Maple Acres Apiary

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11/10/2024

The girls are still packing in yellow pollen on November 7 2024. Not sure which plants or trees are still in blossom but what ever it is they found it 🥰

Yesterday was hive equalization day on our Apiary. When doing hive inspections I take note of the health of each hive an...
09/02/2024

Yesterday was hive equalization day on our Apiary. When doing hive inspections I take note of the health of each hive and the strength of each Queen and their laying patterns and the vitality of each Queen. As the season goes on if a hive's Queen becomes ill or is getting older and losing vigor then it is very important to address this and either combine hives or introduce a new Queen to the hive. It is too late in the season to let them make a new Queen on their own and I don't want to purchase another Queen for hives that need attention so the thing to do is to combine hives and allow the stronger Queen and hive to join the other hive.

Doing this there is a risk the two different colonies can fight and there is a chance the good stronger Queen may get killed in the transition from two colonies to one. So to lessen the chance of that happening I put a sheet of newspaper in between the two different colonies I stack on top of each other and I allow the upper colony to have it's own small entrance and the lower one still has it's larger entrance open. I also put a feeder on the top colony and the stronger Queen is in the lower colony. This gives the lower colony the scent of the bees above them and the feed above them and the upper colony smells the bees below them and the better Queen below them. I also add a little bit of lemon grass oil scent in each colony so that the scent helps mellow or mask any negative pheromones that the joining colonies may exhibit. Honeybees have one of the most complex pheromonal communication systems found in nature, possessing 15 known glands that produce an array of compounds producing all kinds of different scent pheromones which send all kinds of different messages to each other. How cool is that!! :)

The bees will chew their way through the newspaper in order to meet each other. It won't take them long to do this but it gives a little barrier between the two colonies and it will allow them a slower and less drastic meeting of the two colonies.

When first doing this you will know fairly quickly if the bees will allow this combining of hives or if it is going to be a fight between the colonies because of their actions at the entrances of each colony. If they act more curious and interact with each other at the entrances then that is a very good sign. If they start off right away with fighting and killing each other then I would have to separate the hives right away. Yesterday I watched the hives all day to see how they responded to the initial joining of the colonies and it seemed like it was going well with no fighting but lot's of curious bees at each entrance top and bottom.

This morning at 6 am all three of the combined colonies were nice and calm and tucked into their boxes. That is a very good sign. So far so good. After a few days I will do an inspection and condense down the bigger 4 boxes into three and then as we progress more into Fall and the Queens slows her laying down and the hives numbers of bees lessens with more bees of Winter physiology I will then make sure all colonies are in two brood boxes with lot's of Winter stores of food inside each box.

In the photos notice the bee activity of the combined colonies shortly after putting them on top of each other and then notice the pictures of the same hives the next morning. Quite the difference :)

For late season blossoms our bees depend on a few plants like Himalayan Balsam, Jewelweed, Goldenrod, and Japanese Knotw...
09/01/2024

For late season blossoms our bees depend on a few plants like Himalayan Balsam, Jewelweed, Goldenrod, and Japanese Knotweed. Unfortunate for nature some of the pollinators depend on invasive plants that are not native to our area but nonetheless those plants still do support lot's of creatures that depend on their later season pollen and nectar as resource sources. On a walk around our area yesterday morning I found several stands of the Japanese Knotweed that I had not noticed before. Some of them were growing right in the middle of the creek.

08/25/2024

We are now sold out of our 2024 honey harvest. Thank you to all who have supported our Apiary/Farm this year and last year. We hope to see you again in 2025 🍯🐝🥰❤️

What a wonderful season it was with our Honeybees. Our honey harvest for 2024 is done and we are almost sold out of all ...
08/25/2024

What a wonderful season it was with our Honeybees. Our honey harvest for 2024 is done and we are almost sold out of all the honey we have set aside to sell this year. We are making sure we save ourselves enough this year :) Looking forward to adding some more hives to our Apiary next year :)

I learned more this year and enjoyed caring for the bees so much. They bring a peacefulness to our home which is hard to explain. Spending time with them feels healing and is very relaxing for the soul.

This year was also great for collecting swarms of Honeybees where some of them were in danger of not surviving due to quite bad weather they were exposed to. Those swarms are all now thriving in our Apiary and we are very glad to have them here with us.

I also managed to collect and save a few Bumblebee colonies this season where people had contacted me to say they were going to be destroyed if they were not removed. It's great when people care about our pollinators and reach out to see if the wonderful creatures can be moved and saved before they are destroyed. Bumblebees are our Native bees to BC and we need to make their survival paramount to ensure the ecosystem stays in tact.

This year we also saw that letting our field lawn on our property grow wild for the second year in a row without mowing it allowed the wildflowers and grasses to multiply by at least twice as much as last year. There was some very important blooms that supported lot's of different pollinators, insects and creatures by letting it grow wild. It is so great to walk out in the field and see so many creatures enjoying and utilizing the resources we let grow for them. I wish more people would do this rather than focusing on perfectly manicured green grass lawns on their property's that do nothing for nature or the creatures that depend on plants and blossoms for survival.

Thank you to my wife who helped in the Apiary and the honey extraction 🥰 and to everyone who supported our little Apiary and farm this year and the year before and we hope to see you again in the future. ❤️

08/25/2024

This was a few days ago after taking the honey supers off the hives. The girls are still bringing in Jewelweed, Himalayan Balsam, Russian Dandelion, and a little Goldenrod pollen and nectar. Great to see them still finding resources later in the season.

08/25/2024

We are now sold out of pail sizes of our honey. We have 500 gram glass jars and 1 kg glass jars left. Thanks for everyone's support! 🥰

08/22/2024

Our Honey will be available this weekend 😍 🍯🐝

Pulled all the Honey frames yesterday and today. Much bigger hives this year than last year and so many more bees and more Honey 🙂
The biggest producer of honey was one of the Spring time swarm hives. I'm gonna have to use that Queen to make a bunch more Queens from cause her offspring are amazing foragers.
Our bees are still bringing in pollen and nectar so they should be able to still stock pile more resources for the coming Winter.
I left them all of their Honey in their brood boxes too so they are happy happy.

Our honey will be available in 500 gram and 1 kg glass jars like last year. And we had requests for larger sizes so we also now have 3 kg, 5.4 kg, and 6 kg food grade pails available.

It was swarm collection day today :) This one was huge! And there are two more swarms higher up in the same tree I am go...
08/18/2024

It was swarm collection day today :) This one was huge! And there are two more swarms higher up in the same tree I am going to try to collect tomorrow. :)

Something that really fascinates me about the bees is the blossoms they choose to collect pollen and nectar from. I enjo...
08/12/2024

Something that really fascinates me about the bees is the blossoms they choose to collect pollen and nectar from. I enjoy trying to find out which ones and at what times of the year they are on different blossoms and how far they travel from our Apiary to visit those blossoms. Yesterday I'm pretty sure was the last of the Birdfoot Trefoil blossoms. They didn't pop back up after the rain we had and I don't see any bees on them today. Today, Aug 12 2024 our ladies seem to be focused the most on a few types of plants that continue to bloom and are supplying them with pollen and nectar. They are the Himalayan Balsam, The Jewelweed, and the Russian Dandelion. I thought the RD were almost done because a lot of them were going to seed this past week but yesterday and today there seems to be another big burst of new growth of them on our property and the surrounding area. In this video the bright orange pollen on the girls legs is the Russian Dandelion pollen. The off white pollen on their legs is from the Himalayan Balsam and the Jewelweed. I'm very surprised to not see Goldenrod on them anymore. I think that is due to the higher quality nectar they are getting from closer by on the blossoms I just mentioned. Today I got some pictures of some of our foragers on some blossoms collecting pollen and nectar and got a video of them bringing it back to their hives. Such busy, hard working little creatures. I sure do admire them :)

My wife and I were down by the creek by our house yesterday taking our pooch for a walk and we spotted two plots of beau...
08/09/2024

My wife and I were down by the creek by our house yesterday taking our pooch for a walk and we spotted two plots of beautiful pink flowers in full bloom and our bees were all over them collecting nectar. I put a picture of the flowers in my phone app for identification cause we didn’t recognize what kind they were. They are Himalayan Balsam which turns out to be one of the absolute best sources of nectar for Honeybees and it blooms right through August and even into September in some areas.

My wife said she thought there was a whole bunch of that kind of flowering plant just down the road from our place on a farmers acreage. So we went and checked out that plot and sure enough there was around 2 acres of them growing there and our bees were all over them at that location too.

This flower blossom produces a very distinct whitish grey pollen so when I got back home I watched our foraging bees come back to their hives and sure enough they were loaded with the Himalayan Balsam pollen 🙂

I was thinking I was going to have to pull the honey frames from the hives soon to do a honey extraction because the blackberry, chestnut, and clover are done blooming and the Birdsfoot Trefoil is probably only a week away from being all done blooming as well. But now that we know they are collecting nectar and pollen from the Himalayan Balsam blossoms that means they will still be making more honey for at least another two to three weeks!! 🙂

It’s surprising to us too cause Lisa and I swear there were none of these Himalayan Balsam plants around at all last year. The bees absolutely love them.

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