Lessons Learned

I’ve been so busy this summer, that time is going by faster than I can keep up with blog posts. So I am attempting to catch up on a month’s worth of beekeeping in this one post.

We’ve already put up the second deep box with it’s 10 frames and the bees are busy with building honeycomb and honey for storage. Checking the frames every Sunday is the highlight of my week! Pulling out a frame that looks like this is beyond exciting!

Like how incredible is this?  That is all capped honey! We won’t be touching any of this honey, this is food for the bees during the winter months when they don’t leave the hive.

In this photo it’s an entire frame of pollen.

Here’s another view of pollen frame. Isn’t this gorgeous??

Earlier this month, at one of our hives, we had a die-off of thousands of bees. We came to inspection one day to discover a pile of dead bees in front of the hive. We suspect this was caused by some kind of pesticide spraying in the neighborhood. We heard that 5 other beehives were afflicted with this same die-off.  It’s incredibly sad and frustrating for us to see this. I literally felt like crying when I saw the dead bees.

Luckily, the following week, during our inspection, it looked like the bees bounced back from the die-off.  The following week, we saw very little dead bees and the Queen was still alive, thank goodness!

One big lesson that I’ve learned however is to not travel without antihistamines.  As my doctor suspected, I am mildly allergic to bee venom and every time I get stung, the affected area gets really swollen.  Case in point, a bee flew up my veil and I got stung right near my eye. 

And the next day, even though I iced my eye all night, my eye looked like this!! My entire left side of my face was completely swollen. I had to go to work looking like this, and I kinda scared people. LOL.  My doctor prescribed me a prescription strength antihistamine since I have such a severe reaction.

Since I started beekeeping in April…. I’ve been stung a total of 13 times…. Guess which foot was stung?  Now I know what the term “club feet” means. hahahaha.

My latest beesting.  I was stung on my thigh this Sunday, and my welt to prove it.

Despite getting stung over and over and over again, I still enjoy this hobby as much as the first day I started beekeeping.  I get extremely excited when I see frames like this. This is an entire frame of capped honey. In the center is uncapped honey that the bees are working on capping. We don’t know if we’ll be able to harvest any honey this summer for our consumption, but we don’t even care if we do. We are happy to have healthy hives and hopefully next year we’ll be swimming in honey for both the bees and us!!

Read more at gardening in the boroughs of nyc