Category: Environment

Author, Beekeeping, Bees, Book, Environment, hive mind, The Honey Bus

Reserve your seat on The Honey Bus!

by Meredith A. May2 Comments on Reserve your seat on The Honey Bus!

 

THE HONEY BUS is the story of my beekeeping childhood in Big Sur, where the wisdom of my grandfather and his honeybees gave me the strength to overcome a broken home.

“Captivating and surprising…. If you’ve ever been stung by a bee you will instantly forget the venom and remember forever the sweetness and redemption bees offer in this extraordinary book.” —Sy Montgomery, New York Times bestselling author of How To Be A Good Creature and The Soul of an Octopus

Available in hardback, Kindle or audiobook: ORDER HERE

thehoneybus.com

 

 

 

 

Apiculture, beehives, Beekeepers, Beekeeping, Bees, Environment, Gardening, Honey, honeybee, Queen Bee

Pimp My Apiary

by Meredith A. MayLeave a Comment on Pimp My Apiary

I have beekeeper envy of my friend Earl’s bee yard in Port Costa. He has thirty-plus hives of happy, gentle bees that have acres and acres of unmolested meadows to draw from.

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Over Memorial Day Weekend, my other beekeeper pal Aaron and I helped Earl inspect his hives. First Earl schooled us on the proper way to light a smoker. Cedar slices + broken bits of tree branch + balls of green grass = a smoker that goes for an hour or more.

Then we checked his hives to make sure the bee colonies are thriving. We looked for eggs and a queen. Earl is so badass he doesn’t wear any protection.

During a snack break in his “bee trailer” (WANT), he showed us the pollen he’s collecting from just one hive.

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There were yellow, purple, grey, red and orange balls of pollen, all from the different plants growing in the area.

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Curious, we decided to separate and taste the different colors to see if we could tell which plants produced the pollen.

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Here are our tasting notes:

RED – earthy, with a sour, bitter bite. Most likely culprit: Buckeye

YELLOW – grassy, tastes like horse saddle. Plant guess: Mustard

PURPLE – floral, sweetpea. Plant guess: Thistle

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At the end of the day, Earl gave Aaron and me a split colony to take back to our garden in San Francisco. We call them “Earl’s Bees” and they are adjusting well to their urban neighbors. (hive on right)

 

Apiculture, Beekeepers, Beekeeping, Bees, Environment, family, Honey, honeybee, The Honey Bus

A Tour Inside Grandpa’s Honey Bus

by Meredith A. May8 Comments on A Tour Inside Grandpa’s Honey Bus

Here’s Grandpa, the man who taught me beekeeping when I was five, touring the inside of his World War II Army Bus – turned honey factory in his Carmel Valley backyard. He expounds on honey harvesting, why the bees are disappearing, and the proper way to remove a stinger.

This is one of the last videos I took of him before he passed away earlier this year. Note he wears no gloves when he sticks his hands in a hive!

Beekeepers, Beekeeping, Bees, Beeswax, Entomology, Environment, honeybee, Urban Farming

How Bees Make Wax

by Meredith A. May3 Comments on How Bees Make Wax

The other day, I opened my hive to discover my bees clinging together like a cluster of grapes, “festooning,” the fancy word for bees making wax. In the hot months I like to put an empty box on top of the hive to help with circulation, but the bees decided they wanted to fill it with honeycomb.

The way bees make wax is fascinating. One of the best explanations is from William Longgood’s “The Queen Must Die” (1985):

“Usually only young bees are capable of making wax, but, when necessary, older bees can turn the trick, in the same way a retired craftsman can, in an emergency, recapture a former skill. After eighteen to twenty-four hours of clinging together, the temperature climbs to about eighty degrees Fahrenheit and a strange thing happens — tiny wax flakes appear on eight small, pocket-like glands on the abdomens of young bees.

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The bee scrapes off the wax with her forelegs and kneads and chews the secretion in powerful jaws until it is a soft, pliable ball.

She frees herself from the clinging mass and deposits the wax at the base of the sheet of wax foundation with its hexagon imprints. Quickly she moves away, and another bee takes over, perhaps a celebrated architect or artist, who pushes and tugs at the soft wax, drawing it out into the hexagon shape.

Then she, in turn, steps aside and still another craftswoman comes along to draw the cell out farther, each a specialist, it seems, in a different phase of cell building.”

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