This past Friday was a busy work day. We have the best workers ever. However they made a huge disaster of the front yard. I think they used every nook and cranny of the entire front yard. We are all finished selling nucs. Nucs are starter hives. We sell starter hives in the spring to those wanting to get started into keeping bees. That season is done. Now for the cleanup and preparation of storing these boxes until next year. Nuc boxes are like a mini hive. This is where the honeybees stay waiting to be placed into their new home. However, when the honeybees are started in these nucs, they start working and drawing out the wax foundations, thus drawn out combs. We reuse these combs. Now every nuc box needs to be torn apart and pull the drawn out combs out of the nuc boxes so that they will not be destroyed by wax moths. We will take the drawn out combs and put them in honey supers, (recycling). The bees love this, they only have to work half as hard, if the combs are already drawn out.

Yesterday's Project

I have a lovely flower bed in front of the house...well it use to be lovely. Between the construction workers and the dogs it has been 75% demolished. This is the bed where I keep my most treasured flowers, callas. I think that they are the most elegant of flowers. But, no, honeybees are not fans of this flower. I know my husband brings this point up often. I have many others which are. Back to the flower bed. We opened up our front porch and now the dogs like to run through the flower bed and yes pommel the flowers, and leap onto the porch. So to discourage this behavior (yelling at them has not worked,LOL) I bought some planters to make a sort of fence on the font porch to discourage this behavior. I think it is high enough to keep the dogs out of the flowers. This is the first day, I replanted flowers yesterday in the bed and here are some pics of my flower pot fence. By the way for all you potters out there, I tried something new. I hate it when the pots are full of dirt and too heavy to pick up. So, I filled the pots with empty milk jugs, water bottles, pop bottles or whatever old plastic I could find. The pots you see in the picture are 3/4 full with plastic jugs. My planters are so much lighter and it makes a nice little drain area for the water. We will see how well it works. If anyone has tried this before please let me know what your experience was.

Honey Lavender Body Butter

I have been working on some projects. Busy as a bee, so to speak. I have made a fresh batch of Lavender Honey Shea Butter, which also has Mango and Cocoa Butter in them. This is a whipped body butter, there are no preservatives in it. It is a butter made with natural products. If you have really dry skin it is wonderful. My daughter has been using it on her scrapes and bruises from soccer games....she is a very aggressive soccer player and often collides with people, let alone the ball. The 3 main ingredients are Shea Butter, Mango Butter and Cocoa Butter.

This is the information that I found from either the distributor of the products that I use, or from herbal books, magazines and of course the internet. No claims are being made that my products will heal, or prevent anyone from getting anything listed below.

My products are not tested on animals. They are tested first on myself and of course the husband, I think he likes the extra attention:-). Then the kids, my daughter loves this job. And of course many nurses and Dr.s are trying them too.

About Shea Butter: It has been used for years as a base for medicine type ointment and it is said that it has ant-inflammatory properties. Shea butter has been used to treat the following skin conditions: scars, eczema, burns, rashes, stretchmarks, wrinkles, dry cracked skin, dark spots, skin discoloration, chapped lips, and may even help with psoriasis. Shea butter may also help by blocking the sun. Shea butter has a natural ability to help block the sun. No claims may be made because the sun blocking ability varies much from an SPF of 6 to nothing.

About Mango Butter: Anti-aging: It is used in the tropics to help block UV rays, minor wound healing, used to restore flexibility and reduce degereration of skin cells. This is a list of what I found about mango butter: extremely dry skin, rashes, wrinkles, blemishes, sunburn, shaving rash. I found many places where it said that it helped to reduce wrinkles(I love this).


About Cocoa Butter: Great for extremely dry skin. The moisturizing abilities of cocoa butter are used for prevention of stretch marks in pregnant women, used for dry skin and lips, and as a daily moisturizer to prevent dry, itchy skin. Helps diminishing burn marks and making scars less visible. It also contains natural anti-oxidants.

These are the main ingredients that I put into my body butters and as you can see all the properties of these oils listed above, is why I have chosen them. I use high grade, organic if I can afford it. I am posting some pics of the body butter that I have just made. It is a whipped butter and is very light and fluffy. A little it goes a long way. I have packaged it in 2 fluid oz containers and I am selling it for $10.00. Pic shows body butter without label.

Coconut oil and of course honey and lavender are also used, with a little vitamin E.

I had a busy day yesterday. I finished a flower bed in front of the house. Did some laundry and started to mow and the belt broke on the mower. The yard is going to need to be baled before I am able to get to it. For the best part of the day: I caught a swarm. That is also my job. So now I have caught 2 swarms this year, to the left are some pics. Swarms are the honeybees way to reproduce. The old queen leaves the hive with some, okay, in this case a lot of loyal bees. The old hive will have a new queen when she hatches out. Thus, a new family. What you see to the left is a portion of the old hive with the old queen. The bees ball up on a branch or anything and then scout bees look for a new home. They do not intend to stay here, they are seeking a new home. When the scout bees come back with directions(can you tell I give presentations to little kids) to the new home, they will all go to this new location. Often, this is an unwanted location. Like in a chimney or in the walls of a house or building. Or, even attics. We do not remove bees from buildings but if people see a swarm and call, I go and collect them. They are typically very docile. Why? Because they have no home or eggs to protect at this point. The queen is typically in the center of the ball of bees where she is well protected by other worker bees. A swarm of bees, when flying, often looks like a big cloud and it kind of moves like a cloud. I hope to eventually tape one in the air. First I'll have to talk the Beekeeper into a video camera. Sorry, but the pictures are in reverse order. So start at the bottom. Have a great night!

This morning I worked at the day job. Then planted a few flowers and started working in the flower beds in front of the house. The siding is looking great and the remodeled front porch is looking amazing. I love it. I have a sitting porch for watching the thunderstorms and maybe I'll see a swarm from this old porch. Love to watch storms. Tomorrow will be a yard day and a day to get caught up, I need to make some more amazing body butter.

Today is a gorgeous day. Unfortunately I have spent a lot of the day working on paperwork.. Uugh! Girls got to do, what a girls got to do. However I did snap a couple of shots of Sadye moving honey supers from the barn. Currently we store our honey supers on the second floor of our barn. So all supers have to be moved from the barn to a forklift of some sort and stacked on a pallet, shrink wrapped and then moved to the truck. This is one of the things that needs to change. We need a storage area that we can store and move them by forks. We all 3 do this together, but Sadye is eager to get done and has already started. The half colored barn in the background should be sided by the end of summer...it will be red. We will be quitting early tonight, that is Sadye and I will be. She has a soccer game tonight. Yeah!
The forklift in the back, is a Bobcat..some may hear me call it Mama's Cat..because it is mine.

Paper work day/Flash flood in the bee yard

Today and tomorrow are my paperwork days for this week.......YYYUUUUUUUUKKK! I hate paperwork. So pretty much a boring day for the beekeeper's wife. The thing is that when the beekeeper has the wife helping in the yard for the last month she is about a month behind and now overwhelmed. I did get a good start today. But I'd rather show you some pictures of a day that we had a couple of Fridays ago. We had worked over 12 hours for the day and had just come home and cleaned up to go out for some supper(neither one of us was going to do any cooking). That was when the rain that had been coming down all day decided to rain a little bit harder, we had a little flash flood. We then started our trek to town and when we received a phone call from a friend......."Your bees are Under Water!" What??? He said, "Your bees are under water!" So we turned the car around went back home hooked the truck and trailer up as quickly as possible and headed for the Nucs that we had just made up the day before. It was bad. Some hives only had a few inches left out of the water. We moved all the hives to dryer ground and as we picked up each pallet the water would cascade out of the hives. And then so would the bees mad as heck. I was surprised that they lived. Of course the uncapped brood did not make it, but the surprising thing is that the capped brood were able to make it. Who would have guessed. I was shocked that the honeybees themselves made it. Especially after seeing all that water just pour out of the hives. I am sure that they would not have made it if it were not for the friend who noticed them. It was as though they climbed to the ceiling and hung on for dear life. They are so smart. We have put bees in this location for the past 20 years and have never had a hive be under water here. The funny thing is the hives were moved maybe 20 feet away and the next morning were confused looking for their home. By morning the water had receded and noticing the confusion we moved all the hives back to the use to be flooded area and within a short time the lost bees became settled. Amazing isn't it.

Tales and Stings of a Beekeeper's Wife

As I said before I am the wife of a beekeeper. He has been trying to turn me into a beekeeper over the past couple of decades. I am new at this whole blogging thing so please bare with me as I learn this blogging business. I will be blogging about some of my adventures with my husband and without him, and some may be funny, that he may or may not appreciate, and some make me want to cry and never see a bee again(then there is the next day). I will be blogging about past and present events, because there are many and some possibly more interesting than the day to day current boring events. I love to photograph bees and kids, so on this blog you will see many a picture of the honeybee. Not only do I help with the bees I also do all the paperwork, and make products of the hive. Which some are failures, and then there are those that I refuse to let fail. And then there are those products that my family, friends and I have fallen in love with. As I make these products I will also be blogging about them. As for now those of you who dare to take a peek, thanks for just that. Please feel free to contact me or comment on the content of this page. My goal is not to bore anyone including myself.