Stuff Bees Do: Sting

Here's a short little clip of what happens to a poor honeybee when they sting you! Rest in peace, bee! (warning: graphic!)

Honeybee face and body painting!

When you have multiple passions in life, they are bound to overlap now and then.

I work as a face and body artist, and often times I mix that with my love of bees! If you pop over to my other Paintertainment business blog, you'll see that this year I've been posting a painting every day, that coincides with whatever national or international day it is.  Well, "International Honeybee day" is coming up on August 19th, so I did this little painting on my leg today for that!

Back in July was "Don't step on a bee day," so I painted a smashed bee on the bottom of my foot!

I also did a honeybee themed design for a spring themed online competition a while back, and won first place! Here's that design on myself...

Here's another little cheek art design I did this year...I love doing cartoony cheek designs!

I also do henna! Below is a honeycomb design I did on myself!

 And no, this is NOT dangerous black henna...just looks dark in this photo in my dark living room with the Instagram filter! ;-)

So, who knows, maybe someday I'll get to do a honeybee themed full bodypainting! Until then, I'll incorporate them into whatever I can!

As for the bees, we're planning to check on them next week.  Hopefully they are busy filling and capping honey in the supers so we can take them off next week, and let them focus on filling up their stores for winter!

August 5th - Just Looking!

Today we checked the bees between 11:30 and 12:00.  It was sunny and 70 degrees. The bees seemed happy and weren't bearding as much as hotter days!

Today we really just looked. It had been a little while as I was out of town on a road trip for 10 days.  We decided not to take out any full frames as there were still some empty frames in the boxes from our last visit, so there is still room for them to build more comb and finish filling & capping other cells.

We're going to leave them "bee" now until late August, when we'll start pulling off full frames, do a mite check and mite treatment, and then give them time to really fill up those deeps for winter food stores!

My Smoker Fuel "Cocktail!"

Last year, which was my first season doing bees, my Dad had his hip replaced, which meant I had to "go it alone" for a while.  Nothing makes you learn how to use enough smoke on your bees like going alone as a newbie! I was so worried about giving them too much smoke...for weeks I'd end up walking around the field when I was done for 30-45 minutes trying to get the bees to stop attacking my veil. (I couldn't just hop in the car in my suit because my two little boys were in the back seat!). Needless to say, I quickly learned how to get my smoker smoking, keep it smoking, and use enough to keep the bees uninterested in me!

Here's my favorite smoker "cocktail!" A mixture of cedar shavings, dried pine needles, and some commercially sold fluffy "smoker fuel" from my dad!  One year we put our Christmas tree on the side of our house on a gravel pad and kindof forgot about it for a while.  It dried out, needles fell, and then when we had a huge rain, all the needles washed nicely into a big pile! Score! So I filled a gallon ice cream pail with dry needles and now use them in my fuel!  The cedar shavings I got cheap at a pet store.  The fluffy stuff is some smoker fuel my dad had purchased previously, and I mix them all together for some awesome smoke!

  

One of the many little tips I learned while taking the beekeeping courses at the University of Minnesota is to set the smoker on it's side, on the bellows, when you're lighting it.  The bellows act as a pedestal, holding the smoker at a great angle to spread out and expose your fuel, allowing you to stick your lighter in there and get it all going!

 

July 18 - Full Frames!

75 degrees and humid today! We made it out just between rainfalls.  We removed 10 frull frames of honey from Beeatrice and 5 from Penelobee, replacing them with some new frames.

July 11 - Washboarding

It was HOT and sunny! There was some washboarding going on with Penelobee's colony.  Lots of capping is going on, but none are quite full yet.  We added another super to each.

July 4 - Capped honey!

It's the 4th of July and we started the day by checking on the bees!  We added a 3rd super to the top of Beeatrice's stack, and a 3rd super to Penelobee's between the two that were there.  Both colonies had honey in the supers and bees up in the top box!  We saw some capped honey in Penelobee's frames as well. Didn't dig into the deeps today...