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Category: Honeybees

Doing Mid-Summer Morning Chores

  • By - DiyGarden
  • Posted on

I thought you all might like to go along with Ron and do the morning chores on this hot summer day. We have chores down to pretty good system. Ron still works a full-time job so systems are needed here on the homestead. Right now our animals are easy to care for and we are very careful to make sure that we don’t bring in any high maintenance animals for now. I’ll bring you along with pictures but if you want to get a real behind the scenes view check out the video here.

chicken

Feeding the Laying Hens

Right now the only chickens on the homestead are our laying hens. There are 14 of them and we have them free ranging in a part of our pasture where they get their fill of grasshoppers and other delicious bugs. To help make sure they continue laying, they are fed a laying crumble which gives them the protein that they need to keep laying big beautiful eggs. Our hens lay eggs in the colors of green, blue and brown.

The system we have for feeding the laying hens are gravity fed tubes. Here is an article that explains how to make your own gravity fed tubes. Ron fills them on the week-end and there is enough laying crumble to last through the week for our hens. He does have to go out every morning and clean the water troughs out and give them fresh water every morning. Right now he also puts a freezie bottle in each waterer during these hot summer months.

Feeding the Honey Bees

Bee and blossoms

Our honey bees are pretty self-sustainable, however, in this heat just about every plant has died and any blossoms that the bees could fed off of have withered away. So, Ron does give them sugar water during this time. This helps feed and hydrate the bees until fall. He feeds both hives every other week or so.

He never knows what kind of mood the bees will be in, laid back and easy to get along with or… in the mood to sting! After a couple of stings he has decided to suit up in a bee suit and to use his smoker. The smoker helps to relax the bees and make them easier to work with. Here is a look at when he first brought the bees home.

Hope you enjoyed doing chores with Ron. Let me know what kind of chores y’all have to do out here in the heat.

Here is to your homesteading dreams,

Shawn

Honey from Our Own Backyard

  • By - DiyGarden
  • Posted on

We Become Beekeepers

Four years ago we decided to get a couple of bee hives and have some honeybees. I had met a couple of people around the area that had them and were keeping them in their backyards, so I knew we could have them too. We had been talking about getting honey bees because we wanted the pollinators for our fruit trees and garden and also for the honey!

Harvesting the Honey

 We joined a local beekeeping association were we took a year-long class teaching us all things about bees. Before I knew it we had two hives and had bought a couple of bee nucs. A bee nuc is a small nucleus of bees which includes the queen and worker bees that goes into the hive.

Ron in his bee suit and our first bee nuc

It takes a year for the hive to become established and after that we gathered honey in the early spring. This allows the bees to restock their hives with enough honey to get through the upcoming winter. Ron usually feeds them sugar water in the early spring and late summer to help them make enough honey to keep them alive.

Honey

The great thing about the bees is that there are several different products that you can get from them. Just the honey itself so much can be done with it.

Spiced honey: There are so many different spices to add to honey. We have added ginger and really enjoy that flavor. My husband’s favorite treat is honey and peanut butter on toast.

Honey medicine: Adding cinnamon to honey and then placing a stick to make a lollipop or forming balls is a great add to your medicine cabinet for a cough for colds or allergies.

Honey candy: These are a fun way to eat the honey. Seal the bottom of a straw and fill feel them with honey and add some flavored extracts.

organic honey
Ron harvested 23 pints and 12 half pints of raw, unfiltered, organic honey. Yum

Wax

Candles: Candles are a great way to use the wax that come from the honey harvest. Different essential oils can be added to the wax for the candle.

Lip balms & make up: I haven’t done this yet but I really want to make some lip balm with our wax. I’m not really into much make-up but I know that you can use wax in different face products.

Kitchen Help: Making beeswax wraps acts like cling wrap that can be used over and over again.

As we become more experienced beekeepers we will be able to do more things with our bee by-products such as pollen, propolis, royal jelly, and bee venom.

Bee and blossoms
Bee and blossoms

We really do enjoy the bees on the property. They are easy to maintain and help with the pollination in our gardens. Thinking of all they do I think the old saying of “busy as a bee” makes total sense.

Until next time,
Shawn

January Backyard Honeybees Upkeep

  • By - DiyGarden
  • Posted on

I want to share some things with you that we will be doing with our honeybees every month in order to keep the hives healthy and thriving.

Let me tell you a little about our set up. We live in Ft. Worth Texas on a little ½ acre lot. Our winter season is shorter than most so it doesn’t get really cold and we hardly ever have any snow or freezing temperatures so we are able to do some maintenance with our bees over a 2 to 3-month period. We also have some chickens that share the same area as the bees.

This month we will working around the outside of the hive because our temperatures typically don’t get above 60 degrees so we won’t open the hives to do any inspections because the cold blast from outside the hive could really put a damper on things like killing off the bees. I know that some people ask “Well how do you know if the bees are still in there?” With our chickens in the same yard, we are out there a couple of times a week and when the temperatures in the 50’s we can see that some of the bees are traveling in and out of the hive which tells us that things inside the hive are doing ok. As soon as the weather breaks and the temps are above sixty degrees we will get inside and check things out in more detail.

Backyard Honeybee Hives

We check around the hives to make sure there are no weeds grown up close the hives, within a few feet. We use cardboard boxes that we flatten out and lay on the ground the help control the weeds. Our hives are about 6 or 7 feet away from the fence line so we make sure the fence line is trimmed back to make sure the bees have enough room to fly out and then up. We also check for any dead bees that could be around the hive and make sure that it is all cleaned up. The chickens that we have in the same yard help with that part of it because they eat pretty much anything and everything that they can get a hold of.

We also go thru all of our supplies and restock anything that we are low on. We make sure that our extra frames are clean and ready to go into the next hive that we may be starting.

If you are ordering package bees, now is the time to do so. The new bees will be ready to be delivered in the first part of April. If we keep up with things during the months that we can’t get inside the hive we will be ready for the new ones.

When everything is ready to go there will be less stress on you and less stress on the bees. You can enjoy the watching them flying in and out like a super highway.

Tell me about your honeybee set-up.