The Chronicle had an article about Bi-Rite this week. In it our hives our mentioned, although we are not called out by name.

However, you can see the honey from one of those hives, alongside our own Noe Valley Honey (from July) on the shelves in the store.




You should do yourself a favor and try the Rooftop Honey -- it is amazingly tasty. I kinda wish we could have it under our own label.

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Please visit our shop to purchase Noe Valley Honey and other hive products from the Pollen Princesses.

Getting Ready for Winter

This past week has been about visiting all four of the hives that are still going and getting them set for the Winter. Not that Winter poses a big issue for the bees in the Bay Area, but still with much rain projected this year we want to make sure that the hives are set.

A few days back I visited the Dolores Park location to check the two hives there. One hive still had a lot of activity in both hive bodies, and brood and supplies in each. I took the super off the hive and set it aside for extraction -- about four full frames of honey there. The top hive body still has plenty of honey for the bees to use. They will have both hive bodies for the winter, but they seem to have a large population so it won't be an issue for them to heat.

The second hive had not been opened for a long time, though we took a super full of honey off it a couple of weeks ago. When I started pulling frames out of the upper hive body I realized that the entire upper body was all honey, no brood, no pollen.
The lower body contained a little brood and some eggs (meaning the queen is still present and healthy) and a lot of honey with some pollen. Clearly this hive has backed off on brood rearing in preparation for the Winter. I went ahead and took the hive body full of honey off and left just the one hive body for the bees. Less space for them to keep warm, but still plenty of supplies.

Rescuing honey!
On Saturday, we both went to our friend's to check the other two hives. These are both now very busy hives. Both hives had brood and supplies in both hive bodies, and the hive that had started out so slow actually had a super full of honey! The other stronger hive had a super full of capped honey, and one that just had a few frames of nectar not yet cured. We removed all the supers but left both hive bodies on each hive. We added entrance reducers to all the hives to aid in keeping down drafts and minimizing the need for them to dedicate guard bees when they need all the bodies they can get to keep warm.

We will extract all the honey in the supers and the one full hive body (another 80 lbs maybe?) The one super that has only nectar will be stored and returned to the bees in the Spring. They won't have to heat the space over the Winter, but they will have the supplies as a head start in the Spring.
A quick dusting of powdered sugar in all the remaining supers to keep the mites under control and we closed everyone back up. We'll come back to them in February or March, when the rains start to let up to check on how they fared.

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Please visit our shop to purchase Noe Valley Honey and other hive products from the Pollen Princesses.

Upcoming

Next on the agenda, bottling and labeling all this honey!

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Please visit our shop to purchase Noe Valley Honey and other hive products from the Pollen Princesses.

Third Extraction of the Year

This past weekend was spent extracting more honey. We had accumulated three supers full that we were storing in our laundry room until we could get the extractor from the bee club and make some time to actually extract it all.

Those two requirements converged this weekend and we were able to get it all done. We had a total of about 70 lbs. of honey when all was said and done. One of the supers had frames with two clearly distinct shades of honey so we separated them out into two batches. Therefore, when we get everything bottled and labeled you will see a total of four different batches available in our shop - July, Early August, Late August and September. It still amazes me how distinct each different batch can be from the other.



Meanwhile -- we all know how crucial scent is to honey bees. In Britain, according to the Daily Telegraph, this trait is being used in surprising ways. Honeybees are being trained to respond to specific scents and then used to sniff out explosives! See the photo essay here.

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Please visit our shop to purchase Noe Valley Honey and other hive products from the Pollen Princesses.

Maintaining

Not too much has needed to be done with any of the hives for some time. They are all still bringing in nectar, which is great this late in the year.
We did have an opportunity to remove a super of capped honey from one of the hives at the Dolores Park location for a photo shoot done by Bi-Rite. They have a book in the works about food supply chains and wanted to include some shots of the hives we maintain for them.
The book will not be out until later in 2011, but we'll surely keep you posted.
Meanwhile, we've also taken honey off of the newer hive at the original location a couple more times. We are just waiting now for a chance to get the extractor and spin it all out of the comb. This makes a total of four supers from the one hive so far, plus one more from the new location. Lots of sticky sweetness.

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Please visit our shop to purchase Noe Valley Honey and other hive products from the Pollen Princesses.