Esschert Design Bee House--for the pollinators in your garden

If you want to help the bees who keep your vegetables and flowers pollinated, here is a Mason bee house. There are many different designs, but this one looks like a bird house and is inexpensive. Mason bees are prolific pollinators and this can help attract them to your garden. These bees generally nest in holes created by woodpeckers and beetles,

At Esschert Design Bee House

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Wishing Well Hummingbird Feeder, 16 oz

Hummingbird feeders have many interesting designs. This one is a wishing well crafted in wood and features four feeding blossoms, a handcrafted brass roof and holds 16 ounces of nectar in a shatter-proof bottle. Attract those lovely and helpful hummingbirds into your patio and garden.

At Perky-Pet 124 Wishing Well Hummingbird Feeder, 16 oz

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National Pollinator's Week A Time to Help Our Helpers

The National Wildlife Federation has some tips for helping out pollinators, reminding us that "every third bite of food" comes from their help. They have some tips to make life a little easier for butterflies, bees, and birds.

1. Hang a hummingbird feeder
2. Build a bee house
3, Plant a butterfly garden

You can check out their tips for keeping our planet healthy. All things you can do in your back yard.

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It's time to feed the bees!

Beekeepers usually feed their bees in the winter. Typically, it's not because the beekeeper harvested too much honey and didn't leave enough stores for the bees to get through the winter. Rather, it's usually because the bees have moved through their hive in such a way that they are too far from their food stores and they can't move to their saved honey because of the cold temperatures. When it gets cold, bees form a cluster around their brood and keep each other warm by trading places from center to outer edge just the same way the penguins do.

When there is a January "thaw", the bees leave the hive for brief cleansing flights. They will never soil their own house so the mid-winter thaw is crucial to their health and lets them relieve themselves outside. Here you can see evidence of these cleansing flights - small puddles on top of the snow. hmm they are honey colored!

Here are more bee droppings and also a few dead bees that didn't make it back inside. That's no cause for alarm - with a population of 20,000 to 60,000 depending on the time of year, bees are always dying off.

Most beekeepers feed their bees a sugar/water combo. We think sugar is bad for us and for the bees so we feed them their own honey. Sure, it is hard to give up 2-3 jars of the stuff, but they were the ones who gave it to us in the first place! We would rather have a healthy hive and a little less honey than give the bees sugar.

Here's the jar of honey with two tiny holes drilled through the cap. The bees will extract the honey from the holes as they need it.

We set the jar on the opening of the inner cover and the bees immediately crowded around it.

Time to close the hive before they start charging us! We will check the honey supply every few days by lifting up the outer cover. They should be set for 2 1/2 - 3 weeks with that jar.

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How sweet it is . . . the honey harvest!

It is one of those annual fall surprises - what will our honey taste like this year? Three years ago, it tasted sweet yet not overly floral or cloyingly sweet like clover honey. Everyone loved it and we should have entered it into a contest. I suspect that the fantastic taste was due to the Joe Pie Weed field the bees spent so much time in that summer. Last year, our honey tasted just like maple syrup. Could it have been the potato blossoms just outside their front door? Who knows.

This year's honey is a perfect balance of sweetness, flowers and hmmm . . . vegetables? I don't know, but it is good! It's a small harvest (approx. 25 lbs) but many hobby beekeepers didn't get any this year. We feel fortunate to have the little honey we do because of all the rain, diseases, and the fact that the hive swarmed in May and had to rebuild its population over the summer.

After we spun the honey out with the extractor, we set it outside so the bees could do the final cleanup. I wish they did windows! By the end of the day, the equipment was spotless.

We hope to add another hive or two next year so we can compare them and become more proficient in beekeeping. As one veteran beekeeper told me, "It's not how long you've kept bees, it's how many hives you have that makes you experienced."

The USDA (for what they're worth) considers bees as livestock. This strikes me as so funny because I imagine miniature corrals, fencing, trailers and such. Bees are, by far, the easiest "livestock" to care for considering time, initial investment and ongoing expenses. If you don't mind the occasional sting and aren't unnerved by the buzzing, it's a fascinating hobby that doesn't require a lot of land. In fact, it doesn't require any land. Some city dwellers keep bees on their roof decks and they don't have to worry about bears like we do.

Here's a link to a local bee supply company. We took a bee class from the owner, Rick Reault, through the Middlesex Beekeepers Association. These classes are very inexpensive and are a great way to learn about all the aspects of beekeeping. You will also meet experienced beekeepers who are usually very friendly and willing to mentor new beekeepers.

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