For the past month or so, my girls have flirted with the event that drives despair into many a beekeeper’s heart — swarming.

According to this bee expert, bees swarm for two reasons:

• Overcrowding
• Overpopulation

Though Queen Natasha has been quite prolific, the hive is not yet full. My girls are most certainly antsy due to the overcrowding resulting from recent nectar flows in town.

I’ve tried everything I can think of to keep them happily hived including the introduction of empty top bars into the brood nest. So far, they haven’t hived, but the youngsters keep building swarm cells.

Could it be an emergency preparedness tactic more than a full-on declaration of swarm?

To some it’s a chili-laden hot dog from The Dog House. To others, it’s anything covered in chopped green from Frontier or a bowl of posole on Christmas Eve (Ay dios mio, even Rachael Ray has a posole recipe).

To the 30,000 honeybees living in my backyard, Albuquerque quite literally tastes like flowers.

This week, I harvested the first honey from my backyard beehive. Call it “Fringecrest Estate” or “SE Heights Select,” my polyfloral summer vintage is fruit-forward with just a hint of astringency. Ooh la la, wait til the critics get ahold of this exquisite blend.

Or, as my man likes to remind me, you can just be honest and call it bee barf flavored quite deliciously by the lavender, catmint, and old apricot trees found in my ‘hood.

Some parts of the world taste like eucalyptus or chestnut or buckwheat. Albuquerque, I’ve discovered, tastes like a thousand well-tended flower gardens in the middle of the desert. An oasis.

Learn more:

How bees make honey
The European honey bee
The NM Native Bee Project
Albuquerque Urban Beekeepers

[Originally posted at Albuquerque's DukeCityFix.com]

The lavender bloom is on in Albuquerque and my girls are feasting.

I just learned about this powerful bit o work: The Vanishing of the Bees

The trailer includes footage from a Malaysian honey hunt described in Stephen Buchmann’s Letters from the Hive as well as interviews with beekeepers from all over the country.

To be honest, the trailer is so compelling that my sappy little Mama cortex is having a full-on emotional crisis.

This is one of the best folksy walk-throughs I’ve read yet describing the process of inspecting a top bar hive. For newbeeks, it’s like that doddering professor who actually knows what he’s talking about:

If the entrance holes are at one end, I puff a small amount of smoke at the entrance, and wait perhaps a minute. If a good honeyflow is on and the weather is good, smoke probably would not be necessary with my Italian bees but I use a little anyhow. Some smoke is puffed underneath the arching top covers in case paper wasps have started a nest under the tin. Next I remove the covers and the strip that covers the rear half of the notches in my tb’s which lets me see how far the bees have drawn out comb. If the bees seemed to be alarmed because of inclement conditions in which I might need to work or some other factor, most of the notches can be kept covered .

Starting at the rear of the hive, I remove the first bar which will
probably not be drawn out completely, and place that bar in a holder.
I have made a cradle to hold bars as I work on them, but I also
use 5-bar nuc boxes or 5-bar “supers” to hold the bars that are removed.
Moreover, the stands on which I have placed my hives have supports that
are spaced far enough apart that they can be used to hold tb’s.

I remove a couple of bars, then work forward toward the brood area,
shifting the inspected bar to the rear. Only a small gap of a couple of
bars is necessary to give plenty of room to remove bars. Often there is
a small amount of comb attachment to the sides at the upper two inches of
the comb, but the attachments are easily freed with a hive tool. If the
bar is then place on a cradle, the rough sides where the attachments were
can be trimmed smooth with scissors after which the bees are less inclined
to reattach the comb to the sides. This is especially true if the wax is
scraped from the sides also. Rarely there may be a few places where a
comb is attached to the bottom of the hive in which case the hive tool
will free it also. All of the wax scraps go into the solar wax melter.

Proceeding on to the brood area, I make my assessment of the hive
conditions in the same way as with conventional hives. If a comb needs
replacing for any reason, I’ll move it to the back of the hive for the
bees to clear it after which the comb and bar go to my solar wax melter.
I will place a new bar with a starter strip of foundation between two
straight combs so that I get a good comb drawn, especially during a good
honeyflow. After finishing the inspection, I shift the bars forward and
replace the one or two bars I originally removed.
If the hive has holes down both sides, I start at either end, work to
the center, then replace the bars. After that the other side can be
examined or additional work postponed until the next visit.

After I finish inspecting a hive, I make notes about what was found by
writing in pencil on a 4 x 6 index card. The card is kept in a ziplock
plastic bag held by a clothes pin nailed to the back of the hive body.
If the hive needs some additional work, I’ll turn one of the bricks on
top on its side to get my attention. When I go back to the hive, a quick
glance at the record card shows immediately what needs to be done.

From Top Bar Hive FAQ

My jimsonweed is 1 day away from blooming. What will this mean for my bees?

According to some sources:

Bee nectar collection from Datura plants in Mexico and Hungary, belladonna flowers, henbane (Hyoscamus niger) plants from Hungary, Serjania lethalis from Brazil and Gelsemium sempervirens from the American Southwest can all result in toxic honey.

Should I dig up my datura?

In Atlanta (or “Hotlanta” as Linda’s Bees calls it), screened bottom boards are more than a good idea. They’re life jackets for your hot summer hive.

In the dry heat of Albuquerque, I’m still unsure if it’s part of my vital support systems.

Currently, I’ve got a screened bottom board and then below that a solid board. I’m still unclear whether I should remove the solid board during our dry summers, but until then I enjoy pulling it out once a week to explore the bee debris.

There’s a jumble of yellow, green, and orange pollen in addition to an assortment of wax flakes, bee wings, propolis, and unidentifiable gunk. It’s so pretty I might just use it to decorate holiday cookies

Moist little larvae are pure eye-candy for the springtime beekeeper. When opening up your hives each week, you want to see plenty of larvae as evidence of your queen’s fertility.

This image shows larval stage bees (”grubs”) nestled in the comb. In a top bar hive like mine, the larvae are frequently mixed with honey and pollen on the comb.

Also, now that I look at this photo more closely, I notice a drone bee just to the left of the human finger. See it there, slightly larger with wider bands of black and oversized eyes on the top of its head?

Splendid shots by a photographer whose friend invited her to snap away at his hive. Incidental eyebrow stinging optional.

Splitting the Hive

Our friend Jason has a beekeeping hobby. Yesterday he invited us to come watch him “split the hive” and even though we weren’t 100% sure what that meant, we were pretty sure we’d get to see a beehive up close. We couldn’t resist. When we got there, he and the rest of the hive team (his mom and a cool bee guru friend of theirs) were all decked out in serious bee-garb which was a little off-putting. We were told we’d be ok as long as we didn’t wear black (which for us is actually really hard, but we found some white shirts and were feeling pretty brave). We got briefed that the way to survive being around a hive without protection is to wear white and move very slowly, and remain calm even when they come buzzing around you. No sweat.

Got me bees. Got me a queen. But I’m a little short on information since much of America focuses on beekeeping with commercial-style Langstroth hives. Thus, I do hereby highly recommend the following website:

• Hirschback Apiary’s “Guide to Top Bar Beekeeping”

With delectable bee porn and homey misspellings, it’s a website rich with information for hungry newbeeks like me. Dive in and enjoy!