By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

I’ve always lived along the Pacific Coast, from the torrid tropics of Mexico to the temperate rainforest of Northern California, so I have no experience with the kind of cold weather that gives winter a bad name. For advice in about beekeeping in a cold climate, last week I asked readers and Sunset Facebook fans how they prepare their hives for a harsh winter.

Elizabeth Connelly writes: I just attended a beekeeping seminar in NY today, all about Preparing Hives for Winter (given by Chris Harp and Grai St. Clair Rice of HoneybeeLives.org). I'll be removing empty frames and comb, moving frames together, and staining the outside of the supers with homemade propolis-stain (so the supers will better withstand the elements). I'll also be feeding my bees bee tea, to strengthen their immune systems over the next few weeks.

Andrea Cohen says: Our bees seem to do OK here in northern New Mexico without any special protections so long as we leave them adequate honey stores to over-winter. We got about 110 12-oz bottles from our hive this year—our best harvest yet! The supers were stacked about 6 feet high.

Marcee Pfaff advises that she is making sure they (the bees) have plenty of stores. She is also moving frames together to create the right ventilation and space for them to move up in the hives as the season progresses.

The folks at BackYardHive.com in Colorado sent me an article on overwintering bees. I was chastened by their advice about harvesting honey from a top bar hive. Since in winter the bees need plenty of honey, you should take only the last two frames of summer honey from the top bar hive. Gulp—we harvested 8 frames in September, and the hoped for fall harvest never materialized as the weather turned nasty and hot and shut down the nectar flow.

 BackYardHive.com is selling a “hive duvet.” You can buy them in fancy colors, and if you live where that cold white stuff falls from the sky (you call that snow, right?), it seems like they'll help keep your bees warm.   

We may not get really cold weather here in Coastal California, but Kirk Anderson at Backwards Beekeepers in Southern California reminded me that all is not perfect in paradise. “We don't have winter really. But we have Ants. And we have a time of no nectar ... from mid August 'til October more or less. It is difficult to feed because of the ants.” Yes, we know about ants.

On a bright note, spring comes early for us. Kirk says, “Spring here for me is when the peach tree blooms in China Town. This is about the end of January to February.” In the San Francisco Bay Area, spring comes with flowering ornamental plums.

I’m counting on our mild winter, suburban gardens with year-round flowers, and our early spring to get our girls through.

May all your bees survive 'til spring.

 

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

The weather is definitely autumnal around here. Veronica’s beehive is sporting a snazzy entrance reducer to reduce the possibility of robbing as the neighborhood bees search out unprotected honey for their winter stores.  And we’ve got work to do to prepare our hives before winter descends.

Our checklist goes something like this:

1. Do a mite count.

We did. Veronica has 120 mites in 48 hours (we forgot to take the board out). Not good, but not hideous, especially since we haven’t used any controls other than a drone frame trap this summer. We’ll be treating for mites, and soon. 

2. Squash the small hive beetles.

Veronica’s covered with these disgusting creatures. We squash them when we see them, but we’ve got to figure out some kind of trap that actually works.

3. Make sure the bees are moving into a winter cluster.

Califia’s bees are clustering towards the entrance of her top bar hive, leaving the the rear of the hive empty. It’s awe inspiring to run your finger along the observation window glass and feel the change in temperature—the glass is nice and warm where the girls are huddled, and chilly at the rear of the hive. We still have to remove the honey super from Veronica (it's mostly empty since we took most of the honey in the middle of September) and we want to make sure everything is ready for winter inside the brood boxes.

4. Make sure both hives have enough honey to last through winter.

We’re not too worried about this. Our Mediterranean climate means we pretty much have flowers blooming year round.

In fact, in the San Francisco Bay Area, winter mostly means you wear a hoodie over your tank top. We just don’t have really cold weather. We’re curious how beekeepers keep their bees warm and happy in places where it actually snows.

Readers, if you’ve got an apiary, what do you do to ready your bees for winter? Comment on our blog, or on our Facebook page, and I’ll collect them into a post for next week.

by Brianne McElhiney,  Sunset Assistant to the editor-in-chief

The first round of fermentation for our mead is done, and I am feeling great about it! 
  

We racked our honey-wine for the first time the other week, meaning we siphoned off the vibrant clear mead into a new carboy leaving the nasty looking dead yeast cells and the mysterious brown fleck at the bottom of the old one.

 

Vanessa and I siphoning the mead into a clean new carboy, while being careful not to disturb the sediment on the bottom of the old one.  

Before we replaced the stopper and airlock on the new carboy, preparing it for the final round of fermentation, we decided to have a little taste test.  I don't want to sing the praises (do, re, mead...)  too soon, but ours tastes pretty good compared to many of the others we have tried, both homemade and professionally made.  Perhaps the mysterious brown fleck was beneficial. 

            

Tasting mead-  From the left:  Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief Brianne McElhiney, photo intern Vanessa Speckman, imaging specialist Kimberley Burch.  

Our honey has menthol note from the eucalyptus trees in our area, resulting in a slight medicinal flavor in the mead, but the draught is still rather enjoyable.  Meads reach their prime a few years into aging, so we are very excited it tastes as good as it does this early in the game.  

                                                                                        

We have now moved the mead into Sunset's wine cellar for another month or so while the fermenting subsides, then we will rack it again and bottle it for aging.  The mead will be ready to drink in a couple months, but it will be best if we let it age at least a couple years.  I'm not sure we will be able to wait that long.    

By Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist

I was inside the test kitchen yesterday, waiting to show our hives to a visitor from The New York Times, and a bee flew in the open door. 

EEK!

She probably smelled the honey we had wrapped up on the table waiting to process.  Or perhaps she was just curious.  Either way, she got trapped on the window— you know the way flying bugs get trapped trying to leave through the closed window.  Poor thing.  She worked herself up into a frenzy.

I tried frantically to wave her out the door.  I was, of course, not panicking for myself, but worrying about what could happen if she flew farther indoors, into the offices of my coworkers who are allergic to honey bees.  That would not be good.

I first tried distracting her with the beeswax we had for show in the kitchen.  Not interested; much too busy trying to break the glass with her buzzing.

Then I had another idea. AH HA!

I quickly unwrapped the tray of honey, stuck my finger in to get it nice and gooey, went up to the window and held it out to her.  Nothing like honey for a good distraction.  She stuck out her little proboscis (tongue) and started sipping.  I then easily walked out the door—closing it behind me—with her on my finger and giggled in delight as she sipped (her proboscis really tickled underneath my fingernail!) until she’d filled her little belly with the sweetness.

I searched for someone to share this moment with, but everyone was inside, bent over their computers transmitting our December issue. I was left alone outside.

So I thought I’d share the moment with you. And now you know, if you ever get a honey bee stuck in your house, dip your finger in some honey and follow my lead.

 by Brianne McElhiney,  Sunset Editorial Assistant to the Editor-in-chief

                                                                                                                                            

About a month ago Margaret and I were out at the hives having a go with the bees, when one crawled up my suit leg and stung me on the thigh.  Perhaps I was being an irresponsible beekeeper wearing a suit ten times too large, defeating the purpose of elastic around the ankles, but in nine months I had never been stung at work while wearing this absurd ensemble.  "No big deal," I thought.  I have been stung a time or two (or ten).  I couldn't get into my suit to get the stinger out immediately, so I finished what I was doing, then managed to retreat from the hives for stinger removal.  Five minutes later I got stung again on my ankle.  Still, no big deal.  " I'm just building up my immunity," I rationalized in my head and I quickly brushed out the second stinger.                                                                                                                 

About a half hour later when Margaret and I were inside cleaning up, I began feeling really hot, then cramps took over my body, then vomiting ensued.  No swelling or trouble breathing, but these cramps were killing me (similar to what I would imagine child labor to be like).  No joke.  I have a very high pain threshold, but this was the worst I have ever experienced.  

 

To the ER we went, where I received an IV and morphine, but no concrete answers as to what the problem might be.  I hadn't experienced any abnormal swelling from the bee stings, so those had been written off as the problem, but the cramps would not lighten up.  One nurse suggested it might have been a kidney stone, a worthy suggestion.  I'd like to give a shout out to the doctor who INSISTED the torrential pains were menstrual cramps...  You were wrong.  A few hours later the pain subsided and I was released from the ER a bit shaken up, but feeling fine.  

 

During the next few weeks I embarked on a mission to get to the root of this bizarre episode.  A few doctors visits and many tests later, the diagnosis was a honeybee allergy – not kidney stones and definitely not menstrual cramps.  Baffled by the whole ordeal, I naturally had a few questions for allergist, Dr. Toby Levenson of Allergy and Asthma Associates of Northern California.  

 

BMc:  I wasn't allergic to bees before, but I am allergic now.  How did that happen?

Dr. L:   People can develop allergies at any point in their lives.  While some individuals build up immunities from multiple exposures to an allergen, others will develop sensitivities.  Frequent exposure can cause your body to build up IgE antibodies against the allergens, which will then produce common allergy symptoms and sometimes very severe symptoms.

BMc:  I didn't swell up or have trouble breathing.  Can bee allergies produce different symptoms?

Dr. L:  Absolutely.  Allergic reactions can come in the form of hives, flushing, low blood pressure, vomiting, weakness, headaches, cramps, abdominal pains...  

 

BMc:  How can people be tested for honeybee allergies?

Dr. L:  In the past, doctors would crush a whole bee on your skin and wait for a reaction, but that wasn't very effective.  Venom allergies can now be detected through blood work and by performing skin tests.

 

BMc:  If in fact someone is allergic, can anything be done to alleviate the allergy?

Dr. L:  Desensitization is highly effective.  Studies have shown that after desensitization you will be at the same risk as someone without the allergy. Typically this requires getting a shot once a week for 2-5 years... usually on the higher end of the scale for venoms.  Rush immunotherapy has been tried, but far too often patients have had severe reactions to the higher potency shots.  To avoid being stung, do not wear perfumes, avoid grassy areas, refrain from wearing bright floral colors and don't harass hives of any sort.  

 

 

Now you may be wondering...

 

Q:  Are my beekeeping days over?  

A:  At Sunset, yes.  They are sadly at an end.  I would not want to be a liability to this wonderful company, but I will still be helping with Team Bee projects and harvesting frames of honey.  Although, I may try to join up with Team Chicken and Team Cheese.  I will also still be Captain of Team Mead.

     At home, beekeeping will carry on.  From this point forward I will be taking extra special precautions not to get stung, beekeeping only with a buddy, and keeping my new EpiPen, Benadryl, and Predisone close by.  I am currently in the desensitization process, so hopefully in a couple years the allergy will be no longer.

 

Q:  Am I nuts?

A:  Probably, but I just can’t imagine walking away so easily from this hobby I’ve come to love. 

 

 

My arms following 5 rounds of venom tests.  

 

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

We’re letting go of the hive-that-used-to-be-Dramatica. She’s the hive that enchanted us when she swarmed three times this spring, and delighted us this summer with her fragrant honey. She’s been through three queens, successively known as Betty, Midge, and now, finally, the infant, unborn Dramatica, killed accidentally while still a larvae. (We named her Dramatica because there has always been something going on with that hive that was out of the ordinary. It was always high drama in the apiary with those bees.)

The capped queen cell we found two weeks ago had been torn open. The cell was weird; it stood out from the comb face and was filled with honey on the back side. We took it off the comb, and then discovered there somebody in the cell, bathed in royal jelly. Male? Female? We're not sure, but it's unlikely it was a baby queen. (Which begs the question: what happens if a drone larvae grows up floating in royal jelly?)

Last week we decided to let the hive go. We took out some of the frames that had capped drone brood, lest all those cells hatch into mite-loaded drones. We left just empty space.

This week we found that the few worker bees remaining in the hive built free comb in the empty space, and, sure enough, the cells are jammed with multiple eggs, compliments of our over-ambitious laying worker.

The bees seem—am I projecting?—sad, confused, despairing, but still doggedly (or bee-edly) going about their bee business. The bees want to persist, but without a queen they cannot. 

Veronica is still going gangbusters; we'll try again to make a split from her next spring.

by Brianne McElhiney,  Sunset Editorial Assistant to the editor-in-chief

Mead is not just for Renaissance Faire enthusiasts anymore.  It is also for One-Block dieters!  We have made the inaugural batch of honey wine to kick off Team Mead and we are hoping and praying that in a few months it will live up to the delicious draughts we tasted at Rabbit's Foot Meadery. 

Due to lack of space in the test kitchens and the entertaining kitchen, we decided to stir up our batch in Sunset’s new outdoor kitchen.  Incidentally, it was also about 90 degrees and sunny outside.  Maybe it was the heat or maybe the  fact that it was a Friday and we were all looking ahead to the weekend, but we wandered astray from our “Initial Game Plan”.  Perhaps some would call our actions mistakes, but I prefer to think of them as improvisations. 

Ideal Game plan for Day 1:

-Sterilize equipment with boiling water

-Combine honey and water until the must reaches a specific gravity of 1.075 using a hydrometer

-Add White Labs Pitchable Liquid Yeast to the must

-Stir for 5 minutes to aerate

-Cover with several layers of cheesecloth and let sit for another 5 to 10 minutes.  This will allow further aeration while keeping out lots of particles and natural yeasts in the air

-Siphon into carboy leaving no more than 1 inch of room at the top

-Seal with airlock

-Cover with blanket and store in warm, dry place (Sunset prop room) for 10 Days

 Desired outcome:

-3 gallons of delicious mead.

 Actual outcome:

-5 gallons of what, thus far, smells like delicious mead.

 You may naturally wonder how 3 gallons miraculously turned into 5 gallons. The directions said, “use 5.76 lbs of honey per gallon of water".  That does not mean for a 3 gallon carboy you should use 17.28 lbs. (3 x 5.76 lbs.) of honey. Due to this error we ended up adding lots  of water in order get the specific gravity to the desired level of 1.075 (to be honest we settled for 1.080, which means our mead will have a higher alcohol content than we originally planned).  Hence, how 3 gallons of mead turned into 5 gallons.  We misread a few steps here and there, although I am hopeful that it will turn out delicious. If you decided to brew your own, here are some helpful tips to prevent bumps along the way.

 Tips:

1.  Read directions very carefully.  Perhaps read them 5-10 times.  Then read them again in between each step.  We were so excited when the must reached the appropriate specific gravity we nearly forgot to add the yeast (a key element of mead).

 2. In the end, specific gravity will be more important than poundage, so don’t worry so much about the weight of honey used.   And just so you know, you will probably never need 17.28 lbs. honey for a household batch of mead.

 3.  Add honey to water versus water to honey to prevent wasting honey

 4.  Don't wear great high heels because they are likely to get covered in honey water

 5.  Don't make mead outside on a hot day because you will be miserable (the photos are a false representation of how we felt that day)

 6.  If you decide to do it outside be sure nothing falls into your mead (i.e. leaves or bugs).  We currently have a mysterious brown fleck floating around our carboy, which may or may not have potential for causing trouble (see video) 

 

The primary fermentation should be subsiding this week and we will need to transfer the mead into a clean carboy.  We will also be able to take the first taste test.  Stay tuned for updates.

 

 

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Santa Clara Valley is indeed the Garden of Heart’s Delight, particularly if you are a bee, or a beekeeper who loves honey.

Our bees have been socking away honey like crazy. Last week we pulled 8 bars of honey from Califia (our top bar hive). That amounted to 28.5 pounds processed honey. And today we took nearly a full super (7 frames) from Veronica. (Dont' worry, we left plenty in the hive for the bees to eat should there be a sudden summer dearth). Upon tasting each new harvest I pronounce it the best honey yet. Every harvest tastes different. Every harvest is delicious.

We’ve been taking honey from them all summer and I think we'll be able to take some more. Even though it's the beginning of September, there are plenty of flowers blooming to keep the girls busy. They really love the mints, basils, and salvias that are blooming all over town.

The English ivy that grows wild in every untended spot is budded up and ready to bloom. We’ve been told it doesn't make good honey—it crystallizes too fast—but the bees really love the flowers. Asters have yet to begin. Veronica has an empty super, and we’ve put more bars into Califia. We’re ready for the fall harvest.

 

A full frame of beautifully capped honey.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Last night Katie, our editor-in-chief, stopped me in the hall and said, "Have you seen the Do the Honey Bee video?" Of course I hadn't. I was probably out with the bees when it hit cyberspace.

I'm wondering if the Honey Bee will become the new Macarena?

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Yesterday we went into our Dead-Midge hive to see if by some chance the bees had managed to replace the queen cell we ripped open 3 weeks ago.  

Nope. Dead-Midge (hereafter known as Dramatica because of that hive’s penchant for drama) is not queenright. There is no queen. Just lots of drone brood randomly placed all over the frame and multiple eggs cramming the cells in the crazy way only a laying worker can accomplish.

But we also found a mystery: two queen cells (That’s one of them in the photo at left). And the girls are cuddling up to these oversize cells like a bunch of maiden aunts hovering around their only brother’s only baby.

We don’t know what could be in those big cells.

We don’t think it’s possible that there are queens. Bees need fresh eggs or young larvae to make a queen. And bee development from egg to emergence is very reliable. 16 days for queens, 21 days for workers, and 24 days for drones, give or take a couple days.

We’ve counted backward through the month of August every way we can think to count. It’s been 28 days since we split Veronica and gave Midge frames of brood, larvae and eggs, so by the calendar, the bees shouldn’t have had any fresh eggs or larvae to work with within the last 3 weeks.

In fact, the last of the brood from Veronica should have emerged by now. The youngest worker bee should be about 7 days old. Since a worker bee in summer lives only  38 days, this hive is looking at about one more month to live.  We don’t see how there could be any baby queens in those two queen cells.

But here’s a weird thing. Sometimes—although very rarely—an egg from a laying worker will develop parthenogenetically into a female. Anyway, so says The Hive and the Honey Bee, the beekeeper’s bible.

So who knows. Perhaps we’ve got a biological oddity growing in our hives. Or perhaps we’ve got a drone that’s been fed royal jelly all his life. Or perhaps those two cells are empty and the bees are just wishful thinking.

Now we have a decision to make. Split Veronica and try again? Or let Dramatica die?

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

My last post told of our attempts at hive building. We deposed the false queen and created a situation where the bees could make a new leader.

And they did. They built a sweet little queen cell for the baby queen. They built it at the bottom of the 6th frame, and attached it to the adjacent frame.

Perfectly positioned to be ripped apart at one week of age by—yes, of course—us. Readers, we hang our heads in shame. When we opened the hive and moved the frames, we accidentally killed the baby queen.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

I’ve been too disheartened to blog. Two weeks ago we found we’d lost Queen Midge.

The queen is the heart and soul of a beehive. She lays the eggs to make baby bees, she controls the temperament and mood of the hive, and she gives the bees something to live for. Without the queen, the hive is dead. It’s a very important position.

So it makes some kind of sense that if the queen suddenly goes missing (likely smooshed by bumbling beekeepers), one of the workers will think she has a chance at promotion. She’ll fire up those latent ovaries and start laying eggs.

This never works out. A laying worker, being the required sex (female), is able to produce eggs. But since she never did the big dirty–—mating mid-flight with a drone (male)—all her eggs are infertile. Weirdly, the eggs of a laying worker can hatch, but the babies are all drones. And a hive full of drones will soon starve to death.

That’s what we had 2 weeks ago. A hive full of boy bees who had no idea how to feed themselves, a laying worker that could only produce more boy bees, and a dwindling population of working girls that were enthralled by the upstart queen.

A hive that’s accepted a laying worker is very hard to requeen, so we had to take some drastic measures. We had to destroy poor dead Midge’s hive and replace it with a split from Veronica.

This was complicated. We had to write out a script to keep track of our steps as we worked:

• Queen Veronica wasn’t present
• There was capped brood, larvae, and fresh eggs on each frame
• There were plenty of nurse bees on each frame

New hive (front) with bees from Veronica (back)

The idea behind this process is that the bees taken from Veronica, suddenly without a queen, will choose a worker egg, build a bigger cell around it, and douse it with buckets of royal jelly (a blend of proteins and bee hormones that you, who may have used it as a cosmetic, probably don’t want to know about.) Royal jelly turns an ordinary worker egg into a fully functioning queen bee. With any luck, in a week we'd have a new baby queen. A little larval princess.

The bees from the Dead-Midge hive, dumped unceremoniously on the ground behind our greenhouse, were supposed to fly back to their old home site and merge with the bees we’d taken from Veronica.

And the laying worker? We hoped that she stayed where we dumped her and died (since she had never left the hive before, we were hoping she couldn't find her way back).

The day after the big reorganization, I collected the drone frames we'd set out to die. An animal, probably a raccoon or opossum, had dragged the frames around the nursery and eaten most of the drone brood. On one frame I found a huddle of bees sheltering a remaining patch of drone brood. This cluster of bereft bees broke my heart.

It's a cold harsh world in bee husbandry. But at least they don’t squawk like chickens when you kill them.

By Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist

As you may remember, Betty (our second hive) swarmed in March and we named her replacement Midge.

Well, Midge didn’t live long. We are pretty sure that about six weeks ago we killed Midge. Oops. It was a hard day at the hives.

How do we know? About 4 weeks ago (2 weeks after Midge’s estimated demise) we did a full inspection of both brood boxes. We found no brood and several capped queen cells at the bottom and top of the frames. And Midge was nowhere to be found.

The girls were also pretty dang feisty—stinging over 20 times. In fact, they got me twice when I wasn’t even in the hives. I was taking notes a few feet away. Sign of no queen, no?

We left the hive alone for four weeks, giving the new queen time to emerge, mate, and settle in. We inspected again today, intending to just make sure there is young larvae and signs of a queen, and found the distressing signs of a queenless hive:

The queen cells we found four weeks ago gone or ripped open.

Several half-developed queen cells with more than one egg in them.

We also found the following problems:

Varroa mites (duh)
Small Hive Beetles

Wax moth larvae and damage

Now we wonder what to do about this hive, formerly-known-as-Midge-formerly-known-as-Betty?  I’m guessing we should split Veronica, but how?  And can we still use the existing boxes that have chalkbrood in them?  What do we do with the bees still living, though probably demoralized, in the hive?  Wait until they die off? Since it seems we have a laying worker, given all the drone brood, would they reject a new queen if we could find one for them? Or would the laying worker kill any queen the bees tried to make (assuming they'd make one with eggs from Veronica)? We are pretty sure the hive is demoralized since the full inspection did not elicit one sting and we did not need to use smoke. But we understand. We would be too with all those problems!

Some good news
On the other hand, on Tuesday we inspected hive Veronica (still our original queen from Randy) and were surprised with a full super of honey (which we excitedly harvested) and the hive boiling over with bees.  We cut out the drone frame and pulled a few frames to find lots of honey in the brood box where it’s supposed to be and the middle frames filled with brood.  Good job, Veronica.  (You may remember that we found Veronica with NO brood whatsoever in the beginning of June, but practically every cell filled with honey. We pulled several frames, put in empty ones, plus one frame of brood from Then-Midge, and seemed to have successfully prevented a swarm and brought the hive back to boiling over.)

by Brianne McElhiney, Sunset Editorial Assistant to the editor-in-chief

In hopes of some insight to making the intoxicating draught for our One-Block Diet, Margaret, Kimberley, and I paid a visit to the Rabbit's Foot Meadery on a quest to learn more about honey wine.

Since the meadery is located in a business park in Sunnyvale, California, we expected to visit only the production site of Rabbit's Foot mead.  Instead, we were greeted by customers pouring out the door, mugs in hand, due to lack of space inside the bar.  Yes, a bar in an industrial business park.  I must admit, I like their style.  Is this Silicon Valley's secret weeknight hotspot?

Michael and Maria Faul started the meadery about 15 years ago when they began experimenting with mead in their garage and giving it to friends.  Before they knew it, the couple was making 200 gallons a year and their friends were still drinking for free.  Do you see anything wrong with that picture?  Michael and Maria did too and the sale of mead began.  Not only has Rabbit's Foot won many awards since, but their meads are now sold at dozens of grocers and served at many restaurants, including The French Laundry in Yountville, California.

After a tour of the meadery, led by Mark, a close friend of Michael’s, we headed to the bar to taste some of their meads.  Rabbit’s Foot makes five different meads and a variety of honey beers, ciders, and braggot.  Sadly, we were only there for the meads, but another trip for the beers is certainly in order. 

First we sampled their Dry Mead.  When most people think of mead (if they think of it at all), they think of it as syrupy and overly sweet, but this was quite the contrary.  The fragrance was reminiscent of floral bourbon and the taste was dry, buttery, and delicious.  We moved onto the Sweet Mead, which was perfectly delightful in its simplicity.  Water, honey, and yeast.  That’s it.  No spices or juices added to it, just the luscious flavor of the honey shining through.  This was exactly the type of recipe we were looking for.  

After Margaret, Kimberley, and I mulled the idea over a few more glasses of Apple Cyser, Raspberry Mead, and Melia (pure orange blossom honey mead, which rang true to the title of “Nectar of the Gods”), we made a very important decision for the One-Block Diet.

With this post, I would like to formally announce the founding of Team Mead in co-op with Team Bee. 

By Lindsey Hoshaw, Sunset intern 

I’m no stranger to Africanized honeybees.A few years ago my dad was attacked in Tucson while watering the plants in our backyard. Even after he frantically ran inside, more than thirty bees followed him, and my entire family had to swat for nearly ten minutes to get rid of them. He was stung more than thirty times. 

The year before an inspector told us they were Africanized bees, but we’d never had a problem until that day.

Most people know Africanized bees as killer bees, a term UC Davis entomologist Eric Mussen says is misleading. “They were called assassin bees in Brazil because the bees go into European honeybee colonies and wipe out the other bees, not because they kill humans.” They do pose a more serious threat than European bees though. While you might receive up to 200 stings from a honeybee attack you could receive up to 2,000 from Africanized honeybees, something virtually no one can withstand. Genetically, AHB are more aggressive in guarding the hive—they’ll follow you for up to 30 minutes and thus you’re more likely to be stung.

In the past ten years, AHB have gradually been moving north; so far they’ve been located as far north as central Nevada. But Mussen says that trend is slowing and that no new migration has been recorded in recent months. “It appears as though the Northwest expansion has slowed down to a trickle, if not stopped,” Mussen said. “We were predicting they’d be in the Bay Area by now, but for some reason they didn’t make it.” There’s enough pollen and NorCal has the right climate, so entomologists don’t really know why the bees aren’t migrating.

The good news is, beekeepers have learned how to mitigate aggressive AHB colonies by introducing European honeybee queens, which then cross-breed and produce gentler offspring. If only I’d had beekeeping skills back then and could have re-queened the hive outside our house. Ok, you’re right, I probably wouldn’t have had the gusto to suit up and try to reengineer an entire hive. That’s something I’d happily leave up to a professional!

In the end, my dad was fine and never had to go to the hospital. But he’s jumpy around bees now and even the sound of a fly makes the hairs on his arms stand up. It’s too bad he never got the chance to meet Sunset’s bees. Even though they have their feisty moments, they’ve completely won me over.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Everyone wants to help the bees. Suddenly honey bees are the new chickens: backyard hives are sexy. They're trendy. Ed Wagner of  Mannlake Ltd. says there’s no question about it, sales of beekeeping supplies to new customers are up, and suppliers of package bees have been selling out all over the country. After years of unpopularity, bees, it seems, are becoming fashionable pets.

Trendiness involving animals always sets off cries of alarm from my inner animal-rights activist. I wonder if now that we’ve kindled an interest in bees and beekeeping, could we be in danger of loving the girls to death? Can there be too many hives in an urban area? Will all those extra bees have to compete for a finite amount of nectar and pollen? I know, I know, my concern is not completely altruistic, but will our bees make less honey for us?

I called Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture Magazine and the Beekeeper blogger at thedailygreen.com to ask him how many bees could fit in a neighborhood.

He wasn’t worried about them finding enough food. “The carrying capacity of a city can be phenomenal,” he said. “You’ve got parks and roadside plantings. Draw a circle 2 miles around a hive, you’ll find backyards with flowers and weeds.” You’re not likely to run out of forage in most areas.

Kim thinks water—especially in our drought prone Western states—may be more of an issue than lack of forage. “The urban area is all cement. So where will the bees find water? If you’re in the backyard watering, bees will find you.” Swimming pools can be troublesome he said. “The chlorine cloud attracts bees. They love it.”

We all know what it’s like to come nose to proboscis with a floating bee in a swimming pool. And while some cities are changing their zoning codes to allow bees—Denver recently decriminalized keeping bees, and their municipal code declares that domestic honey bees are not “wild or dangerous animals"—bees can and will sting if threatened or scared. And we humans, when we see a bee, tend to flail and shriek and scare the bee.

As more people take on beekeeping in urban areas, the bee-human interface will become the most important issue bees and beekeepers face. I hope we can help the bees can win this one.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Whew, I'm tired. We spent today going through our three hives. It was the first full inspection we've done since April. Everything seems to be going well in Veronica. She has lots of brood, larvae, and eggs. Midge we're worried about. She has fewer brood cells, not much larvae, and no eggs. We never did see the queen bee, But we did spot her two weeks ago; perhaps we just missed her today.

However, there were many queen cells in Midge, and some were capped—you can see two in the photo at right (click the photo to see a larger image). One looks like a queen has emerged. Does this mean Midge is about to swarm again? Or perhaps she's swarmed and we missed it?  Or this queen cell could be left over from when she swarmed this spring.

Califia is a strong hive and has filled the top bar hive with brood and honey. She's also kind of testy, and more defensive than the other two hives. She tries to chase us away whenever we are near the hives; she gets positively riled into a blue rage when we open her up. Perhaps naming her after an Amazonian warrior queen was not such a good idea.

Actually, all the girls were unhappy with us today, and stung skin, gloves, and suits numerous times. But we were tearing apart the hives, so we did deserve it. And we stole—I mean, harvested—honey. Lots of honey, and each frame has honey of a different flavor. Yum.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Handmade boar salami....home-cured olives...wine grown in the back yard....fat, juicy venison sausages.

We ate this—and much, much more—on Saturday at the home of Hank Shaw, a political writer, and his partner, Holly Heyser, a journalism professor at Sacramento State.

Hank was also nominated for the James Beard blog award this year. We shared a table with him and Holly and his mom at the awards ceremony in New York back in May, and really enjoyed their company and like-mindedness. Hank writes fascinating accounts of making food from scratch, which in his case involves hunting and fishing as well as gardening. Holly grew up hunting in Minnesota and has a blog of her own about, as she says, "acquiring food the hard way."

Talk about a gracious guy. Even though he lost to us, he invited us to a cookout at his place on the east side of Sacramento. 

Dinner fell on what turned out to be a fearsomely scorching day in his neighborhood—as in, 108 F°. Nonetheless, a small group of us One-Blockers left our cool coastal habitat behind, lured by his promise of wild game.

A Wild Feast

The minute we walked in the door, Hank had his homemade and very respectable sangiovese ready for pouring, and a glistening array of things to eat:

* Good home-cured olives, which I found impressive since we've tried to make them ourselves, without success (yet!)
* Hank's own pickled beets, carrots, and sunchokes
* Totally delicious shad rillettes—a sort of loose pâté, traditionally made with pork or rabbit but here with  tasty local shad that Hank caught with his dad recently on the American River. I had no idea that shad existed in the West. I thought they were strictly an East Coast species. Now I'm hankering to catch some shad myself. (Their roe are particularly amazing, fyi.)
* Excellent saucisson sec, a dry salami from a wild boar Hank bagged in Monterey County. Secret ingredient: 1974 Heitz Cellars Angelica, made from Mission grapes. This fortified wine was the first wine made in California back in the 1700s.
* Lonzino, air-cured from the loin of above boar—more delicate and thinly sliced, so it looked like rose petals
* Fennel- and ouzo-cured salmon, made with an Alaskan pink salmon caught by one of Hank's friends

Bear in mind, these were just the appetizers. I hadn't seen snacks so hefty since my New Year's in Moscow, when I noshed on an enormous spread of zakuski.

After a fully appreciating all that was on the table, we presented Hank with a couple of just-baked fruit pies, plus gifts from the One-Block Diet: last year's honey from hive Veronica and this spring's honey from Midge, plus a bottle of red-wine vinegar and some fresh eggs from the flock.

Then he took us on a tour of their abode.

The Tour

The first guided look-around of a person's house is always fun, isn't it? It's especially interesting when the place is full of strange and quirky stuff. Hank and Holly live in that kind of house, and seeing how Hank makes his food only increased our pleasure in eating it.

Hank's homemade wine, hanging out with the books.
Each carboy holds one varietal; included here are
Tempranillo, Sangiovese, and deep, dark
Portuguese Touriga.The two tiny carboys in back are
Zinfandel, which Hank made from his own grapes
(the rest used grapes he bought).

The garden, where Hank grows everything from beets
to heat-resistant romaine to salsify. 

It occupies a chunk of their 1/4-acre back yard,
but there's plenty of space to grow more stuff. We
semi-seriously suggested he try growing wheat—
since he actually has the space for it.

A few of Hank's vines (I think these are mainly Zinfandel).
More grapes grow against a far wall.

In the garage, garden zucchini dry on a rack.
Several ripe figs were set out to dry on a work
surface nearby.

And best of all...

The "curing fridge"—a battered but useful appliance
in the garage, equipped with a thermostat control
and a teeny humidifier (at bottom right).

 

Hank at the grill while we gab under the tree.

Hank slowly and tenderly grilled a slew of those venison sausages until they were shiny, taut, and on the verge of bursting. The rest of us sat around under the big shady tree just beyond and gabbed for a while.

The Dinner

We went indoors—merciful air conditioning!—and feasted on those sausages, stuffed into giant buns with homemade pickles; firm, meaty marinated octopus liberally seasoned with paprika; two pasta salads—one with the couscous-like Sardinian pasta called fregola, studded with bocconcini (tiny fresh mozzarella balls), and the other with barley and sundried tomatoes—and a lovely, simple little beet salad with feta cheese and lovage. So much care and generosity went into this dinner. Hank even made the paprika. As in, he grew the peppers, dried them, and ground them. Having made our own salt, we knew this wasn't as crazy as it sounds. These kinds of things are worth doing, if for no other reason that it makes you really, really appreciate paprika and salt.

Hank served his honey lemon-verbena ice cream, I cut up the pies, and we chewed our last bites in a semi-stupor. Hank brought out some little glasses filled with that precious 1974 Heitz Angelica, which tasted surprisingly similar to Italian nocino, a walnut liqueur. Delicious. 

Then Hank and Holly, pied pipers that they are, ushered us into what they proudly call their Opium Den. It's a library with deep pink walls, a comfy sofa, a fireplace, and a mantle adorned with bare skulls of past game. As we sank into the sofa, Hank plied us with homemade absinthe. Yow. You could practically see the fumes emerging from our lips as we tried it. It only took a couple of sips to finish us off.

We eased into our cars and drove home, sated from head to toe and marveling at all that Hank and Holly do. Before we left, they accepted our invitation to munch freshly baked pizzas from our brand-new wood-fired oven, topped, naturally, with whatever will be ripest and most flavorful in the One-Block garden. Coming soon.

UPDATE: Here's what Hank wrote about the evening (and you can see the food he made, too).

Reader Karl Arcuri sent us a question last week: I live in Austin and I'm thinking about starting an urban hive. I've been following your blog, and I'm curious on how big your yard is where you keep your hives?

Team Bee member Brianne McElhiney: Here at Sunset, we are fortunate to have a campus that is about 10-12 acres, but the beekeepers guild that I belong to says that you only need about 10 sq. ft.to keep a hive. Recently, I have heard of people in San Francisco raising hives on top of their apartment buildings, and one of the men in my beekeepers guild keeps them at his condo complex.

You just want to be sure that there is a large enough food source for them in your area. Typically your bees will stay within a mile radius, so as long as there are plenty of flowering plants in your neighborhood, the bees will stay around. I would also recommend that you contact your local beekeepers guild (in Austin one guild is the Capital Area Honeybee Stewards) and perhaps attend a meeting. The members are usually very knowledgeable and more than willing to answer any questions you may have about raising bees.

Brianne McElhiney (shown in photo), assistant to the editor-in-chief, keeps bees at her home in the South Bay, as well as working on Sunset's Team Bee.

Team Bee member Margaret Sloan: Our beeyard is in the back of our nursery area (bees like privacy). We keep our hives far enough apart that we can still work between them, but commercial beekeeps stack them on pallets with little or no room in between hives. It’s up to you.

Before you buy bees, be sure to check your city’s municipal code or call the city to find out what the restrictions are. Some cities are fairly restrictive when it comes to beekeeping, and some outlaw beehives altogether, although that is beginning to change.

Update: Since Karl sent us his question, he's emailed us with the news that he's started beekeeping lessons with the owner of Round Rock Honey, and hopes to start his hive in August.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Beekeeper and beeblogger Kirk Anderson believes that with bees, backwards is the new forwards. Inspired by the writings of Charles Martin Simon, he practices this new trend in hive management. “Take everything you knew about beekeeping and forget about it,” Kirk told me. “Don’t use foundation. Don’t treat them with chemicals. Don’t feed them any additives. If I have to feed them, I’ll feed them cane sugar and water. I let them use their own wax to make their own comb, and then the hive is clean.”

Sure, it’s revolutionary. And controversial. But Kirk keeps “backwards bees” with great success all over the L.A. area in places like Pasadena, Silver Lake, and Studio City. It turns out that Southern California is a great place for bees. Kirk says, “They flourish in urban areas. I haven’t bought bees since 2000. I use feral bees. There are lots of swarms in the L.A. area.”

Kirk’s Beehuman blog centers on how he captures those swarms, and his joy in promoting the fine art of beekeeping. "The number of bees and beekeepers has gone down in the last 20 years.  But it’s like planting seeds. People are getting interested in beekeeping."

Perhaps the trend of keeping backyard bees isn't as popular as the not-so-bogus backyard chicken trend. But less than a year after Kirk started the Backwards Beekeepers bee club in September 2008, 132 people have joined. That's a pretty good number of newbees.

Kirk’s strongest advice on keeping bees to those new to it? Leave the girls alone. “Most people get bees, they think they’ve got an aquarium and want to inspect them once a week or more. When you first get them, give them a week and inspect to make sure she’s laying. Then go through the hive a month later to make sure there’s a good pattern of eggs and brood.

“And be a responsible beekeeper. Because you usually don’t have trouble with bees. You usually have trouble with people.”

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

There’s been a synchronicity of bees around here this week. The other day, Kimberley and I were discussing the National Wildlife Federation’s June/July story about the importance of native pollinators (and that means bees!) when we saw something crawling on the floor in her office.

It was a bee. This little bee you see here, no longer than an eraser on a pencil.

We don’t know what kind of bee this is, but in the last 2 days, we’ve found 7 of them crawling around the imaging department (2 of them engaged in the activity that fulfills their half of The Birds & The Bees concept). We think they’re native bees, but we don’t know for sure.

Now, I’m no slouch when it comes to plant and animal identification. I love a good dichotomous key. But I have to admit, it was daunting to try to identify this little bee on The Bug Guide, a site that promises to help you identify insects, spiders, “and their kin.” Honestly, there are more kinds of bees on there than you’d find at an overturned Pepsi truck on the highway.

And that is exactly the point of the National Wildlife Federation’s story about native pollinators. It turns out that the numerous native bees of North America may be among the answers to the pollination woes brought about by the decline of the European honeybee. In California alone there are more than 1,600 known species of native bees, and there may be over 4,000 species of bees and wasps in North America. That’s a lot of pollinating possibilities. 

But our native pollinators are at risk as well, through habitat and forage loss, pesticide use, and other troubles brought about by bees living wing to elbow with humans (a species, as you may have noticed, that is not in decline).

There’s good news. You, the human, can help native pollinators, and it’s not as hard as you might think. The National Wildlife story has tips that range from reducing your use of pesticides to becoming a “messy” gardener by leaving patches of unmulched soil and brush piles that pollinators can use for nests. (I wholeheartedly endorse and practice that advice).

And you can plant a bee-friendly garden. I like Urban Bee Gardens, a website with a whole hive full of information about bees and the gardens they love, including plant lists. And definitely read “In the Key of Bee,” in BayNature, for more information about bee gardens.

Or branch out and plant a garden that will attract may different types of pollinators—like butterflies, moths, bats, and birds. Pollinator.org has some nifty downloadable guides tailored to specific areas of North America.

Bee gardens aren't just altruistic pursuits. Gardening to help pollinators will also help your garden, and you’ll reap the benefits with better yields of fruits and vegetables.

Happy bee gardening!

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Just another day with Sunset’s Team Bee. Kimberley Burch, our team’s queen bee, bottles an unexpected honey harvest. We pulled a few frames from Midge, and bottled 32 3 oz. bottles (and ate a fair amount before bottling). Since one frame had enough honey to fill 22 bottles, I guess we ate more than a fair amount. It was delicious—light and fragrant

The girls seem to be doing well. Veronica has a tiny spot of brood of her own, some eggs that may or may not work out (we didn’t see them in the frame—my bad old eyes, I’m afraid, couldn’t pick out the tiny tiny eggs in the cells—and so we hung it from the side of the hive on the frame stand. Maybe too long.) We replaced one of Veronica’s honey-laden frames with a frame of brood and some nurse bees from Midge (who has a good amount of brood).

Califia is steadily filling her top bar hive with comb. Every day at about 4 p.m. there are young bees making orientation flights in front of the hive, flying zig zags as they scope out their surroundings before taking off on foraging trips.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Ok, I admit that Minnesota is out of Sunset's coverage range of the Western United States (although Minnesota—correction:a part of Minnesota— is west of the Mississippi). But when I found that one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman (Coraline, Anansi Boys, and the Sandman series), kept bees on his rural property outside the Twin Cities, I had to find out more.

It turns out that although he is a supreme weaver of tales, and while he does attend to the hives when he has time, Neil is not the Big Bee Boss. Sharon Stiteler, birder and beekeeper, is the lady in charge.

Sharon says she always wanted to keep bees, but until very recently, beehives weren’t allowed in Minneapolis.

“One day we were visiting with Neil, and he mentioned he was thinking about getting bees to pollinate his fruit trees. I said, ‘I always wanted to keep bees. But my husband said ‘Oh no you’re not.’ ”

Her husband mentioned that she was busy. Neil was busy. And if Neil was away at a book signing and Sharon away a birding event, who would be stuck taking care of the bees? The husband.

Neil’s assistant chimed in saying keeping bees wasn’t in her job description.

Sharon laughs when she finishes this story. “Now they’re my biggest helpers.” She finds that people love to visit the hives. “When they’re in a bee suit, it’s like they’re in their own little fortress of solitude.”

Sharon's been a beekeeper for 3 years. "When I first started bee keeping, I realized that if you ask 5 beekeepers a question, you'd get 5 answers." One day she was having a discussion with Neil about the hives, and she suddenly realized, "We must be real beekeepers now. We're arguing about methods."

The Gaiman beeyard is planned to grow to 7 Langstroth hives strong this year, with 4 hives of Minnesota hyegenic Italians and 3 hives of Russians. Why Russians? “We read that Russians have varroa mite resistance. And they also do better in long, cold winters.” 

Sharon has a very cool video on her blog, Birdchick.com of hiving their bees. You can see how the bees pour out of the box.  Having just hived a package of bees, I can attest to how easily the bees flow into their new home.

I'm curious. Any readers from cold places like Alaska been trying Russians?

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Last Sunday, Erika Ehmsen, Johanna Silver, Amy Machnak, and I sat in a darkened theater at the Millennium Broadway Hotel, nerves tingling. As some of you know, we'd been nominated—along with fellow one-block-diet bloggers Elizabeth Jardina, Rick LaFrentz, and Margaret Sloan—for a James Beard Journalism award.

Since we were sitting at a table near the exit sign, way way at the back, I was sure we wouldn't win. After all, no one would put us here if we were actually meant to get to the stage in any reasonable amount of time. I gently suggested that everyone just relax and enjoy dinner and give up the dream of winning an award.

So we did, and got to know our tablemates—fellow nominee Hank Shaw; his wife, Holly; and his lovely mother--all come from Sacramento. Hank writes a very entertaining, knowledgeable, pull-no-punches blog called Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. Like us, he's trying to show how possible it is for you to make your own food — from scratch. He tends to hunt and forage, we tend to garden and make wine, but the intention is very much the same. We felt glad to be sharing our table with a kindred spirit.

Then Kelly Choi, announcing the winners for the award ahead of ours (for Audio Webcast or Radio Show), accidentally opened the wrong envelope. "Erika Ehmsen, Elizabeth..." Oh, my lord. She'd flubbed, but we knew we'd won. Whoever got the Audio Webcast award, well, sorry, dude, our screaming completely drowned out your moment. Then we ran to the stage. (Ok, Erika walked. She's pregnant and wise.)

Hank Shaw's mother very kindly took this picture of us accepting our award:

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Happy May Day!

Our bees are doing well. Veronica, who was broodless last week, is following directions and has been laying eggs in the empty frames we placed in her hive. Kimberley wrote on the empty frames “put brood here,” so evidently bees can read. We know bees are smart, but we didn’t know they could read English.

Califia’s top bar hive doing well. It’s amazing how fast they’re building out natural comb. There are 15 bars on the hive now, and 14 of the bars are sporting comb with capped brood and honey.

Brianne inspects Califia's top bar hive

Top bar hives are marvelously easy to inspect. The top bars are simply strips of wood (no frames, no foundation) to which the bees attach their comb. The bars lie across the top of the box with no spaces between them; we only remove one or two bars at a time to look inside the hive (easy on the back), so most of the bees are still in darkness under the remaining top bars. We use barely any smoke, the girls stay calm, and everyone is happy.

These bees are watching us, but they're not attacking.

And the most captivating thing about Califia’s top bar hive? We can look through the observation window in the side and see what’s going on without disturbing the bees. It’s addicting, and I find myself in the bee yard whenever I have a spare moment, watching the bees inside the hive as they go about their business.

Looking through the observation window

We built our hive from two plans we found on the internet.
For the body of the hive, we used a plan from How to Build a Top Bar Hive offered for free by J.P. Chandler, author of the The Barefoot Beekeeper. To build the window, we used plans (also free) from BackYardHive.com

If you’re not handy, or don’t have, as we did, a resident carpenter available to build it for you, (A big thanks to Dan Strack!) you can purchase beautiful prebuilt hives from BackYardHive.com. I’m coveting one of their graceful top bar hive tools.  

Oh, well. I've said my white rabbits (it's the first day of the month). Perhaps I'll have the good luck to get one of these tools.

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

We’re looking over a four-leaf clover that Chicago’s French Pastry School sent to wish us luck at this Sunday’s James Beard Foundation Awards. (Thanks, guys!) Four of us are headed to New York for the ceremony, and we’re excited and nervous—and not just about what to wear!

Our One-Block project is in great company in the Best Food Blog category: Our fellow nominees are Bon Appétit columnist Andrew Knowlton’s The BA Foodist and Sacramento omnivore Hank Shaw’s Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, which takes locavore to a near-complete DIY level. We’re looking forward to swapping stories with Shaw, Knowlton, and all of the other food and wine writers we’ll be meeting this weekend.

Want to hear who we’re talking to and find out if we win? We’ll be posting live updates from the Media Awards ceremony on Sunset’s Twitter page. Sign up to follow us by clicking here—it’s free, easy, fun, and admittedly a bit addictive. Wish us luck, and see you on the Interweb!

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

We spent a seriously warm Earth Day in the hives. Sheer bliss (if bliss is also sweaty and uncomfortable).

It’s been a while since we fully inspected the two Langstroth hives, and we were dying of curiosity to see how our new queen, Califia, and her bees were doing in the top bar hive

Readers, meet our two new queens:

Califia

 

And Midge

Califia is the queen in the top bar hive. Top bar hives don’t have foundation or frames; the bees build natural comb that hangs from a simple bar of wood that rests on the top of the hive. A strip of beeswax running down the central length of the bar guides the girls to build straight.

Califia’s bees are smart. And quick too. Scarcely two weeks after we installed them in their new home, they’ve begun building comb—straight, perfect comb—on all the original 8 bars. 

We carefully pulled each bar, and then ... there she was! Califia. And right in front of Team Bee, she stuck her tush in a cell and laid an egg! Of course we cheered wildly. But quietly. They're bees, after all.

Midge (thanks to Jen Barnett for suggesting the name) is a daughter of Betty, the queen who swarmed in March. We weren’t sure we had a new queen, an old queen, or any queen at all, so we were very happy when we opened the hive and found it full of brood and eggs. Midge was clambering around in the bottom box. We know she’s not Betty, because she is more orange, and brighter in color than Betty ever was.

Her hive was so full of honey that we took two frames from the center and gave her two empty ones to fill (hopefully with eggs). This will be our first harvest of the year.

And Veronica in the third hive? She’s having some problems. She’s all honey and no brood, but the queen is still in the hive, desperately looking for empty cells in which to lay eggs. We’re trying to figure out what to do. Readers, any suggestions?

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

A couple of weeks ago, while up in the gorgeous Okanagan Valley (B.C.), I met a charming beekeeper named Helen Kennedy.

I'd gone to her place, Arlo's Honey Farm, to taste her award-winning honey and learn a bit about her beekeeping techniques. Well, as it turned out, Helen has been reading our Bee blog. She knew all about our strange multiple swarmings and our epic, unending battles with mites, which fasten perniciously to the bees' bodies, weakening them. They also kill brood and spread viruses.

Immediately yet gently, she began dispensing bits of advice about both swarming and mite control. We're passing these gifts along today, Earth Day, for the benefit of any beekeepers reading this--and their bees.

Helen's Earth Day Gift No. 1: How to control swarming

Bees will swarm for a number of reasons--most often when the hive has produced a rival queen (or queens), who each fly off with a portion of the bees, or when the hive is too crowded. Your chances of averting a swarm increase if you a) remove the rival queens before they're born and b) give your bees more space.

Which means: destroy the queen cells as soon as they're formed. "Look for a row of cups (i.e. queen cells) along the bottom of the frame and remove those," advises Helen.

But sometimes the queen is weakening, and really does need to be replaced with a strong, healthy new queen. How can you tell whether you're knocking off a crowd of Pied Pipers--or a desirable new leader?

 "If the queen cell is in the middle of the frame, leave it alone. That means the bees know they need another queen." Amazing little creatures, these bees.

The other point about the row-of-cups formation: this is your heads-up that the bees are considering a mass move. It's valuable information, because then you can remove filled frames and replace them with empty ones, giving the bees room to build and grow--and lessening their urge to emigrate.

Helen's Earth Day Gift No. 2: How to fight mites

Use screened bottom boards, with a removable plastic board to catch and count mites. (We do this already, but Helen gave me a board marked into sixths, to make it easier to count a zillion mites; one square's count times six will do the trick.)

Use formic acid pads. We've tried this, with some success. Helen applies hers in fall (after the honey harvest in August and before the frost) and  three times in spring. She likes to apply three times, 5 days apart, "to get it through all the bees and the brood, too."

Put in an "extender patty", a hamburger-like patty made of  Crisco, icing sugar, and essential oil of wintergreen. The bees eat it, crawl over it, and get thoroughly coated in this slick stuff so that the mites have no toehold.  She'll be sending her recipe to us; look for it in a post coming soon.

Plant nasturtiums. She's not completely sure about this, having not yet tried it herself, but she's read about a beekeeper in Germany who noticed that whenever his hives were set near nasturtiums, they were mite-free. Sounds like an idea worth trying!

Here's a last Earth Day gift from Helen's own earth—her bees and her 14 acres of peach trees:

Peach and Honey Preserves

In a large saucepan over medium-high heat, boil 1 part peach chunks with a little less than 1 part honey (adjust the amount depending on the sweetness of your fruit). Boil until the syrup starts to thicken. (Test by dropping some syrup on a plate and popping it in the freezer until it's just cool; if it's as thick as you like, stop; if not thick enough, keep simmering and testing.) Pour into jars and process the way you would any other preserve.

By Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist and Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Our new bees arrived this week! We asked our fans on Facebook for name suggestions and ...

We’ve named the new queen Califia, after the queen of the mythical Island of California! Thanks to Chryss Yost for her suggestion on our Facebook page.

Califia’s girls are to populate our topbar hive.  We’ve never installed bees before. It was quite an experience.

Kimberley picked up the wooden box of bees (this photo is of the box of bees in her car). She was safe in the car; the screened sides of the box contained the bees. A can filled with sugar syrup hanging down in the center of the box kept the bees fed, and the queen, suspended to the side of the can, kept the bees happy.

And, all suited up, we began the “installation.”

We pulled the can from the box, then took Califia’s little cage from the box. The bees clumped around her and didn’t want to leave her, and we had to gently shake and brush them off.

Then Brianne (who just installed her own bees last weekend) removed the little cork in the queen cage and stuffed in a marshmallow. 

The idea is that the bees will eat through this candy plug in a few days and release her. We hung her little cage inside the hive.

Then we installed the bees. It was really more like dumping them.

Kimberley banged on the side of the box, then shook it over the hive and a ball of bees fell into the bottom of the hive.

They surged like a wave up the sides, and began clumping around the queen.

Not all the bees came out of the box, and there was quite a bit of banging the box on the ground and shaking it to dislodge the remaining bees. In the end we put the box on the top of the hive and told the 50 or so reluctant bees to find their own way out.

Bees were flying everywhere, dazed and confused, but once we put the top bars in place, they began to settle down and come to their entrance holes to fan the pheromones that tell the other bees “this is home.”

After about 2 hours, most of the bees had settled down and were scouting the area. At the end of the day, we could see them (through the observation window!) in a big cluster around the queen.

Now we wait excitedly for our new worker bees to build their natural comb on our top bars!

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

The swarm we gave Tom Vercoutere is booming. We left it in the xerox box, screen taped over the hole, next to the back fence for him to pick up on the Thursday we captured it. He emailed us a week later:

"Your girls got put in a Nuc box on Friday morning and they had already drawn a 4-inch comb from the lid, just sitting in the box for 15 hours.

So did I get Betty? I checked yesterday and there was already capped brood in the Nuc. She must have started laying the Friday I put her in. If it wasn’t Betty, it sure was a mated queen and not a virgin leaving in an after swarm.

One of my hives has a very spotty brood pattern and a failing queen so I am going to put the swarm bees in that hive after I remove the bad queen."

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

This week we pulled the drone frame from Betty and were astonished to find at least 5 queen cells on the drone comb. You can see one of the queen cells in the left of this photo—it’s the long cell hanging from the comb face. If you look closely, you can see that the cap at the bottom has been chewed through to form a little escape hatch. That queen mostly likely emerged successfully on her own by chewing her way out. In fact, it looked like all the queens from that frame emerged successfully, which no doubt spurred our week of swarms.

We had waited the 28 days Randy Oliver recommends for mite trapping, so that we'd be able to kill the drones before they emerged (and in doing so, kill their varroa mites). It was clearly too long to wait.

The hive was filled with drones. Not drones sleeping soundly in their cells, mind you, but lumbering big-butt drones stomping around the frame like it was some kind of testosterone-infused honey-scented male spa. At the right of the photo above you can see one of the drones muscling his way out of a cell. Brute.

The drone frame was filled with empty used cells, and more drones were emerging as we inspected the comb. We froze those bad boys, along with their mite load. We made a note to pull the drone frame a few days earlier next time. (I know, this seems cruel, but beekeeping is not all sweetness and honey.)

The rest of the frames are full of capped brood, and the bees act like they’re queenright (meaning they have a mated queen): calm and productive. In turning a frame over to look at it, a big chunk of brood fell off the foundation (Brianne, shocked, is holding the chunk). We stuck it back on, but we’re not sure the brood will survive.

At the bottom of the frame, you can see yet another queen cell. We don't think this one currently houses a virgin queen. But if it does, and if the hive already has a mated queen, she’ll likely chew through the side of the cell and kill her virgin competition.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

We've been working on the May issue of the magazine, so I didn't have time to blog about the rest of the high drama in the beeyard that began when Betty swarmed last week. She first swarmed on a Tuesday, then on Wednesday, another swarm left the hive, puddled on the ground, and then crawled back, ending up underneath the hive. By that evening I only saw a few bees sniffing around the stack of clay pots near the hives. It looked sad, like they'd lost all their girlfriends and were trying to figure out what to do. I thought we'd lost another bit of Betty.

But the next morning we found a small swarm on one of the clay pot stacks!

Bee Team member Brianne, who belongs to the Santa Clara Valley Beekeepers Guild, had just attended a lecture about how to capture a swarm. She calmly and surely scooped the bees into the box we'd prepared as a trap box (we cut a hole into the side and put some wax inside—it's supposed to be enticing to bees on the prowl for a new hive).

Yes, it's a xerox box. Yes, we've heard the jokes about the bees replicating.

The bees tumbled right in, with a little help from a bee brush. They were so docile. Like little kittens (with stingers). They were huddled and sweet, and seemed a little dazed. They never once tried to sting us, although if we had somehow hurt the queen or threatened them, they would have. But slow, steady, and careful handling keeps bees calm.

We figured we'd gotten the queen that was in the middle of the swarm, because after we put the lid on the box, bees ringed the hole in the box, bottoms out, and fanned for all they were worth, spreading pheremones that told the other bees "hey, Her Majesty's in here!" The bees we hadn't caught poured up to the box and into the hole, just like they are supposed to do.

The box of bees went to Tom Vercoutere, of the Beekeepers Guild Of San Mateo County. He's been so generous with his help as we stumble through our first year of beekeeping, we thought we'd give him the swarm as thanks.

This week has been calm in the beeyard, although Betty (or what's left of her hive) sometimes clumps up at the entrance of her box. We're not sure what's going on in that hive. We hope that the bees planned well and prepared some queen cells so they'd have a new queen after they swarmed. There have been plenty of drones, so she shouldn't have any trouble getting mated. Hopefully she'll start laying eggs soon.

Excuse us while we do a little crowing.

We've been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award! Yes, this very blog.

The category is: Blog Focusing on Food, Beverage, Restaurants, or Nutrition. (Yep, that sounds like us.) The winner will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on May 3.

And this is right on the heels of the news that our One-Block Feast story from August '08 was nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals award.

Spring is feeling very springy indeed.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

We hinted of it here and here, and now it seems there will actually be an organic veggie garden at the White House.

The White House has even released the planting plan. Looks great!

I'm disappointed Obama confessed to disliking beets. Who dislikes beets?! Then again, it seems like an easy out for a disliked vegetable. Can you imagine the uproar from mothers across the country had he chosen broccoli?

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Good news! Our print story last August about our summer one-block feast, We Had a Dream, has been nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) journalism award.

To read our story, click here.

We're thrilled about the nomination, since the IACP has thousands of members—and other nominees include such food-magazine luminaries as Gourmet, Saveur, and Food & Wine. The winners of the awards will be announced at a gala ceremony in Denver on April 4.

We'll let you know how we do!

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Holy moly! The bees have swarmed again! This afternoon they started roaring, and a cloud of bees zoomed up and down the creekbed next to the beeyard (that's Kimberley, looking at the madness of bees in the creek). There were bees crawling all over the ground.

Then they boiled out of Betty’s hive, bearded across the front, and poured out onto the ground to make a big puddle of bees.

Bees filled the air around the hive. The puddle on the ground grew larger.

But they didn’t fly away. After about 15 minutes, the puddle of bees crawled up the leg of the hive, forming chains to cross the waterfilled tupperware.

They clustered on the bottom of the hive. That’s where we left them (we had to get back to working on the magazine).

We also found a queen wandering around on the ground. She was attended by a retinue of about 15 bees. Then she was gone. We're not sure if she flew away or crawled under a leaf.

We have no idea what’s going on. But it’s dramatic. It’s exciting.

And terribly exhilarating to be in the middle of a cloud of swarming bees.

By Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist

I was out in the Sunset gardens this morning shooting some flowers and plants for the magazine.  I got a frantic call on my cell phone from Margaret.

“Where ARE you!? One of our hives is swarming!!!”

I grabbed the camera, ran as fast as I could (with the huge camera and tripod slowing me down) to the bee yard.  Sure enough, bees were everywhere!  Most in the oak tree just above the hives.  We could see a ball of bees, just barely, through the branches, about 30 feet up. Too obstructed to get a good photograph.

There was a smaller cluster at Betty’s entrance that makes us think it was Betty who abandoned the hive.

We watched them in awe, doing their little bee thing. Thousands of bees flying all around our unprotected heads (there was no time to grab veils!), pooing on our clean shirts (we don't mind). It was all over within 45 minutes. Amazing.

We think we still have bees left in Betty’s old hive— With a new queen? We want to inspect as soon as we can, but have been advised to leave the new queen (or whoever is in there) alone for a few weeks.  Sigh...

More from Margaret to come later this week.  Exciting stuff around the bee yard!

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

We began with salad, wheatberry ciabatta, and homemade butter.

Our winter feast started with a happy accident.

Back in September, Team Kitchen and Team Garden drew up a list of cool-season crops that would do well in our area, and planned a menu around it. First we'd have a salad of Belgian endive and escarole, with a fresh poached egg on top and croutons from extremely homemade wheat bread (as in, we grew the wheat and ground it).

Well, the endive never sprouted. And we couldn't find escarole seeds. Who knew there'd be a run on escarole seeds?

Moral: Be flexible. Johanna, our test garden coordinator, had also planted some red butterhead lettuce and arugula, so Team Kitchen adapted.

It was easy; the lettuces were beautiful. We hardcooked the egg instead of poaching it, because a liquidy poached yolk, great on crisp endive and escarole, would've turned the tender lettuces into a sticky clump. We added small chunks of sweet, juicy tangerines from our tree, garlic-rubbed croutons, and a vinaigrette made with tangerine juice, our olive oil, and sea salt.

Red butterhead lettuce and arugula salad with tangerines and hard-cooked eggs.

We had plenty of wine to go with the food. The Syrah was in bottle at last and had recovered from its bottle-shock; it was back to its original blackberry suaveness. The Chardonnay still tasted fine—like a crisp green apple.

Sunset Chardonnay and Syrah, left; right, wine editor Sara Schneider sips the white as managing editor Alan Phinney tears off a chunk of ciabatta. (By the way, that construction site you see through the windows here will be a big outdoor kitchen, to be completed by June.
Come to our Celebration Weekend and see it for yourself.)

The stunning brassicas from the garden—cauliflower, broccoli romanesco, Savoy cabbage, kale, broccoli rabe, mustard greens—gave us our main courses: a winter vegetable chowder and spicy braised greens with preserved lemon.

Our chowder was packed with cauliflower, broccoli romanesco, and broccoli rabe,
plus a few potatoes saved from fall. On top: broccoli rabe flowers and purple rosemary blooms.

Braised Savoy cabbage, mustard greens, and
Tuscan kale with preserved lemon and chile.

The broccoli romanesco was so beautiful and strange that we used it as decor, too.

We ended not with our original dessert—olive oil tangerine cake, which turned out to be a total clunker given we were destroying the original recipe—but with something that arose naturally from our short list of available ingredients, which included honey, eggs, "imported" cream, and tangerines.

 

Tangerine honey crème caramel.

We had a very nice afternoon.

Recipe editor Amy Machnak and researcher Elizabeth Jardina.

Test garden coordinator Johanna Silver in the middle of
what must've been a vivid story.

Me (at left) and copy chief Erika Ehmsen.

SO WHERE ARE THE RECIPES?

They and the story of how we raised the ingredients for this winter menu will be showing up in larger form at some point in the months ahead—I promise.

For now, please have some salad. It's hearty enough to eat when it's cold, but bright and lively, too—which suits our California March, the month when winter slides into spring.

Red Butterhead Lettuce and Arugula Salad with Tangerines and Hard-Cooked Eggs

MAKES 6 to 8 servings TIME About 1 hour

We used our own chickens’ eggs, but we let them sit in the fridge for at least a week to let the air pocket inside each shell expand and make the eggs easier to peel.

6 to 8 eggs (not super-fresh)
2 tsp. fresh tangerine juice
1/2 tsp. each finely grated tangerine zest and sea salt
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided
3 to 4 thin slices wheatberry ciabatta or other whole wheat bread,
     cut into 1/2-in. dice (about 1 1/2 cups)
2 cloves garlic, mashed to a paste with 1/4 tsp. sea salt
5 loosely packed cups arugula leaves
6 loosely packed cups red butterhead lettuce leaves
     (about 1/2 small head)
2 large or 4 small tangerines

1. Preheat oven to 400°. Put eggs in a small pot and cover with about 1 in. of water. Bring to a boil; immediately lower heat to a simmer and cook 10 minutes. When eggs are finished, transfer to ice water; let cool 1 minute. Crack eggs all over on counter and return to ice water for 5 minutes. Peel under cold water. Set aside.
2. Meanwhile, whisk tangerine juice, zest, and salt together in a small bowl. Whisk in 1/4 cup olive oil. Set aside.
3. In a heatproof cup, microwave remaining 1/4 cup olive oil with mashed garlic for 10 seconds. Put bread cubes on a baking pan and drizzle with garlic oil, tossing to coat. Spread in a single layer and bake about 15 minutes, or until crisp, stirring once or twice. Set aside.
4. Rinse greens and dry twice in a salad spinner. Peel tangerines and remove thready white pith; then cut fruit crosswise into chunks, removing any seeds.
5. In a large bowl, toss greens gently but thoroughly with only enough dressing to coat. Add tangerines and croutons and toss just to mix. Divide salad among plates. Add a quartered egg to each plate and drizzle eggs with a little more dressing. Or pile it all on a platter if you like, so people can help themselves.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

In a break between welcome storms (I hope this rain eases California’s third year of drought) we ran out to the hives to give the bees some more real estate.

The bees in Betty were bursting the seams of her single box, and Veronica has drawn out comb in both brood boxes (although she’s filled most of her top box with honey). And, as we found last week in the great drone/mite massacre, her queen is clearly laying eggs.

The sun shone across Betty’s hive as we lifted her lid; we had to admire how beautiful and golden the mass of bees looked.

Betty’s bees are so laid back they didn’t even seem to notice us peering in. We added a second brood box; we’re hoping this spring she’ll be able to fill it out and even support a honey super.

Veronica was not so calm. We pulled off the lid to add her super and soon bees started buzzing up and warning us to go away (it’s a funny feeling when they get up against your veil and yell at you in their buzzy voices). The bees weren't crazy mad like the Africanized bees in this video, and our bees didn't sting us, but they were firm as they let us know they didn’t like being bothered. Sometimes bees will get really cranky if they’re no longer queen-right (queen-right means they have a queen); I hope that’s not the case.

Reader Tina K (friend of Nugget) has commented that she already has put honey supers on her hives, and they are pretty full. Wonder how long it will take our girls to make enough honey to share with us? Seems like there’s a nectar flow going on. The neighborhood is full of blooming fruit trees, eucalyptus, and acacia. Rosemary bushes are full of blue flowers, bulb blossoms are starting to crack open, and spring blooms are budded up ready to go.  Good time to be a bee.

Note from Kimberley: I am happy to report that Betty has already moved up into her new space-- she must have been eager for it!  There are five frames of bees happily building comb on the new brood frames. We still hope she won't be like rebel Veronica and will put brood where brood should be (instead of honey)!

K.Ruby/IUH

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

A couple weeks ago, K. Ruby Blume of The Institute of Urban Homesteading emailed us this message: “I have kept bees with the top bar system for 10 years. I have never once had a problem with mites. The bees build naturally, the cells are smaller which inhibits mite reproduction. We also work with feral bees who have had a chance to breed up their resistance living on their own without human interference here in our bioregion....the only time I had a mite problem was the one year I tried working with the traditional hives.”

Well, we’ve been thinking about running a top bar hive in addition to our two Langstroth hives. So I called Ruby to find out more information.

She’s sold on top bar hives as a way to raise bees.

“They’re good for a hobbyist backyard beekeeper,” she said. “Since you usually build a top bar hive yourself, and you don’t need to buy foundation or frames, it’s much cheaper than buying a Langstroth hive.”   

Plus, she pointed out, it’s easier to work a top bar hive, as you’re only lifting one bar at a time to inspect the hive, rather than wrestling with an box full of 80 lbs of frames, honey, and brood (as we had to do last week).

“It’s easier on the bees too. When you open Lang hive all the bees have access to air and they fly around, but when you open a top bar hive, the hive stays closed except where the bar is out.” This means you can use less smoke, because the bees don’t get so upset.

And she says she can inspect her top bar hives pretty fast. “I have three top bar hives here, and I can go through them in less than an hour. But you have to manage them every two to three weeks [during warm weather] because they are building freeform. You have to prevent them from building crooked comb.”

So where do you get plans to build a top bar hive? You can find many different plans in cyberspace, including two top bar hive plans at Ruby’s website. “Top bar hive styles are not standardized. You can do pretty much whatever you want. Really, bees just need a dry cavity, and they will build.”

Ruby teaches top bar beekeeping in the Oakland area at The Institute of Urban Homesteading. Her next beginner class, Backyard Beekeeping with the Kenyan Top Bar Hive is March 21, 2009.

 

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Four of our chicks at about two weeks old, back in August of 2007.

If you've been enjoying our blog posts about our various one-block feast projects, and don't yet know about our downloadable how-to guides for each, check them out by clicking on the one that interests you.

The Guides:

How to Raise Chickens

How to Make Beer

How to Make Olive Oil

How to Raise Honeybees

How to Make Wine

How to Make Vinegar

How to Make Salt

How to Grow Summer Crops

How We Made Cheese

How to Attract Beneficial Insects (we threw this one in just for fun, and because it's helpful)

Send us your comments, if you like...and stay tuned for the launch of new projects as we head into spring.

By Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist

This week, following Randy Oliver’s advice from last week, we prepared to kill the brood in Veronica and treat once again with formic acid, understanding that if we didn’t take this drastic step the hive might be doomed to fail against the mites. 
We first wanted to get a mite % of infestation to be sure the treatment was necessary (and we were curious). To get this, we gathered a sample of bees taken from a brood frame into alcohol, then counted the mites that fell after washing them and divided the mite count with the number of bees in the sample. A few must die for the good of the hive!
So, we opened up our Veronica hive on Wednesday to get the bee wash sample. There wasn’t any brood in the top box (they are still filling all ten frames with honey!) so we took the box off to get to the bottom box.  What a task that was!  There was so much drone and burr comb in between the two boxes that it was extremely difficult to get the two apart.  It took two of us lifting the estimated 80lb. box vertically while using the hive tool to break the propolis seal at the same time!

What we found in the bottom box was a shock! We were not expecting drone brood (white larva in photo) this early in the year, but as you can see in the picture we have LOTS of drone comb and the mites are taking advantage.  (Click on photo to make larger-- I count at least five mites in that picture.  How many do you count?)

We sampled about 125 bees from the brood frame into alcohol and only got five mites after washing, which would be a 4% infestation. However, I am not convinced this number is accurate. For the first time EVER, I saw several bees in the hive with mites on them, and the drone brood is covered in mites. We scraped off the ruined drone brood and burr comb from the top of the frames in the bottom box and put it in a plastic bag. Just in the bag I counted at least ten mites. And that’s just the number that didn’t jump off the brood and onto another bee while we were scraping!

In any case, we can see that Veronica is doing very well, despite the mites!  She has at least sixteen frames of bees in her two boxes, which according to Randy is strong enough to hold up against the mites.  Yay!
We returned to the hive yesterday to scrape off the remaining burr and drone comb. We also inserted the drone frame, now that we know how eager Veronica is to make drones!  We hope this will be enough to keep the mites under control, for now.

Our next concern?  Swarming season approaches!

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

All is gloom in the bee yard these days.

We had been so hopeful. Remember in my last post how I bragged we’d found only 4 mites in Betty? We thought surely the formic acid pad on Veronica knocked down her mites as well. After all, we treated Veronica with formic acid twice; Betty only once, and then only for a few hours a day.

Poor Veronica! Twice she lived with formic acid day and night for three weeks—once in mid December, then in late January. And yet, a week after removing the formic acid from Veronica, what do we find? 102 mites stuck to the sticky board after a 24-hour natural mite drop. And worse, a powdered-sugar dusting that same day yielded 132 mites in 10 minutes! Aye, Veronica!

But weak little Betty, the hive who had such trouble building up last summer, seems to be holding her own against the mites, with only 5 mites dropping 10 minutes after a powdered-sugar dusting.

We’re confounded. We don’t know what to do.

We have been advised: Tear apart Veronica’s boxes immediately, kill any brood we find (the idea being that there shouldn't be much egg laying going on this time of year), shake the bees into one box with some honey and treat them again with formic acid. Sterilize the empty brood box.

I hate this idea. I’ve been doing some reading about beekeeping alternatives, and I tend to agree with the biodynamic beekeepers who try to preserve the unity, or the “bien” of the colony. Since the first time I went into a hive, I’ve thought of the hive—the girls, the queen, even the much maligned drones—as a single, complete organism. You know, like an animal. I often describe the hive to my friends as a tiger in a box. To cut poor Veronica apart and invade her “body” seems horrific to me.

Still, I suppose radical surgery is often necessary. We’re discussing it—really, we're having a dispirited argument. Treat? Or don't treat? It's a huge controversy. But we're going to have to make up our minds, as time is drawing short. Queen Veronica will soon be laying frames of eggs, if she isn’t already.

We’re discussing other ways of raising bees, and are thinking about getting a top bar hive in addition to our two Langstroth hives. This is controversial in itself. And we're researching small cell retrogression. Readers, do any of you have personal experience with top bar hives or alternative beekeeping? Comments, please!

Betty's bees

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

This week the formic acid pads came off Veronica, and the sticky board came out. The board, cleaned and vaselined only a few days before, was coated with clumps of mites. I counted over 200 before I gave up. Some of the mites were still alive, scuttling across the board when I poked them with a stick. Ugh.

I do think the formic acid treatment has helped the bees. There are fewer crawling and dead bees on the ground outside the hive; we don’t know for certain that the girls had tracheal mites blocking their little breathing passages—you need a dissecting microscope to check that—but crawling bees can be a symptom of an infestation. Formic acid is supposed to help control tracheal mites as well as varroa.  (The USDA has some pretty gruesome pictures of tracheal mites. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!)

And our Betty is getting stronger. When we open her hive to put the formic acid pads in, the frames are full of bees. There is a steady stream of bees at the entrance bringing pollen and nectar. After her last formic acid treatment we waited 6 days and then did a 48-hour natural mite fall. I counted 4 mites and one thing I couldn’t quite identify as a mite. Woo hoo! Those are good numbers.

Hopefully all this mite treatment will give the girls a leg up for the season. Spring is starting up in the Bay Area. I saw a honey bee at the flowering almond outside my kitchen window yesterday. The acacias are puffing out with yellow flowers. and ornamental plums lining the city streets are covered in pink blossoms. Seems like a good situation for a bee.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Here’s another reason to buy honey from someone you know and trust.

You know the honey you buy at the grocery store? The honey labeled “pure” and “organic?”

Hmmm. Maybe not so pure.

In a special report on honey laundering, by Seattle Post-Intelligencer Senior correspondent Andrew Schneider, you’ll find a story of questionable dealings in the honey world. Honey shipped in from undisclosed countries of origin. Honey tainted with pesticides and antibiotics. Honey dumped on the U.S. honeymarket at unbelievably low prices. Reading this series will make you as hot as any Africanized bee hive.

On the home front
We’re still treating our bees for mites. (Disclaimer: Formic acid is classified as organic. And we would not eat honey produced while the treatment was on the hive.)

The girls seem to agree with us; the formic acid treatment is nasty . Betty gets a treatment for a half a day only. We put the pad on in the morning and take it off in the evening. In the mornings, when we open her hive up, she’s fine. The bees are very calm, just buzzing quietly to themselves as contented bees do. But when we put on the formic acid pad, what an uproar!

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

This is a picture of Kimberley suited up to put formic acid in the hives to treat for varroa mites. Formic acid stinks, and the vapor burns. Makes your nose feel like it’s been toasted, your eyes feel like they’ve been torched. Our advice: Wear a respirator. Wear eye protection.

We’ve treated with formic acid once, although just on Veronica. It didn’t seem to help; a week afterward, we sugar dusted, and the sticky board from Veronica was still covered in mites.  Lot’s of the little vampires—almost 200 in five minutes! Even natural 24-falls yielded high counts.

To kill mites, formic acid needs daytime outside air temperatures to be between 50-79 degrees. The first time we applied formic acid we had a cold spell, and the temperature never reached optimum levels. Perhaps that’s why we didn’t kill so many mites. For this second application we’ve been in luck, with summer-like weather during the first two weeks of January. We put the formic acid in Veronica on January 14, and we’ve been slaughtering mites ever since. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Too many to count.

Betty gets a formic acid pad for only a few hours during the day. She's too weak to live with the vapor for longer periods of time. She doesn't have as many dead mites, but still there are enough to be worrisome.

Formic acid may slow down spring brood production, but the mites will weaken and eventually kill the hive. We'll take the pad out of Veronica the first week of February. We hope this works.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Put your garden design skills to work helping bees by entering the Honey Bee Haven garden design competition at University of California, Davis.

This garden, funded by Häagen-Dazs, will “be a pollinator paradise,” according to Lynn Kimsey, chair of the Department of Entomology. At a half-acre, it will provide year round blooms for bees, research material for the on-going study of bees, and inspiration to visitors interested in building their own bee-friendly paradise.

But enter soon. The deadline is January 30, 2009. You can read all the particulars at UC Davis’s Department of Entomology website.

On the home front
The battle with varroa mites continues. Even after the formic acid treatment, a sugar dusting a week later knocked off just under 200 mites from Veronica. A natural 24-hour fall produced about 100 mites. Happily, the same 24 hours only yielded 9 from Betty (although with less bees, she provides less potential mite victims).

Frankly, we’re about out of ideas. We've tried Apiguard, drone comb trapping, sugar dusting, and formic acid. There are other products to try, but they're not organic, and we're loathe to try them. Readers, any advice?

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

In December, Todd Schofield wrote that he and his young daughters often found dead or dying bees in their yard. And, concerned about the troubles facing bees, he asked what they could do to help bees.

It’s always sad to find a dead bee, but the sad fact of bee life is that a worker bee's allotted time is short. A summer-born worker bee lives only 28 to 35 days. They simply wear out; their tattered wings can no longer carry them and they often die in the field, on the job.  So, Todd and daughters, don’t be too upset about the bee bodies you find.

But do help bees! European honeybees are in some serious trouble, as are native bumble bees. Here are some things you can do (and not do) in the new year to help bees of all kinds.

1. Don’t use any pesticides. This is probably the single most important thing you can do. Many researchers (and beekeepers) suspect that the low level of  pesticides found in bees is weakening them and making them more susceptible to other diseases. (Sharon Cohoon wrote about a common pesticide in lawn fertilizer, Imidacloprid, a nerve toxin which is taken up by the plant and goes into all parts of it, including pollen, in our Fresh Dirt Blog.)

2. Plant a variety of pollen bearing plants. Don’t go for flashy, sterile blossoms. Let clover grow in the lawn, and dandelions too. Relax. An added benefit of bee-attracting plants is that they’ll also attract beneficial insects and birds to your garden.

There’s a good bee-plant list at the Melissa Garden website.  And take our quiz How Green is Your Garden, to find out how softly on the planet your garden grows.

3. Buy honey! Buy it from local beekeepers if you can. We want to keep these folks in business; their bees pollinate our gardens, forests, and meadows. And, on the plus side for you, you’ll be tasting the terroir of the land as found through the honeybee.

For more on how you can help bees, see Elizabeth Jardina's Sunset story, Give Bees a Chance, as well as the Haagen Dazs Help the Honey Bees website.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

We’ve been shivering in the San Francisco Bay Area with an arctic express barreling through. I know it doesn’t mean much to folks living in the east, but believe me, it’s different out here. The thermometer dives much below 50 degrees Fahrenheit and we turn blue and stay shivering inside.

Our girls are no different. They’re hunkered down in their hives, in a shifting cluster that they keep between 64-90°F. When the weather’s cold and wet, we don’t see them.

The other day I was out checking on the girls in a little window between storms. The sun was out, and the thermometer read about 56°F. The bees were going crazy, flying all around! I could hear them buzzing from five feet away.

There was a fist-sized clump of bees on Betty. At first I thought. oh, great, all her other troubles, and now she’s getting robbed by other bees. But then I saw that many of the girls had something bright yellow-white (Propolis? Pollen? What’s blooming right now?) on their hind legs. They were all jockeying to get into the hive.

Veronica was also active, although fewer of her bees carried pollen.

Also, for the first time since this cold weather rolled in, I could smell that sweet eucalyptus scent of our bees. I couldn’t smell the formic acid in Veronica, though. That’s probably not good, since it needs higher temperatures to work. Darn.

Sadly, everyday there are lots of dead bees on the patio, some with the yellow stuff on their legs. We sweep nearly everyday, so these are new dead bees.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Here's what we're giving for Christmas this year:

Photograph by Spencer Toy

Yes! The fruits of our summer one-block diet.

Happy Holidays, everybody.