Hello, Spring! We missed ya!

Today is the first full day of spring, and I am ecstatic that it has arrived! John and I showed winter out the door with our first inspection of the hives. I must say, they look lovely. The number of bees surprised me as I would have expected it to be a bit of a slower build up. To my mind, the population looked equal to, if not greater than, what we started with from the nucs last year - roughly 10,000 bees.

The temperment of the Sicilians reflected the beautiful temperature of the day: warm and cheery. Ditto goes to the Italians, though they got a little annoyed when John thunked the inner cover against the pallet their hive rests on to clear of bees so he could scrape burr comb and propolis off. One of the girls let me know of their displeasure and stung me (I wonder if this is the sort of reason most beekeepers are solitary animals).

Both hives contained good honey and bee bread stores. As importantly for this time of year, they both held a good number of eggs, larvae and capped brood. This means that despite not seeing the queens they are active and healthy. Because of the healthy population boom, John and I have set our sights on splitting the hives. Splitting is the most cost effective means of building up one's apiary. And it is just what it sounds like: taking one hive and making two by putting frames with a bunch of brood and capped honey along with plenty of worker bees into another hive. The tricky part is knowing whether the queen remained in the "mother" hive or got moved into the new one. It seems that most beekeepers that do splits just let the queenless hive take care of itself and raise a queen from the brood. However, we have a goal to expand the apiary with different breeds like Russians and Carniolans. So we want to time our splits with having new queens that we order. Judging by the dearth of mail order queens (which reminds me: be careful with searching for Russian queens on the Internet as you get a lot of results that have nothing to do with bees), we might be thinking a bit too early about splits.

Nonetheless, our beekeeping season is officially open and yesterday was a much better day for it!

Natural or organic?

Some of the inspiration for posts comes from email threads John and I have. That's where this one comes from.

If we were to seek "true" USDA organic certification, we'd run into a few problems. First off, everything inserted into the hive, whether sugar or probiotic supplement or smoke from the smoker, would have to be documented. I'm not saying we're lazy beekeepers, but this just isn't us. Second, and much more problematically, is that no true standards for organic honey exists.

Ross Conrad writes about this in his book Natural Beekeeping. Two quasi-standards have been adopted in lieu of official standard. One is the conservative: not only do you raise the bees organically, everything they can get their paws and proboscis on is also organic. That means that every neighbor or crop within 5 miles must be certified organic. That's a tough nut to crack as it desparately limits where a beekeeper can put hives.

The second is the liberal interpretation where the beekeeper raises the bees organically without regard to his or her surroundings. This way, if the honey isn't quite organic, the bees are to blame as the beekeeper has done the best s/he can do.

All said and done, one should know that even if the beekeeper sticks to the conservative definition, non-organic means may still be used on not only bees but every crop or animal that one eats. According to Title XXI - Orgainc Certification, Section 2110 Animal Production Practices and Materials a livestock rancher can still gain certification as long as s/he does not do the following:

• use antibiotics in subtherapeutic doses;
• use synthetic internal parasticides on a regualr basis; or;
• administer medicine, other than vaccinations, in the absence of illness.(http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/getfile?dDocName=STELPRDC5060370&acct=nopgeninfo)

So, when the label says "USDA Organic," it ain't what you think it means. If the animal has been sick, medicine or antibiotics have been used. And your organic milk possibly comes from an cow that has only been "organically" certified for a year. I don't bring these things up to suggest that organic farmers and ranchers are running a con on American consumers, but rather that the label doesn't mean as much as we've been led to think it does.

So what does this mean for the bees John and I raise? Because of the location of the hives, in John's backyard on the east side of the third biggest city in Colorado, we could be categorized as a strong sense of the liberal definition of organic beekeeping. Our goal is to raise strong bees that can take care of themselves. If this means that a hive dies out due to a disease, we're okay with it as that suggests something is lacking in their immune system. However, with assistance such as natural probiotics like kombucha and acidophillus and using organic menthols to deal with mites, we aren't just out for survival of the fittest.

So if you want to label us, call it natural honey as we have no intention of seeking the organic label. But I must say (a little biasedly, of course) that our "Suburban Blends" from last year taste better than anything else I've had!

first pollination observed

I observed a tree full of bees in the street next to ours. Suprised me to see bee foraging this early. I think the tree is a type of Maple ( I will confirm later in the season when leaves appear ). Not sure if they were our bees , but a quick look at our hives showed they were coming and going in large numbers.