Happy Birthday Sweet Hubby

I racked my brain trying to think of something to get my hubby for his birthday.

Actually, I do know what he would love to have but it is a bit out of my price range.

But Hubby is still young enough to dream.


This morning, I thought it would be nice to go with Bob to check the hives. As we approached the hives and then a few minutes later he marveled, "This is a small piece of heaven!"


It made his day to find all four hives in this yard doing well!
We had a mild winter and also, Bob is pleased with his winterizing job.

Just for fun, I tried something new for our little family celebration tomorrow. They do not look quite right to me but they taste good and are pretty cute and fun to do.

This evening we watched Morgan perform in her eighth grade musical. Isn't she beautiful!

What a perfect birthday!

# 7 The Headache Hazard

We have this very nice area under our new deck—not very tall—54 inches to be exact—perfect for something—perhaps to store supers.

So, after hubby finished extracting the last of the honey today,


he stacked a few supers in said area


and then he stood up.


. . . Which is why I am wearing a bike helmet and stacking supers under the deck.


Because experience is a good teacher.

However . . .

The good report for the day is that there were no—none—not any at all—wax moths in the supers today. Yay!

Also, my eye is much better. My drops are only every four hours today instead of every half hour.

A little ibuprofen for hubby and he is feeling good.

We just had one small Oops! to add to our growing beekeeping list.

All in all a very successful harvest.

Now we are done with the extracting and almost done cleaning. Yay!

Tonight we will go to the DuPage Beekeeper's Meeting and see how our fellow beekeeper's fared. There are bound to be some good stories.

Seeing and believing

This was our first honey extraction in our new garage. It worked well. We were thankful for good help. The job would not get done without Kevin. He is one of those people that see a job that needs doing and does it. In fact he sees it before most of us are aware it is going to need to be done. Bob and I think that we could do the work by ourselves but we would be at it for a very long time—probably weeks—with just the two of us.

We got a late start this year because of so many other activities that took precedence. Usually, we start on Labor Day weekend but we chose to go to a garage sale at my sister’s house instead.

Usually, we start early in the morning—this time we started in the afternoon because we went for a Suicide Prevention Walk with some other family members first.

When we did start, the kids had ballgames and practices and meets and other interests. Steven came and donated a few hours of hard work.


David showed up to be on bee patrol for a bit before his football game.


We only got in a couple hours of work on the first day. The second day we also could not start until the afternoon. Kevin graciously appeared again and then we gladly welcomed the help of Joe and Kathi and Jessica, too.


Joe did most of the uncapping and heavy lifting,


Bob ran the extractor. This is a bad picture. I did not take many pictures this year. It was at a rare moment when Kevin was sitting. Kevin barely took time for a bite to eat. He washed equipment and moved and scraped supers and mopped our ever sticky floor and did all kinds of dirty jobs.


The girls efficiently and tirelessly bottled honey.

When we quit for the day, we still had one short stack of supers to do. A few years ago, we would have worked until 10:00 pm or until the job was done but we tire more quickly now and when our help needed to go home towards late afternoon, Bob and I quit as well. We were tired.

I am paranoid about wax moths. We lost a couple of hundred pounds of honey early this season to wax moths because we brought the honey in and did not get around to extracting for a couple of weeks and the honey and frames were destroyed by wax moths. It was devastating.

I knew that Bob was going to be traveling and that we would have to let our honey sit for a week before we extracted. Being concerned about the wax moths, I brought pails, bottles and everything portable that we use to extract our honey into the house.

I covered everything else and used many very large plastic bags to cover our honey supers and seal them as tightly as possible.

Then I closed up the garage and set off a bug fogger. I saw a moth on Tuesday evening and so I set off another fogger. However just after I started it, I noticed something to bring inside. In my haste to retrieve it and get in the house, I knocked over the fogger—reached for it to set it upright and at the same time, the force of the spray turned it towards me and I got some spray in my left eye.

I went in and flushed my eye with contact solution and took out my contact and thought little else about it, figuring it would be fine in the morning—and it was—or so it appeared so I put in my contact lens and went to Bible study. At Bible study, my eye really began to seriously bother me. However, I could not take out my contact because I had not brought any reading glasses and reading is essential in a Bible study.

When I got home, I was very glad to take out my contact and wash my eye and continue with my day—particularly a hair appointment. It is too hard to reschedule and I was desperate for it. Following that, I went on to my tutoring class because they were depending on me. By the time I arrived home at 5:45, my eye looked disgusting and was hurting.

Today, I had an eye doctor appointment. I have a nasty eye infection and am putting drops in my eye every half hour. It is hard to get anything done as they sting a bit each time. I will see the eye doctor again in the morning. He says it should heal in a few days. I hope he is correct. I am very grateful to live in a place where doctors are accessible and knowledgeable. We are blessed!

The eye doctor said, my infection could be from the spray but perhaps not. He thinks it is more likely that I scratched my eye when removing my contact lens and had a mild abrasion which was a good entry point for the infection. In any case, I believe this is another beekeeping hazard. We have had many in the past so this just adds to our repertoire. Ben Franklin said, "Honey is sweet but the bee stings."

Today, I would not be a persuasive person to recruit new beekeepers to our hobby. They would take one look at me and run. But here on the blog, you can’t see me and I must say, “This fresh honey on toast is the best!”

I have been enjoying our fresh honey more than ever. It is delicious. I took some fresh honey in the comb for my tutoring kids to taste and to chew the wax. I told all of them, “You do not have to eat it. Try it, and if you don’t like it, please put it in your napkin and then in the waste can.” Every single one of them ate it—wax and all and asked for more. They asked if they could get a jar of honey for good behavior rewards on Friday. They can choose from all kinds of treats on Fridays, if they earn enough behavior points and they want honey!

I'm still a believer. Beekeeping is worth the risks.

Long live the queen!

Yay! Packages of another sort arrived.


The girls are here!

Hubby wanted to make sure that I shared the experience so I did install three of the packages. Unfortunately, I had another event scheduled in the afternoon and had to leave but grandson David took over and installed two packages by himself as well.

We will check this weekend and make sure that the queens survived. One took off flying as Bob was releasing her but we are hoping she returned to her attendants. It is fascinating to watch the workers care for and feed the queen right through screen covering the queen cage before she is released in the hive. I think it is so interesting that she knows just what to do to take over the leadership of the hive. She was bred apart from the others and is another type of bee. The packages are Italian bees but soon all of the hives will be Carniolans because all of our queens are California Carniolans and will lay Carniolan eggs.

The queen cage was introduced to the other bees four days earlier so the other bees have had an opportunity to get used to and accept her. Each queen has a unique smell and once she is recognized and accepted the other bees are all willing to give their lives to save her.

If our queens do well, the hives will do well.

It is kind of like . . . if mama's happy, everybody's happy.

Stepping it up to a higher level

Bob sent a text to me on Friday. “Sowing seed 2moro. Need more hands.”

I replied. “Hmmm. Ok. You can have mine.”

And thus, in our fifteen years of marriage, and nearly as many years of being a beekeeper’s wife, yesterday was a first for me—and for my hubby.


In about three hours, using a handheld seeder, we covered six acres walking and sowing clover seed, hoping to increase our honey production.


We had the farmer’s permission, of course.

We spent about an hour doing another two acre field today.

We won’t see results this year because clover does not get flowers until the second year. Bob thinks we will sow clover again next spring if we see it coming up this year. Oh boy, oh boy!

I think our farmer may have sat inside his house and chuckled as he watched us.

Your wrist gets really tired as you hold the spreader and the trigger to keep it open and turn the crank with the other hand.


We traded off every other time down the field. When it was not our turn to walk the field we refilled the bucket with seed and provided a target so the other could walk as straight as possible.


We took a water break about half way through our farming experiment.


It gave us great pleasure to see our bees working hard and bringing in lots of pollen. (Althought this is a terrible picture and does not show much. Many, many of the bees had pollen!)


I chuckled a bit as I spotted my hubby at the end of the field holding up his hands to keep me straight.

And I followed his lead and did the same—one time. That was all that it took for me to figure out that holding up our hands was unnecessary—a bit over the top so to speak.

But while walking and holding the spreader and turning the crank and looking down the field at my hubby with his hands in the air, and waiting for my next turn to walk. I recalled the story of Aaron and Hur holding up Moses hands as recorded in Exodus 17:8-16.

Then I remembered to “hold up my hands” about some things that the Holy Spirit was placing on my heart.

And I came home to find the verse about God’s hands will guide me.

Psalm 139: 7-10
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.

Moving Day

But not to here. Not yet.

No, some bees got relocated, house and all, from here . . .

with a mighty heave . . .

to here . . .

For non beekeepers, I will explain . . .

Bees need to be moved in the evening. We wait until they are mostly in their hive for the day. Then they are sealed inside and moved as gently as possible.

As it gets dark, the bees are given passageways again for entering and exiting--but hopefully not until the morning. Bees return from where they leave each day. So if they are in the hive all night. Their GPS gets reoriented and they will return to the hive in its new location.

If the hives had been moved when the bees were in the field working, they would have returned to the same place they left and circled until they died. That is why the hive must be moved with all or as many of the bees inside as possible.

Then we assisted with another kind of moving project.

Young friends--children of our good friends--are beginning a new business. Their shelving units were on the truck and were delayed and delayed and delayed until the day before the city was to inspect the shelving. So a few of us went to see if we could assist with opening boxes, marking the outlets and putting the shelves on the walls.

It gave us such a sense of accomplishment and joy to see everything coming together. We are asking God to bless the business and make it profitable for this young family.

And as we left, Tim and Tiff graciously gave us VIP cards, t-shirts and some products to sample.

We were moved.

Facets of Beekeeping

Chuck Lorence has been promoting, educating, encouraging and protecting bees and their keepers for many years. He is creative, experimental and entrepreneurial. He has a long history of serving on boards, presiding over beekeeping clubs, and advancing the causes of beekeepers by his involvement in organizations, the state fair and politics. He is, in my opinion and I am pretty sure that I am in good company, The Master Beekeeper of Cook DuPage Counties in Illinois. In addition, he is frugal, approachable, entertaining and wise.

Chuck says that he and his wife were hippies in the 1970’s. Not the pot smoking kind of hippies but the natural food, gardener, live-off-the-land kind of hippies. He says, “You know, hippies brought us organic farming. They were the pioneers in that field.”

In 1971, Chuck read an article about beekeeping in a copy of Mother Earth News while waiting for a dentist appointment. It reminded him that his father used to keep bees when he was around the age of eight in Racine, WI.

He told a humorous story of how his father used to pull honey. With the bees swarming his father like a cloud, Chuck and his siblings and his mom watched from the safety of the screen door. He recalls his mother saying, “Do not laugh at your father.”

After reading the article on beekeeping, and seeing what it could do for the environment and our food supply, he went to the Wisconsin farm where he was raised and got his father’s old beekeeping equipment. He burned all that was beyond repair, and scraped, sanded and painted the rest and got his beekeeping start with two hives. He has been keeping bees ever since. He continued to teach graphic arts at Glenbrook South High School. However, unlike most hobbyist beekeepers, he figured out a way to make it a lucrative hobby. At his prime, he kept 150 colonies but recently downsized to 25-30 colonies.


When I heard that Chuck was going to semi retire, I jumped at the opportunity to sit under his teaching. I am so glad for this experience. Chuck is good. He is passionate. I leave class each Wednesday really wanting to become a beekeeper and believing that I can do it.

However, to be quite honest, I think that I like the idea of beekeeping better than actually doing the beekeeping. Much in the same way, I like the idea of dogs—especially Lassie-like stories. I like the idea of horses and horse stories and yes, I went through a phase of drawing horses. However, I can’t say that I really want a dog or a horse. In fact I am quite sure that if someone offered to give me a dog or a horse and pay for the expenses for one year, I would decline. I am not too optimistic that beekeeping is ever going to be much of a passionate hobby for me either.


Yet I was excited and eager to accompany my beekeeping hubby on Saturday to see if his girls had survived the winter.


He was overjoyed, ecstatic, to discover four surviving hives at this beeyard. We did not get to the other beeyards because we needed to do some other chores before attending our local beekeeper’s club meeting.


At this particular meeting, a CSI panel shared what they knew and did not know about dead-outs. (In beekeeping terms, a dead colony especially one that did not survive the winter is referred to as a “dead-out.”) One gracious beekeeper, brought an unopened winter colony—a dead-out and it was opened and dismantled and scrutinized—an autopsy of sorts. The panel and other knowledgeable beekeepers explained the forensic science of beekeeping. Several theories for this dead-out emerged. Perhaps there was too much moisture in the hive—but that theory did not make sense to me as it was wintered just like other colonies in the beeyard that survived and the dead bees were not wet. There was plenty of honey in the hive and no evidence of disease. The theory that made the most sense to me was that the queen died and the cluster became confused with no queen to protect. Thus small clusters were found in four or five areas of the hive. When they did not huddle and work together, they got cold and could not survive. Several beekeepers made suggestions as to why the queen might have died. It is important to know why colonies do not survive the winter so changes can be made for a better outcome the next year.


At first glance, you might think that beekeepers are an unusual group of people.















But here is what I discovered after attending several of these meetings each year.

Beekeepers are:

• unpretentious
• generous
• vulnerable
• sharing
• kind
• learned
• hopeful
• motivating
• fascinating
• hardworking




• and appreciative of good desserts.

I am so glad that my hubby is a beekeeper!