New Products: Boo-Boo Balm and Cracked Skin Salve!

I'm excited to announce a few new items to our shop! 

Boo-Boo Balm

When I was little and got hurt, my grandpa Harvey would pull his "medicine" out of his pocket...an empty chap stick tube...pretend to twist it up and apply it to my "owies." Miraculously, it always helped! The Boo-Boo Balm is lovingly developed with Grandpa Harvey in mind, only this one is not empty! A great overall first aid salve for owies, real and imaginary.

Ingredients: beeswax, olive oil & grapeseed oil infused with calendula blossoms, lavender blossoms, comfrey leaf, plantain leaf, and chickweed leaf, and a bend of lavender oil & vitamin E oil.

Cracked Skin Salve

Available in 1 oz and 2 oz tins, our cracked skin salve is great for relieving dry skin, especially in our dry Minnesota winters!

Ingredients: beeswax, olive oil infused with calendula blossoms, plantain leaf & St. John's Wort, and a blend of pine needle oil, German chamomile oil, lavender oil and tea tree oil.


All of our products are hand made in small batches with beeswax from our local MN honeybees! Your purchase not only helps support local business and the material costs of creating memories with my dad and the bees, but helps us help our little pollinators thrive! ;-)

Thanks for stopping in! Hope you have a BEE-autiful day!

The Costs of Beekeeping

Just for fun, I've been keeping track of every expense I've had so far in this new beekeeping hobby! Now I don't have nearly as many expenses as someone starting from scratch, because I've been able to utilize all of my dad's equipment, including his boxes, frames, feeder pails, smoker fuel, extracting tools, etc etc etc...  So, this is by no means an accurate estimate for what it will cost to start up an operation from scratch! But, I love being organized and find it interesting keeping track of stuff like this.

Also, I've spent money on things not required to get into beekeeping, stocking up on herbs, tools and containers required to turn the beeswax into things like balms, salves, candles, etc.  Here's where I'm at so far for expenses alone, not including my dad's investment in bees last year and equipment over his decades in beekeeping...

2016 - First Season (2 colonies):

$0.00 - Bees - My dad bought the bees this year!
$165.33 - Education - Beekeeping class at the U of M, and a couple books
$165.54 - Equipment - My own smoker, gloves, suit, & hive tool, and oxalic acid & vaporizer
$175.27 - Beeswax Products - Supplies & herbs for balms & candles

Total: $506.14 spent. I believe we extracted around 36 pounds of honey total?

2017 - Second Season (2 new colonies):

$257.10 - Bees - Two 2 lb packages
$110.00 - Education - Beekeeping 2nd year class at the U of M
$205.51 - Equipment - More frames, uncapping fork, refractometer, mite kit, winter patties, etc
$550.29 - Beeswax Products - Supplies, herbs, containers for balms and new salves

Total: $1,122.90 spent. We extracted around 124 pounds this year!

Keeping our fingers crossed that we won't have the expense of 2 new packages of bees next spring...hopefully they'll make it through winter and we can split some hives next year!

There are a few things I forgot to add like sugar for syrup, lighters for the smoker, and olive oil for balms, but this is all pretty close. Once you add in the priceless time spent with my dad out in the fields tending to the bees, you can see why we find our honey to be so precious! :-)

Now how is this honey parceled out? My dad and I split it up...first we give a good chunk to my friends who generously allow us to keep our bees on their property and show up into their yard every week all summer long! Last year what liquid gold was left I hoarded in our house to enjoy personally! ;-) My boys have become pretty accustomed to having honey on Ritz crackers every day as an after school snack, haha! And my 2nd grader's lunch of choice is a peanut butter & honey sandwich he brings to school every day! ;-)

This year I'm loosening my grip just a tad since we got a lot more, planning to give a little sampling to some family and friends as Christmas gifts, and maybe...just maybe...sell a little bit. But we'll see once I get my gifts together. ;-)

Thank you for sharing my fascination with bees by reading my blog! Stay tuned for some new beeswax products coming to the site SOON...as you can see I've invested more this year in acquiring herbs needed to create a couple more products!

Honey Extracting Day 2017!

We extracted honey on November 18th! I know, it's pretty late to be getting to extracting but we stowed away the supers right before my dad went on a 2 month road trip! So, now that he's back we got to harvest the fruits of our labor!

I was there for a little over 5 hours, and when I left there was still honey to be strained. The strainer was getting clogged often and had to be cleaned, dried, and replaced, so that part took a while.  But, we harvested probably 4 times what we did last year so it was a great year!

Here's a video of what we did!

I also didn't blog about one other visit I made to the bees last week...I went in and gave them some winter patties.  Crossing our fingers they make it through the winter! I'd LOVE to be able to split a hive next spring!!

Winterizing the Bees!

Dad is back from his 2 month RV trip, so on October 30th we winterized our bees! Temps were in the upper 30's, and it was windy. Not ideal but still the best weather day of the week, so we figured we'd better get this done as winter is moving in fast all of a sudden!

Beeatrice still seems to be the weaker of the two hives...there were some dead bees at the entrance (though I remember those being there a couple weeks ago when I went to feed them), and there were more bees up under the cover in the top box. They all really stayed inside the hives as we worked.

Penelobee's colony, however, we could hear the roar of buzzing inside as we worked, and they immediately started coming out once they saw the vaporizer coming in their entrance.  There were not many up around the lid so I'm assuming they are down low where they should be.

Feeder pails were pretty full on both of them, which we removed and dumped out, so they've gotten all the syrup they are going to get for the winter!

Here is a video of what we did today!

Our next BIG activity will be the glorious day of honey extraction!! This will happen in November, when we can get a date to get together, so stay tuned!