Day #133 Branding

With a title like "Branding," you probably thought I was going to talk about marketing, right? Isn’t everyone into branding nowadays – making sure their public image is packaged tidily?

Forget it. I’m talking about real BRANDING. My branding iron arrived yesterday.

No! I’m not going to apply a hot branding iron to my bees!

But I am going to brand the hives. It all came about when I was reading one of those dire doom-and-gloom articles about people who steal hives. Lousy thought. Of course, the large commercial outfits are much more likely to see thieves lurking about than the teeny back-yard beekeepers, so I didn’t really have to mark my hives.

And I certainly didn’t want to use magic markers to write PROPERTY OF FRAN STEWART. IF FOUND PLEASE RETURN TO . . . Ugly, ugly.

So, I checked out http://www.brandnew.net/. I found them because their advertisement has shown up several times in the ad column to the left of this blog. I’m not allowed to click on those links, but I did note the URL and went to their website.

I sent them a rather stark design that showed what I wanted, bemoaning the fact that I didn’t know how to put a bee in the middle of it. Lo and behold, a very nice person emailed me back and said he could put a bee in there.

Within the next week or so, my son's going to drive out here with his propane torch (to heat the iron), and after he leaves, each one of my hive boxes will sport the following logo (but you'll have to imagine the cute little bee in between the two lines, since I can't figure out how to reproduce it):

Bees Knees

Beekeeping

Now I get to join that illustrious list of BrandNew customers . . .

The White House

Ghiradelli Chocolate

Mayo Clinic

Disney World

BeesKnees . . . !

 

BEEattitude for Day # 133:

       Blessed are the businesses that give good value, for they shall receive accolades from their clients.

One thing Fran is grateful for right now:

       The possum who cleans up the excess birdseed that falls under my porch    

http://www.franstewart.com

Day #103 Ah-ha! A Solution to My Dilemma

All this time I've wasted grumbling about not having a table saw—and yesterday the light dawned. I called H & L Bee Farm, the people I bought my five-frame garden hive from several months ago, and asked if they would be willing to sell me the hive components so that I could put them together and paint them myself.

The answer? Yes!

So, I'll pick up those extras (one cover, one deep hive body, and five honey supers) when I get my bees in eight more weeks or so. By the time my bee colonies are ready to split, I'll have happy new homes ready for them to move into. And I'll be able to use top bars instead of foundation, so I'll be able to harvest delicious comb honey. If you're wondering what I'm talking about, go back to Day #1, where I explain what foundation is.

Now I just have to decide what color to paint the new hive. Any suggestions?

BEEattitude for Day # 103:

       Blessed are those who are open to inspiration, for they shall be pleasantly surprised.

One thing Fran is grateful for right now:

       My old high school buddy, Ellen, who said she’d send me some Macadamia Nut Honey from her sister-in-law in Hawaii.

Day #97 January Building Project

I just realized it’s January.

Dumb, huh? Of course it’s January. But January in a normal (i.e. pre-bee) year was just a time to gather my momentum for the coming year.

This time, it’s Uh-oh! Only about 9 weeks left! And I was planning to build a top-bar hive to put my package of bees in.

I have some plans I bought from www.BeeLanding.com. Now, all I need is:

        lots of wood

        a bunch of wood-screws

        two hinges

        a rectangle of glass (so I can make a viewing port)

        some steel thingies to brace the angles

I’d better visit Home Depot tomorrow.

I could also use a friend with a table saw. Know where I can get one of those?

BEEattitude for Day # 97:

       Blessed are those who plan ahead, for we shall settle happily into our new home and produce great stores of honey

One thing Fran is grateful for right now:

       My wonderful sister who, I hope, is having a delightful birthday     

http://www.franstewart.com/

Day #35 More than eight thousand acres

I keep getting more and more impressed with bees.

If foraging worker bees fly out two miles from their hive, the circle indicated by that radius encompasses 8,042.5 acres. That's a lot of pollinating.

Of course, if they can find ample nectar sources within 100 yards of the hive, The Beekeeper's Handbook says they have six and a half acres to cover. I'm making lists of the kinds of plants I can plant in my yard. We're at the end of the planting season here in Georgia, though, so my little bees are going to have to spread out a bit when they get started in the spring. I hope I can spread good bee-safety-energy around a few thousand acres.

Do bees have guardian angels?

BEEattitude for Day # 35:

       Blessed are they who plant good food for us near our hives, for they shall have longer-lived bees. 

One thing I’m grateful for right now:

       Oatmeal for breakfast

Day #33 Dancing with Bees

Well, I don't exactly dance with them. Not yet. But I'm looking forward to the time when I'll know that those forager bees are in the hive dancing their little hearts out.

It takes a high degree of cooperation amongst the members of a hive to collect, store, prepare, and protect the pollen, nectar, and eventually, the honey. If the older forager bees simply wandered around looking for nectar, there's a good chance the colony would starve, since good food sources that are relatively far from the hive might be visited by only a single bee,
like this one.The bees have it all figured out, though, which is one reason they've managed to survive so long. They dance. Now we all know dancing is good for you, but for the bees it's absolutely critical. When a bee finds a nectar source, she collects some, brings it home, and uses dance movements, either circles or figure-eights, to tell the other foragers not only that there is nectar, but also how far away it is, and in what direction.

                                                                                      The round dance tells the other bees that the nectar source is within 100 meters (that's 300 feet or so) from the hive, but the round dance can't tell the other bees which direction the nectar is in. For that information, they need the figure-eight, often called the "waggle tail" dance for an obvious reason. The bee waggles her tail. The way she's lined up in relation to the sun gives the direction. And the speed of her dance tells how far away the source is.

So the foraging buddies head out exactly to where they've been directed, and find that patch of michaelmas daisies, like the bright pink one above..

On cloudy days, the bees can still see the sun because they can sense ultraviolet light.

When another bee brings in info about a different source, she tell them which way to go, and more bees pour out of the hive to go get this new bunch of nectar.

Amazing, eh?

BEEattitude for Day #33:
      Blessed are those who dance in joy or in sorrow, for they shall find their direction in life.

Something for which I'm grateful:
      The fact that I can dance - as if no one were watching

Day #29 My new end table

Imagine this:


Rubber Duck Yellow Hive from H&L Bee Farm

                      








Imagine it sitting in my dining area where I have to walk around it every time I want to go to the kitchen.




Now imagine it sitting in my living room as an end table. Much better, eh? It will have to sit there only until late March or early April, when the bees arrive.

What did I do with the previous end table?
             I'm taking it to Goodwill tomorrow.

What will I do when I lose this end table?
             Buy another hive - maybe a blue one, so I'll be ready when my bees outgrow the yellow hive.

BEEattitude for Day # 29:

       Blessed are they who can laugh at their furniture, for they shall not be tied to meaningless things. 

One thing I’m grateful for right now:

       The new gate on my back deck.

Day #28 Grannie's Bee Lessons

My grandkids came to visit Friday night while their mother was at an awards dinner for The Hope Clinic in Lawrenceville. We had great fun. We ate stove toast (I don't have a toaster, so I toast bread by buttering the slices and frying them in a saute pan until they're golden brown - the kids think it's goumet fare). They drew monster pictures and fancy designs. We heated up some soup and ate it. They told jokes. We made butter from some extra creamy goat's milk, and ate it on crackers. We baked Grannie's special Molasses Chewy Cookies, and then we ate some of them. Let me know if you want the recipe. I'm going to try to make it with my homegrown honey next year.

For somebody who's never liked to cook, I sure do a lot of it around my grandkids.

Anyway after the cookies, they asked me about the yellow four-tiered hive I have sitting in my dining room. So I took it apart and explained all the pieces. Then the questions came about how the bees operate, how they find the flowers to pollinate, why there's only one queen per hive, why to use a queen excluder (one of the parts of the hive), and how bees find their way home if they fly five miles away from the hive.

We talked about bees for about two hours. For a fifth-grader and a second-grader, that's a long attention span. Then it was time for them to leave. I sent them home with some cookies in a bag.

Day #22 Bee Queen Wings

It's (relatively - if you're an experienced beekeeper) easy to spot the queen. She's the one with the short wings. Not really. They're the same size as the wings of the workers, but her abdomen is a great deal longer than theirs, so her wings just look shorter.

Her first few flights allow her to orient herself to the hive so she can find her way back to it. Then she takes off to the drone-gathering place. Don't ask me how she knows where that is - it probably has something to do with smell, but nobody seems to know for sure. After she's mated and returned to the hive, the workers start feeding her lots of good bee food, and her abdomen increases greatly in size. As well it should, since she's going to be laying anywhere up to 2,500 eggs a day for the rest of the season, and for two, three, or even four years after that.

She'll never use her wings for much, unless the hive has to swarm. If the workers decide to leave the hive, they stop feeding her as much, so she'll slim down to a weight where her wings can support her. When she's slender enough, half the worker bees in the hive leave, enticing her along in some magical unknown bee language. They all go find another place to live, and the remaining workers get busy on the queen cells they've built up around some regular old eggs. By stuffing those cells with Royal Jelly, they actually create a new queen.

And you thought the queen was in charge????  Nope!

BEEattitude for Day # 22:

       Blessed are those who tread the ground lightly, for they shall not hurt our food sources.

One thing I’m grateful for right now:

       Smiles and hugs from my grandchildren.

Day # 18 "Cinnamon and Honey"

Did you know that honey is the only food on the planet that will not spoil or rot? Or so I've heard. If you put it in the 'fridge, it will crystallize, but it's still honey and still edible. I put it in my tea that way, and it works just fine. If you want to liquefy it, though, just loosen the lid and sit the honey in a container of hot water. It will "melt" and be as good as it ever was. Never boil honey or put it in a microwave. If you do, you'll kill the enzymes in the honey.

Now, if you combine wonderful Honey with wonderful Cinnamon:

Some people claim that a mixture of honey and cinnamon can cure most diseases. I'm not sure I'd go quite that far, but I do know from my own experience that honey has been a very effective medicine for some of what ails me. Honey can probably be used without any side effects - but that's just a guess on my part. 

I found a list that was printed years ago in a crackpot tabloid. The Weekly World News went out of business in 2007, with very good cause - wait till you see the sorts of things they "reported." 

Its list of what honey and cinnamon could cure included arthritis, bad breath, bladder infections, cancer, cholesterol, colds, fatigue, hearing loss, heart disease, immune system, indigestion, influenza, longevity, skin infections, upset stomach, weight loss.(Forgive the poor syntax in the list. I didn't write it! Whyever would one want to cure longevity? Or one's immune system?)

Here's one of their instructions, quoted directly:

 HEART DISEASES: Make a paste of honey and cinnamon powder, apply on bread, instead of jelly and jam, and eat it regularly for breakfast. It reduces the cholesterol in the arteries and saves the patient from heart attack. Also, those who have already had an attack, if they do this process daily, they are kept miles away from the next attack.. Regular use of the above process relieves loss of breath and strengthens the heart beat. In America and Canada, various nursing homes have treated patients successfully and have found that as you age, the arteries and veins lose their flexibility and get clogged; honey and cinnamon revitalize the arteries and veins.

Here's another one:
ARTHRITIS: Arthritis patients may take daily, morning and night, one cup of hot water with two spoons of honey and one small teaspoon of cinnamon powder. If taken regularly even chronic arthritis can be cured. In a recent research conducted at the Copenhagen University, it was found that when the doctors treated their patients with a mixture of one tablespoon Honey and half teaspoon Cinnamon powder before breakfast, they found that within a week, out of the 200 people so treated, practically 73 patients were totally relieved of pain, and within a month, mostly all the patients who could not walk or move around because of arthritis started walking without pain.

See why they went out of business? Don't you love the "practically 73 patients"? Does that mean 72 patients? And the "mostly all of the patients"? Does that mean mostly all of the 73  (72?) or would it mean mostly all of the 200? The world needs more editors!

Well, let me know if you try honey/cinnamon and have miraculous results.

(c) Yelloideas Photography

Still, honey and cinnamon both have a lot going for them. I wonder if the two of them together are more effective than each one alone would be - sort of like a good marriage, a respectful partnership, a clown fish and an anemone, or a well-functioning beehive. 

I figure it can't hurt - and it might help - so I'm headed to the kitchen to spread some honey and cinnamon on a slice of the homemade bread that a thoughtful neighbor gave me. Yum! It's guaranteed to cure my snack urge.

I'll eat it while I'm looking at my bright yellow hive and planning which perennials I need to plant this fall.

BeeAttitude for Day #18:
     Blessed are they who write the truth. We bees don't care, but we know that humans will respect such people.