The bees are dead, long live the bees

I had a 100% deadout this year. I know a couple of the things that I did wrong, but I don't know all the factors that contributed to it. This is really sad. Now, I have to try to figure out what the reasons were, and if there was anything I could have done differently.

The learning curve on beekeeping is pretty much a vertical wall.

First Attempt at Mead

It takes me a long time to work myself up to trying something new. I'm always worried that I'll mess it up and end up having wasted my time and money. However, in this case, everything is either cheap or reusable.

I keep bees, and earlier this summer I was trying to do something with one of my hives (I can't remember what now), and I ended up with a frame of unfinished honey. This honey smells a little off, but it's perfectly safe to eat. I suspect there were some odd flowers or something that went into this batch. It just doesn't taste very good in my tea.

So, I saved it in the fridge until I was ready to try making mead. I have enough of that honey to probably make just about five gallons of this stuff.

More mead thoughts

As is usually the case I'm not the first person to have thought about the medieval way of making mead. I came across a great post in a forum recently that really clears up all my questions. This is the kind of mead that I'm going to be making at the end of the week-

Some thoughts on mead and pre-industrial bee keeping

So, in a lot of mead recipes there's the direction to boil the honey with water and skim off the scum, which sterilizes it a bit and removes impurities. With modern beekeeping methods there's very little in the way of impurities, so this always seemed like a slightly redundant step to me. Until two days ago when I had to clean up a mess I let build up in a hive, and I ended up with almost 2kg of honey, and the associated wax... and a bunch of dead bees in it. Pro tip- bees are busy little creatures, and if you leave a bit of extra space on top for any reason they will build right up into it lickety-split.

Bee roundup for this year

Beekeeping has a very steep learning curve, and not a lot of leeway for errors. So far going into winter my own hive seems strong-ish, and the one that I'm looking after for a friend is dead. Getting a sneaky walking pneumonia for a month and a half really put a spanner in the works, and probably killed the second hive. Welp, at least my friend will be getting honey from his first year's investment. We can buy a box of bees in the spring and just install them into a hive that is full of drawn comb (ie. full of the wax cells arranged on frames and ready to go). He has a flow hive, so that's going to be interesting to see.

I finally got my own bees wrapped up for the winter and a mite treatment on them a few weeks ago. I also put some loose sugar sandwiched between sheets of newspaper. I tried making a solid candy block, but I did something wrong and it was quite liquid even when dry. Something to try again for next year. Maybe I didn't leave it on the heat long enough, or I didn't use the hand blender long enough to put in adequate air bubbles.I did use my cheese thermometer, which doesn't quite measure high enough, so perhaps it didn't hit the right temperature. I'd never tried candy before, so it's a bit of a mystery to me.

When I put the mouse guard on the front they started coming out at me, so that feisty-ness is a bit encouraging. I knew they wouldn't like the hammering on their hive so I saved that for last on purpose. Good thing, too. Despite the cold they were out for blood! I got out of there before they could sting me. May they stay feisty and alive through the next long months. And then promptly calm down and become docile again in the spring.

I can always hope...

So, I got 2kg of half-finished honey out of my own bees when I took out a frame to keep them from getting honey bound earlier in the summer, and I'll get 1/3 of my friend's honey when I go in there this week and remove and spin out the frames. I don't know how much that will be, but I'm hopeful. And so are some of my friends who have a standing order for honey, too, I'm sure.

I will make mead, darnit. I will. I have everything now except the honey.

The bees are doing well

And I'm learning so much... There's only so much you can read before trying it for real. Experience is the best teacher.

And it's true what they say- To make a small fortune in beekeeping... start with a large one. Good thing these bees are my only pets right now!

I haz bees...

Or, I will soon enough. I need to spread some white clover seeds around the fields near where they're going to live. This is pretty darn exciting. I've been thinking and planning this for about three years now. As I said to my husband the other day, some people take up marathon running. It hurts them *all the time* they are running. I'll only get stung every once in a while, and at the end I'll have honey... It's far less crazy than some people!
Sometime in the next three or four weeks I'll have a whole bunch of little lives to steward. I think I'm ready for the responsibility.
Maybe?