These Two Hands

I was so excited to harvest my first honey this past weekend. Lady Grey had amassed an entire deep box of capped honey, and Darjeeling looked well on her way as well. The plan was to harvest Lady Grey now, then wait until after the buckwheat flowering to harvest Darjeeling. I just assumed that after waiting a year and a half and babying Lady Grey through so many crises, I would finally get some honey this year.

Honey!

But nothing ever goes according to plan. I examined Lady Grey and was disappointed to see that the bees had clearly been eating down the honey, despite my supplementing the colony with sugar syrup to prevent exactly this.

Oh. No honey.

What this means is that now there is not enough honey for both overwintering the colony and surplus for me. Since the health of the colony comes first (before my grumpiness at TWO missed honey harvests now), I’m going to leave them everything they’ve saved for the winter and hope they get off to a good strong start next Spring.

And now the deer have cropped down the entire patch of buckwheat that was beginning to flower. Without that late boost of nectar and pollen I don’t know if Darjeeling will be able to produce enough surplus for me to harvest her, either.

I should look on the bright side; the bees are dual-purpose livestock after all. With all the pollination they’ve been providing, they are more than earning their keep. And I guess even if the deer are eating down all the buckwheat… at least they’re leaving my tomatoes alone.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2011 at 11:00 pm and is filed under food, homesteading, bees. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.