About our Bees
We live at such a high elevation that there are very few wild bees to pollinate our garden so one spring we decided to get honey bees to fix that.
The honey we got from our first colony (hive) was a wonderful surprise and was gobbled up by family very quickly.
Grandpa Stan with our first hive
As the years have gone by we’ve added more colonies, not because the one colony couldn’t pollinate our garden, but the request for more honey from family and friends was so high.
Through the years we learned that because of our extreme altitude and cooler temperatures the nectar that the bees want and need is not as plentiful as if we were in the valley. Our ranch is within a few miles of lush alfalfa and grain fields but they only bloom 3-4 times throughout the summer, so our bees are left foraging the mountain foliage for nectar and our mountains are High Desert so the nectar supply is very low.
FEED THE BEES
Bees are just like livestock. If you’ve never owned or worked with bees you wouldn’t know that bees have to be fed. We all just think that they fly around and get what they need from nature, but this is not always true. As we “shake in”1 a new colony box with a “package”2 of bees we have to feed them.
Click here to see a video of Brad shaking in a package of bees
If you raise cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens etc., you know you have to feed them and provide them with water and in some cases shelter. In turn, they supply you with what you raise them for.
Bees are no different.
They need food and even vitamin supplements to grow their colony numbers and make honey.
What Do Bees Eat?
Bees eat pollen (protein) and nectar (sugar). They make honey from the excess nectar that the worker bees are bringing back to the colony.
When we shake in a new package they need to be fed as they do not know their new area and therefore do not have a readily available source of pollen and nectar, so we have to feed them until they go out foraging and find it.
From day ONE we give them a 1:1 sugar to water mixture. It mimics the nectar’s they usually get from flowers close enough for them to eat it, but it is not exactly the natural nectar they want.
If there is an ample nectar supply for the colony, they will not touch the sugar water, but if the wild nectar supply is low they will utilize the sugar water for food, brood and honey.
Honey made from sugar water is extremely thick, very sweet and tastes very much like clover honey. I believe that alfalfa and clover nectar is very similar to sugar, therefore the identical taste. Since there are workers bringing nectar back even in scarce times the honey is still multi-floral mountain flora/clover/alfalfa.
Bees are also in love with Cinnamon. We use cinnamon in many ways to keep them in their boxes or to attract and encourage them to take water from a particular place or just to give them a treat. They also love mint. At times, you might taste just a hint of a woodsy note of cinnamon in our honey as we add it to the supplemental nectar we give them. We’ve never had anyone be able to detect or taste even the slightest mint flavor but they get it so it could be there in some slight form.
During the spring in our mountains, the flowers and clover and alfalfa are not yet producing so the bees are more than willing to take the sugar water to build the colony numbers preparing for summer, however as the natural nectar supply comes on in the spring and summer they stop taking the sugar water. Throughout the summer and when all of the farmers have cut their alfalfa and bailed it to hay the nectar supply is low and the bees will go back to taking sugar water when ever their natural supply is low.
Hive Top, no drown bee feeders. Hold approx 3 gallons each.
The artwork was done by Miss Chrissie to make the bees feel more comfortable with their feeders…I think it makes her feel more comfortable being around them!
We also provide a protein substance to substitute a lack of pollen but our mountain bees seldom if ever take this substitute as there is always plenty of pollen, just not enough nectar.
We also give our bees a ProBiotic all summer long to keep the colony healthy and I believe that this is the reason our bees out preform everyone around us.
This is similar to California Pecan pollination.
During the winter many northern cold climate bee keepers take their colonies to California to avoid their below zero cold winter which kills a huge number of the colonies and while there, they are available to pecan farmers to pollinate the Pecan trees.
During this time the colonies must be fed sugar water every few days, this is because pecan tree blossoms produce only a tiny bit of nectar. The bees get an ample supply of pollen but are lacking in nectar. So again, you’re feeding the bees.
Because of the scarcity of nectar for our bees at our altitude and here at our high desert ranch, we limit our colonies in number and consequently get a very limited supply of honey per year. Toward the end of the summer when our colonies are boasting numbers of 30,000+ bees each, we are feeding each hive about 1.5 gallons of sugar water every 2 days, so feeding the massive numbers becomes costly and requires us to charge a more for our honey.
The taste of our honey is a very rich flora/alfalfa/clover honey. It can have a hint of mint, chamomile as we grow mint and chamomile for our Kauai Girl Soap products. We also grow a few varieties of Chestnuts (including the endangered American Chestnut) and American Hazelnuts.
Since we’re not really in the business of honey, what we get and have is all we have and we make what we have available to family, friends and customers of Kauai Girl Soap …. while our very limited reserve lasts.
It is truly a one of a kind honey. Thick, Rich, Sweet, Beautiful, Healthy and Satisfying.
POLLEN
We do gather the pollen from the bees for just a couple of weeks in June, a month or so after they’ve settled down into their hive boxes. Each colony will donate up to 1/4 cup of pollen a day. The pollen traps we use only take about 1/2 of the incoming pollen so we’re not starving our bees and since we only collect it for a couple of weeks they have plenty of time to store up for winter.
We encapsulate the pollen for family and locals who are allergic to the mountain flora. One or two capsules a day and their allergies will diminish, subside or go away altogether.
Bee pollen in capsules
1 Shake-In; This is a term for moving bees from their shipping container called a package to their new bee hive. It is called “shaking in” because you literally have to open the wooden shipping box and SHAKE them into the hive box. The bees are usually disoriented from their trip from their origin apiary to you so they are not terribly vicious, however there can be a few that just get ticked off at the person doing the shaking and want to defend the colony by stinging.
Click here to see a video of Brad shaking in a package of bees
2 Package; This is the shipping box the colony of bees arrive in. It can contain 3,000 to 10,000 bees (depending on whether you order a regular or large package), one queen in her queen cage and a can of sugar water with some tiny holes in the bottom that slowly weep sugar water. The workers lick up the sugar water and feed each other and the queen attendants who process the sugar water in their mouth into honey for the queen.
——-
Queen Cage: 2.25″ x .875″ x .625″
The queen cages below each contain one live queen bee, each are marked with a color to make them easy to locate when working with the colony as attendants and workers tend to cover her up when you open the lid and look for her.
A seasoned pro bee keeper can spot the queen without a marking as she is much bigger and longer than her attending bees.
Also see: