Cottage Gardening with bees in mind

I don't have any grass in the front or back yard. It's all garden.

Over the last 27 years I have added more and more perennial beds.

It's my passion to garden and I knew it was environmentally a good choice.

I've chosen to create cottage style gardens.  This type of garden is not formal and so plants have a casual look.  Plants are allowed to self sow where they please.

Most people find the garden attractive and interesting, but others who are more traditional may prefer their grass.

I believe I think differently because I've lived in other countries.  England especially where the gardens are so amazing.

Many homes were built with a low brick wall all around the front.  The perfect backdrop for a garden.  No one can grow roses like the English.

Gardens are less work than most people think.

By using a layer of large chunk bark chips (the small ones disintegrate way too fast) the weeds are kept to a minimum.

Stick with hardy, drought tolerant native plants and you'll not need to water either,

Close plantings--or allowing the flowers to crowd each other--also limits space for weeds.

Birds pick at seeds and do an awesome job of eating insects.

Before taking up beekeeping, I had spent a year reading, writing, researching and talking about honey bees.

I'll never forget a particularly difficult time a few years back.  I went to tour the garden as a way to relax.

If there was any kind of message to send to encourage me, it was bees.

They were very busy buzzing all over the Russian sage that was in bloom.
Every summer the bees come to this plant, almost like a frenzy of collecting.

[Photo Russian Sage across the front of the photo above - photo taken prior to blooming]

It smells like sage and is very hardy and drought tolerant.  It spreads nicely but is not invasive.  And of course the honey bees love it.

Bees love all the flowers in the garden but Russian Sage is the plant I watch them forage the most.

It might be because it blooms later in the season when there are less flowers available.

The Basics of Splitting Hives - Creating Nucs

Paul Kelly, is an Apiarist that works in the Field Laboratory, at the Department of Environmental Biology, at the University of Guelph, Ontario.


He attended our Beekeeper's meeting this month (Middlesex, Elgin & Oxford Beekeepers' Association) and he talked about some of the studies and surveys carried out over the last two years and gave a demonstration on how to create splits to make up for winter losses.

I did my best to take notes - so I can't guarantee they are completely accurate.

Also, sorry I have no photo of Paul to show from the meeting, but here's a photo of him from the summer when he won the bee beard competition at Clovermead's Apiaries (blog from 19 Feb 2009 - http://thebeejournal.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_archive.html).

My excuse for the lack of photos is that I was too focused on chatting with the beekeepers' and bidding in the Silent Auction to take photos. But I did win this amazing book printed in 1935 and a box of past issues of Bee Culture magazine. SCORE!!! This book is still in print and I have a new copy but it was a real thrill to get an old copy for my bee book collection. (the other photos below are from the book and don't relate to Paul's talk).

In Ontario, it is agreed that hives need to have their fall treatment done in August. Waiting to Sept/Oct is too late and a couple beekeepers who reported losses of 80% had done their treatments after Aug.

Paul mentioned that making up splits is essential to help make up for colony losses.

Note that these notes apply to beekeeping in Ontario. April and May is too early to create splits because the bees have not built up their population yet. The methods to divide a colony vary considerably, depending on the circumstances.

A new colony needs to be a full strong colony by the fall. It can be determined to be a full and strong colony if it has created a surplus of honey.

Splits should be done in late May/June and not after June. Splits that are done earlier will be smaller splits.

There are two kinds of colonies: 1 = Product and 2 = Replacements for Losses.

When dividing a hive and introducing a new queen, use light smoke so as to not scatter the bees.

Find the queen: Remove the second frame from the deep to be divided to create some space. Scan the frames quickly for the queen - looking for differences. Remove another frame and look down in box at the frames - the queen will avoid light and most often she'll be in the box moving to the next frame. Focus only on looking for the queen and nothing else. Once the queen is found, either put her in a queen cage or set the frame aside (Paul recommended resting the queen frame in front of the entrance so that if she falls off the frame she can go back inside the hive.

For the new nucleus hive, pick frames from the strong hive with both brood and bees--2 frames as a minimum. In June 3 to 4 frames are used to create a nuc. You will need to add bees too by shaking bees from some of the other frames because there will not be enough bees on the just the frames alone to keep the cluster warm during the cool nights. Also add an empty frame to the nuc plus 1 or 2 frames of honey and pollen.

Honey supers are put on the 1st of May, otherwise the deep will become overcrowded.

Paul puts a screen over the entrance of the new nuc hive to keep the bees inside the nuc box and he recommends taking it to another bee yard (another location farther than 3 kms) if possible. This would prevent the bees from straying back to their original hive.

One or two days later you can introduce a local queen. He did not recommend letting a weak colony raise it's own queen, stating that a weak colony won't raise a good queen.

If the new nuc is left longer than a week without a new queen introduced, they will create their own queen cells.

On the second day, open the screen from the front to release the bees. They will reorient themselves to their new location.

After introducing the queen, do not disturb the hive for one full week. If you open the hive before one week, the bees might ball and kill the queen.

After one week, when doing an inspection, it's not necessary to look for the queen. Just look for eggs.

A question was asked about letting the bees create their own queen and Paul's comment was that if bees are left to create their own queen, the bees will become mean.

Munro Honey in Alvinston, Ontario

If you like white wine or light tasting drinks then you must try Mead. I had never had it before although I had heard of it spoken of as a popular drink from the Middle Ages.

Mead is made with honey and water and yeast that is then fermented.

History tells us mead is probably the oldest alcoholic drink known to mankind and there are many mentions of it in the historic writings.

See a brief history of mead on Wikepedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead#History).

It is believed that the word 'honeymoon' came from the tradition to supply a newly married couple with enough mead for a month, ensuring happiness and fertility for a full cycle of the moon, hence the creation of the word honeymoon.

Munro Honey in Alvinston makes an award winning mead and if you've never tried mead, I suggest trying their blue label "Mead" or my personal favourite, the green label "Sweet Mead".

Munro Honey http://www.munrohoney.com/ is a large scale commercial beekeeping operation.

Last summer I drove out to Alvinston, Ontario to pick up my supplies and had a brief tour of their brand new facility--sorry I didn't have a camera with me at the time. I was really impressed with all the large stainless steel vats for the mead making.

In the store they offered samples of the wine (no they didn't card me to make sure I was old enough to drink alcohol--those days are long since past). Of course they sell honey (raw, creamed, flavoured--just about all the ways you can package it) and they have a really quaint gift shop with bee and honey related items.

I found some great primary books there on bees - Honey in the Hive (http://www.amazon.ca/Honey-Hive-Anne-F-Rockwell/dp/0060285672/ref=cm_cr-mr-img).

Munro Honey run around 2,000 hives and they supply many of the grocery stores in the surrounding cities with honey and honey comb.

My nephew Codie, had never tried honeycomb before so I made sure to buy some for him to try. He's addicted now and every time he comes over he looks through the kitchen until he finds it.

I bought my original hive boxes and supplies from Munro Honey last year and now that I've decided to give up procrastinating on finishing preparing my hives, I placed an order for my wax covered plastic foundation.

I'm moving forward, and here's the box of supplies just delivered.

The off-white sheets are wax coated plastic (permadent) which will slide into the frames for my honey supers.

The honey super is the box that goes on top and it's just for honey only.

This is where the extra honey will go and it's for the beekeeper's use. Beekeeper's only takes the extra honey from the bees that they don't need.

Both plastic foundations have a light coating of wax on them which smells great. It will encourage the bees to use this pre-molded foundation to build their honeycomb.

The surface of each sheet is pre-pressed with a honeycomb pattern which the bees will use as a guide when making their comb.

The larger black permadent is for the medium sized deeps where the bees will live and raise their brood. The medium deep is the box that sits on the bottom (that is if you're picturing the traditional beehive with two boxes, one on top of the other). Bees will store some honey and pollen on these black frames for their own personal use as well as using most of the cells to raise their brood.

Bees have special wax producing glands on their abdomen. These glands will secrete the liquid wax into little pockets on the bee's underside. The wax then cools and turns white.

The bees then remove these little scales of wax with their feet, chew it into a soft mash with their mandibles and shape it into perfect honeycombs... easy eh!!

(I can't even DRAW honeycomb accurately let alone make it yet this insect does it with no schooling, no drafting paper, rulers or anything!!!)

This new permadent foundation is black. I haven't seen black before in all my web reading. I think I may have seen a couple photos of frames with black foundation. I expect the advantage with black is that you can more easily see the tiny little white eggs at the bottom of the cells. That makes sense since white plastic has been used for years and when the combs are new the white really shows through making the white eggs very hard to see.

I'm thinking I might keep a couple of my honey frames with no foundation and put in a vertical dowel so that I can have honeycomb to eat.

When the plastic foundation is used, the honeycomb built on it is left intact to be reused by the bees to fill up with honey again. The foundation makes the combs stronger and more stable for handling.

To create honey comb, the bees are usually just given an outside frame that they can build comb inside. The honey and wax from honeycomb is delicious and even the wax can be eaten.

Each evening throughout March I'm determined to move forward by preparing for my bees in spring.

I have my hammer, wood glue and nails in the living room and I'm all set. So while it's snowing or raining in the evenings, I'll flip on the TV and work on nailing my frames together.

Ten frames go in the medium deep on the bottom and usually the honey super box on top has about 9 frames.

A healthy hive of bees can produce as much as 100 lbs of honey in a season. They also make the honey comb so when the beekeeper slices off the wax caps to release the honey, that wax is saved. It can be used to make all kinds of products from candles to furniture polish. Nothing gets wasted.

The more I think about bees and how special and important they are the more I can't wait to start.

I just got to keep thinking positive.

Where It All Started

There was always honey at Grandma and Grandpa's house. Not just one kind of honey either. They had creamed honey, pasteurized honey and honey in the comb.

It was at Grandma's house that I tried honey in the comb for the first time. It was delicious and sweet. My Dad told me they ate the bees wax as a chewing gum when he was a kid.

I'll never forget the metal pails that the honey came in. They had metal lids and wire handles. We couldn't get these pails in the city. In the city, all our honey came in plastic containers. I guess it was old fashioned to have honey in pails, but later I found out there was a good reason for the pails.

Grandpa liked to spread his toast with a lot of butter and then he'd add a huge heap of honey. At one time I remember Grandma eating a lot of peanut butter and honey sandwiches. She got nspired and then mixed up the honey and peanut butter together in a container. She thought that was a marvelous idea.

One day she asked me if I'd like to visit the bee man. I look at her funny, "the what?" Then she explained that they needed to get some honey and she was going to go see the bee man. She said that wasn't really his name, that's just what she called him. Of course I wanted to see this man too.

We drove down country roads and after about 10 minutes she pulled into the place where the bee man lived. We went inside a room that looked a lot like Grandpa's milk house - it had white walls and a big window. There were a few bees flying around inside and a couple of them were flying at the window, but the bees weren't interested in us at all.

It was kind of exciting to be inside with bees and I wasn't scared of them either. The bee man was old like grandma and had white hair. He was very nice and he smiled. He asked me if I'd like to taste the honey. Of course I wanted to, so I nodded, "Yes." He gave me a plastic spoon and he directed me to a big tank.

The tank reminded me of the water tank in my basement at home, the one where the hot water is kept for our showers and baths. At the bottom of the tank was a little tap and Grandma first held her spoon under the tap and I watched as the bee man turned the spigot on the tap and honey ran out onto Grandma's spoon.

It was my turn next and I put my spoon under the table and the bee man turned the spigot. I held my spoon as carefully as I could so I wouldn't spill. The golden honey was thick and it filled my spoon. I tasted it and it was very very good. After that, Grandma brought her empty tin honey pails and the bee man held her pails under the spout and turn the spigot to fill her honey pails. Then I understood that the metal pails were used over and over to refill with honey when she visited the bee man. I thought that was very clever.

The fascination with beekeeping and honey and the bee man has stayed with me my whole life. I regret that I do not remember the name of the bee man but he has absolutely influenced my life.
In the spring I will be starting with my first two beehives and I'm very excited to become a beekeeper. Maybe one day I'll be called the bee lady.

My grandmother passed away many years ago but she left me her honey pails. I have them on display in my living room and when I look at them I remember Grandma and her love, the friendly bee man with his delicious honey and the honey bees that flew around inside a room, ignoring us.