I am a new beekeeper and a member of the San Diego Beekeeping Society. For this year’s county fair, I made awards for the annual Home Harvest Honey Contest.
My honey submission didn’t win, but I was called to the front and honored with a shout out at the awards ceremony for my Glowforge creations (reward enough!).
The awards are made of Proofgrade Cherry Hardwood using the second to darkest engrave setting. A big thanks to @karaelena for helping with the final touches in Illustrator. I bow to his AI-fu.
Self-bred? No dot on her. Breeders usually use a colored paint dot on the queen’s back so you can tell how old she is so you can re-queen the colony when her fecundity starts to decline.
Surprisingly, I have two different bee-keeper friends. I’ve been thinking about ways to help them out with Geordi (my Glowforge). I was thinking wood placards for their honey jars or maybe etching the jars directly for them. Well see!
It always makes me happy to see Bee-Keepers in the US.
It is so easy for us here to keep bees alive as Australia is the last Continent to be safe from Veroa Destructor, though Climate Change is bringing large enough swarms of Small Hive Beetle that some people are losing entire hives to them.
The challenge to keeps enough hives alive to avoid total collapse in the USA is an immense struggle. Each hobbiest that helps out is doing a great service to their Continent and environment.
Yup anything in the Borage family is a high-value target for bees.
I also plant a lot of Sunflowers for them but sunflower pollen makes honey that crystallises quickly.
If you are interested i am one of the original backers of the FlowHive system and have FlowHives on both my hives. Here is a harvest in progress. I can generally get 1.5-2kg of honey from a FlowFrame in just 15min (on a warm day) with no disruption or stress to the hive. It is an amazing system. Even more amazing is that within 30min of closing the frame up the bees are already starting to restock the cells.
Oh, you have no idea. To harvest 4 frames of capped honey used to be 6 long messy hours for 2 people. The bees would be so pissed off by the end of it and so much honey was wasted that it was sad. I would end up with around 7kg of honey from all this.
To harvest the same amount from the Flowhive means 1hour; no mess, no stressed bees (but also no left over wax for us but i am willing to lose that for all the other benefits). I don’t even have to bother suiting up as the bees barely know you are there. The FH pipe goes straight into the storage container, the honey has no wax, no residue.
It is an ABSOLUTE game changer and i highly recommend looking at the product
My wife is a data coach at Explorer Academy, it’s a hands on learning school. They built the school with pipes and wiring exposed and this year purchased a flowhive to do bea keeping with the kids. Last year they opened a small garden area for the kids to plant in.
Perfect for the kiddies… the FlowHive hives have a built in observation window that the kids would love!
almost every visitor to our place comes out to look through our windows at the flourishing hive
Also great to teach the kids that bees are not to fear but to greatly respect and protect
Definitely agree that bees have gotten a bad wrap, especially with kids. I spend most of my time outdoors in the spring, summer, and fall. As far as I can remember I have been stung 2 times. One on the lip from a pop can and one on the foot when I stepped on a hornet with flip flops on. I try to tell my daughter that they don’t want to sting but it’s engrained in her to run and swat lol
The problem is that people do not realise bees have compound eyes… movement is what they see best.
To a bee: waving your hands in a shooing motion just makes you look bigger and potentially more of a threat than before.
I train my kids and friends to just stand still when a bee is close and making the ‘back off’ buzz… Unless you are an extreme diabetic with pure sugar for blood there is nothing you got that they want and they will leave you alone very fast.
