had to get the Queen.  I opened it and the feeder can was still in place along with the Queen cage.  Only about 100 bees were roaming around.  No big deal, Whew!  Ok, so next I pulled to Queen cage out did not drop it bonus points for me!  Checked her out and officially named her Queen Ortensia upon first site.  You may remember the poll I had up earlier, Ortensia is Italian for "the garden lover".  I like this name, and apparently so do some other people and I intended on making a garden area down around the BeeMax area.  Now, when we pulled her out many bees did escape and we had to cover that up pretty quickly.  I wish I could have taken a close up picture, Queen Ortensia is very pale, reddish in tint, but more like clear reddish/brown.  She looks very different than the other bees.  I gave her to my father to look at and before you know it my father had rubber banded her to the frame and stuck her in.  I asked to have Queen Ortensia back in order to remove the cork (the main thing you have to do) in order for her to get out at a later time.  We then put her back into the hive attached to a frame.  Next, took off the piece of wood blocking hole and pulled out the feeder jar and dumped the bees one or two times into beehive.  As instructed before, the bees did not like that and they got a little fussy.  Then, set the box in the beehive so rest of bees will be able to fly out into their new home!  I will come back in a day or two to remove this box and replace with the rest of the frames.  For now, the bees seem to be liking and adjusting to their new home just fine.

I will post pictures later this week of event and maybe even some video.

All in all, it went pretty well.  Glory be to God for always providing everything we need at the right time.  

Another Beemaster Meeting

Proverbs 19:20  Listen to advice and accept discipline, and at the end you will be counted among the wise.  - God, aka The Bible
Proverbs 13:10  Where there is strife, there is pride, but wisdom is found in those that take advice.
- God, aka The Bible

One day earlier this week I was extremely blessed to get another chance to meet with a wise old beekeeper.  This guy's grandfather was a beekeeper and he worked with a commercial outfit that operated around 1000 beehives, I just have 1 - LOL  This guy was amazing, he answered all my many questions and gave sound advice.  I tried to listen in and understand everything he was saying.  One of the most interesting things he said was that once you decide on your beehive location, leave it there and don't move it.  Even if you move it 3 feet over it will confuse the bees as apparently they have this totally righteous built in GPS compass in their tiny little brain.  Nevertheless, he was extremely helpful answering many questions that I had.  Overall, he said I have a pretty good set up and everything should go just fine for me.  Between this Beemaster and the other Beemaster there is a combined total of around 1200 beehives mastered experience.  I think its safe to say that I might be the most advanced beginner beekeeper there can be!  
CURRENT UPDATE:
Tick-Tock, the bees come in like 4-5 days.  Enlight of not being able to convince my mother that my home-made bee suit was sufficient, I now had to rush(and pay for that rush order) an order of a completed bee suit to pass my mother's inspection.  Which I still don't have by the way.  I went by the post office to tell them that I would be receiving bees (very surprisingly that conversation went wonderful, actually perfect) and to call me as soon as they receive them.  They should be here this monday or tuesday, wednesday at the latest.  Dad and I exactly don't have the beehive completely fixed yet.  We have done some vast improvements though!  I actually did a DUMB thing and sanded everything a little too much or rather in areas I should not have.  Thus, some ends are like wavy and not flush like they should be which is not good.  So, we are dealing with that, among other improvements that are going ok but not complete. 
STAY TUNED!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MORE UPDATES COMING & THE BEES :)

BeeMax

Thank you all for voting on the Queen name, the Queen's name will be released on Opening Day...that's a baseball joke :)

Current Update:  Working on getting last couple of bee suit items, Working on getting last couple of pieces to beehive, Built/Building frames(what the bees use to make honeycomb on) for beehive, Working on restoring, painting, and add-ons for beehive, Planted/Planting Bee Food, Building Foundation for beehive and walkway.

BeeMax is the name my nephew and I choose for the area we worked on that will contain the bees.  The name is perfect:  it contains the word "bee", contains two letters of my name "Be" from Ben, and Max is my nephew's nickname.  I love it.  It's a Triple Play...just not gonna quit am I = LOL.  {Side note - to all those Los Angeles readers and unto all really, it saddens my heart to hear about the recent violence at Dodger Stadium,  and I just want to say I learned along time ago that it is important to have good sportsmanship on the field, but equally important is having good sportsmanship as a fan.}  Back to BeeMax, my nephew and I worked tirelessly to get a bunch of work done with limited time.  Just to give you idea of what we did, here are the tools we used:  Rake, Leaf Rake, Garden Hoe(Spade ended), Long Shovel, Regular Shovel, Clippers/Sheers, Pronged Hoe, Axe, Hedge Clippers(electric power), Lawn mower(gas power).  And here is what we did.

Sticks, Trees, & Vines...Oh these Vines!

                            
 <<<Max working Hard>>>

 Stump ville...What an ordeal these trees were!!!  Seriously, I had to hand saw ALL of these because I was unable to fix my chainsaw...As you can see> there is always that one in life that stubborn.  No, actually it was just polar.  I had to dig deep, axe it, and then just cover it.  There was no way to pull it out(with my tools at least), and no telling how deep it goes.

<After clearing all the trees
After clearing most everything>










Good Job!