11 Reasons You Should Consider Beekeeping

This month marks the two-year anniversary of my husband and I becoming full-fledged beekeepers. I love telling people that I keep bees - some react with fascination, others think I'm nuts. There's this notion that beekeeping is complicated, scary, and even dangerous. Really, beekeeping is none of those things.  In fact, I'm convinced that just about anyone who cares enough about bees can become a beekeeper.

Here are eleven reasons why you should consider beekeeping:

1. HONEY!
I'll just get this one of the way: one of the best reasons to keep bees is for the honey! This past fall, we got our first honey harvest (we didn't get enough our first year since we had such dry conditions in 2012). You know that difference between a store-bought tomato vs. a homegrown one? Same goes for honey. I've never tasted better honey in my life! I remember eating it the first time, honeycomb and all, and feeling such a sense of awe and gratitude for those bees. Sadly, we are on our last jar of the liquid gold. Our September honey extraction can't come soon enough! (You can read all about our honey extraction experience here.)

2.  Having beehives helps your garden grow....and your neighbor's garden, too. 
Having tens of thousands of honeybees living in your backyard means lots of pollinators for your garden. Our beehives are actually located in my parents' yard (since our city banned beehives up until last year) and I asked my my mom if she noticed a significant increase in her garden's production. She told me that of everything in her yard, her raspberry bushes have benefited the most -- she had more berries on them than in years past, thanks to the bees.  I'm practically begging my in-laws to let me and my husband put a couple hives in their yard since they have a bunch of fruit trees; I'm sure their yields would be even better if we could get more pollinators there! (Note to self: forward this post to hesitant father-in-law...)

3. Beekeeping is a great way to be self-sufficient.
Keeping bees is a wonderful way to be self-sufficient - honey is a great replacement for regular white sugar. There are some start-up costs that comes with beekeeping, but it's a worthwhile investment. If I remember correctly, we spent about $350 when got started -- that price included our two hives (with three deep boxes each), two beekeeping jackets and hats/veils, gloves, a hive tool, a smoker, and, of course, the bees (that price doesn't include the class I took, but that didn't cost much, either).  After a few honey harvests, the hives will pay for themselves. The only real expenses after the initial start-up costs are for mite treatments (all-natural) and any supplemental feeding that may be necessary. Another self-sufficiency facet:  in terms of food storage, you can't beat the shelf life of honey because it lasts forever. Archaeologists have found honey from the ancient Egyptians that can still be eaten today.

4. It takes very little effort and time to keep bees. 
Do you have a dog or cat? You spend more time taking care of that pet than you would a couple of beehives. Even in the peak summer months when my husband and I do regular inspections, we probably spend less than an hour a month taking care of them. Seriously. The less you bother the bees, the better. All they really need is a short-and-sweet inspection every 10 days or so. The only time-consuming part of beekeeping is the honey extraction, but that part also happens to be a lot of fun.

5. Honey is good for your health.
Honey has been used for centuries for health and medicinal uses. Honey contains flavonoids that have been shown to reduce the risk of some cancers and heart disease. Honey is anti-bacterial and anti-fungal because the bees add an enzyme that makes hydrogen peroxide in the honey. For this reason, honey is actually a great treatment for wounds. I love adding honey to hot water and lemon when I have a cold, cough, or sore throat. Honey is actually as effective, studies have shown, as cough syrup. Another health benefit of honey is with allergy symptoms. Although there are no conclusive studies, many scientists believe as you ingest the pollen spores in honey in small amounts at a time, your body gets used to them and your allergic response to them diminishes. (One other medical sidenote: Did you know that scientists have found that bee venom can kill HIV? How crazy/cool is that?!)

One caveat: to get many of the health and medicinal benefits, you need to use raw, unprocessed (and local, particularly in terms of helping with allergies) honey. Most of the honey at the grocery store won't cut it. That's where beekeeping comes in: you can't get honey that is more local and raw than the honey that comes from your backyard.

For the other six reasons to consider beekeeping, check out my post at The Green Phone Booth!

{This post is linked up to the Homestead Barn Hop, Simple Lives Thursday, From the Farm Blog Hop, and Little House Friday DIY Linky.}

Sweet Success: Our Very First Honey Harvest

I'm just going to put it out there: nothing tastes quite as deliciously sweet as honey from your very own hives. Seriously. The honey we harvested a few days ago is better than any other honey I've ever tried. It might be even sweeter because we had to wait extra long for it. We started beekeeping last spring, but we got no honey harvest (due to the drought conditions in my state -- just about every beekeeper here suffered last year).

This isn't going to be the most informative of posts -- I am certainly no expert on honey extraction. As the title indicates, this was my first go with the whole process. Mostly, it's my way of saying "Yay! Our beekeeping efforts finally paid off!" and to give a quick overview of the process to the bee-curious.

(You'll have to excuse the quality of the pictures in this post -- I only had the ones from my phone and Instagram feed; my toddler took the memory card out of my regular camera and lost it. Also, I took the pictures quickly; as you can imagine, extracting honey is a pretty sticky process.)

Once we knew early this year that our bees had survived the winter (hooray!), we had our fingers crossed that they would have a much more productive year than the last one. With each inspection, we saw more and more frames gradually get filled. By mid-summer, we started adding the honey supers to our hives with excitement and hope. Sure enough, by Labor Day weekend, we knew for sure we were getting a honey harvest.

Getting the bees out of the honey supers was definitely interesting for my husband and me. We had a general idea how to do it, but we were also kind of winging it.  We used a homemade fume board (basically fabric stretched over a wooden frame) sprayed with mix of oils that bees don't particularly like the smell of. On our first hive, the bees moved right out of the honey supers down into the brood boxes below. The second hive was a little more stubborn. Eventually, we had to get my dad's leaf blower and blow the poor little bees out of the honey super. 

Another problem we encountered was that the bees had built some bridges between the frames. When we pulled the frames apart, huge sections of honey were exposed. This sent the bees into a sort of feeding frenzy. Things were really sticky by then, with little bees gathering everywhere in clusters around us, on the hives, the frames, our tools, everywhere trying to lick up the honey. Lucky for us, they were too busy gorging on honey to sting us.

We ended up putting some of the loose and exposed honeycomb into jars. We were going to mash them up and get the honey out, but it's been too much fun just opening the jar and breaking off a chunk of honeycomb to eat. It's kind of like honey gum: once you get all the honey out, you just spit out the mashed beeswax into the trash. Oh my goodness, it's good. It also kind of makes you feel like Winnie the Pooh.

The good news was that we eventually got all the frames out and ready to extract.

For about a week before our harvest, I was struggling trying to get an extractor rented (since manual honey extractors can cost around $400 to buy), but then soon found out one of our neighbors had rented one for Labor Day. He said were welcome to use it, so we split the rental cost. Even better, he let us extract in his garage, where everything was already set up.

We had a few frames that were completely full -- every inch of it covered in capped honey. Most of our frames, though, looked more like the one pictured above. I can't help but be completely fascinated by the way these frames look with all those perfectly formed hexagons.  Anyway, that section that's white is where you'll find the honey!

The first step of extraction is to uncap the honey. You do this with a tool that looks sort of like like a hair pick. You drag the metal tines of the tool across the top of the capped honey, exposing the sweet stuff underneath. The cool part is that you can save all the cappings (see how it fell into the container on that rack?) for other stuff; I have yet to figure out what to do with them, but I'll let you know when I do. 

Once the honey has been uncapped, the frames are put into the extractor.  One the three frames are put in, the lid is shut and the crank on the top of it is turned quickly. The honey is flung out of the comb using centrifugal force. The nice thing about this method of extraction is that the honeycomb is left in tact so that the bees can reuse it next season (read: less time building foundation, more time filling it with honey!).

The honey settles at the bottom of the extractor and comes out through a valve at the bottom. We used two strainers over a plastic food-grade bucket. This bucket also had a valve at the bottom (with another filter), which we used to fill the Mason jars we brought. My husband, my mom, and I oohed and ahhed as the dark, golden honey flowed into the jars.

Our final haul: three gallons (approximately 35 pounds) of the most delicious honey I've ever tasted! Even better, I did a little math. I can get local honey at the health food store for about $4 a pound; at that rate, I've got around $140 worth of honey. Another year of this much honey and our start-up costs (the hives, the bees, the equipment), will be more than covered.

I still have the jars out on my kitchen table and I get a little giddy when I see them. Not only giddy, but full of gratitude for the tens of thousands of honeybees we've tended to since April 2012. It's really a miracle how those bees work to make such a perfect product. Who would have thought I'd grow to love a little insect as much as I love those bees!

Ants Hate Cinnamon

I'm sure it has happened at your home -- maybe by a door, or in the driveway, or on your patio. You're outside, enjoying a sunny day in the yard, and, to your dismay, you notice one of those big, black, wriggling clusters of ants. Yuck.

It's that time of year when you start seeing ants everywhere, inside and out. It doesn't help, either, when you live with little kids who leave crumbs and bits of food in their wakes. I've been able to keep ants under control in the house with those covered ant baits, but haven't found anything that works really well with them outside.  Well, except for a can of aerosol ant spray -- that always does the trick -- but I hate the fumes and chemicals, especially around my young kids.  For that reason, I've tried all sorts of natural ways to kill them -- mint leaves, salt, baking soda, vinegar, etc. They've all worked okay, but not nearly as well as the stinky poison spray.

Back when I took my beekeeping class and the topic of pests came up, the instructor suggested using cinnamon to keep ants away from hives.  Then a couple weeks ago, while doing an inspection of our hives, my husband and I noticed that one of the hives had ants crawling around it, on the cover, and even a couple on top of some of the frames inside. So, as instructed, we sprinkled cinnamon around on the ground below the hives (since they're up on cinder-blocks) and dusted some on the cinder-blocks, too.  A week later when we inspected again, there was no sign of ants.  The cinnamon worked so well!

A couple days ago, Max ran into the backyard shouting, "Mommy! There are millions of ants going into the garage!"  I went inside and grabbed my big cinnamon container.

I'm not sure there were millions, but there were a ton of ants on the ground by the open garage door and also crawling up bricks next to it. The second the cinnamon hit the ground and the backs of the ants, they all started freaking out. Max found this all pretty exciting. "Oooh, they hate that stuff!"

In no time, the ants were high-tailing it out of there and the corner by our garage door was ant-free!

I bought my big bottle of cinnamon at Costco for less than $3, so I didn't mind using a generous amount on our ant invasion. (Sidenote: the Kirkland brand of cinnamon is my favorite! It has such a great flavor and smell.)  Even with the generous sprinkling, I only used a few cents' worth. It's a much cheaper alternative to buying that can of ant spray (I checked Amazon -- a can of the stuff runs for around $5-10). Not only is it non-toxic, but it smells nice. Even yesterday, you could smell little notes of cinnamon in the garage! All in all, it's a pretty pleasant way to get rid of some not-so-pleasant invaders.

Note: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have disclosed.

{This post is linked up with Homestead Barn Hop, Your Green Resource, and Little House Friday}

A Bee-utiful Way to Spend an Evening: My First Beekeeping Experience

Since I mentioned my joint beekeeping endeavor with my parents a few times on here, I thought I would share how our hive installation went!

After reviewing the notes from my beekeeping classes, reading the installation part of Keeping Bees a few times, and watching a bunch of YouTube bee installation videos (this one was the most helpful, in my opinion), my husband and I were ready to suit up and put our six-pounds of Italian honeybees into their hives.

Working with thousands of buzzing bees was quite the experience, definitely unlike anything I've ever done before. I actually documented the whole experience on my personal blog, but here are some tidbits.

"That's a lot of bees. If you look at the picture above (click on it to see better), you can see how I've got bees just hanging out on me. At point, my dad said, "You've got bees all over your pants!" (I'd worn black pants. I know. Smart. But if you watch the videos, lots of the bee experts just wear regular clothes and don't even wear gloves, so...yeah...I'm getting some light colored pants). Sure enough, I looked down and saw like ten bees (at least) on each of my legs. Of course, my first instinct was to start running around like a crazy person to get them off, but instead I made myself brush them off calmly. The weirdest was when they would buzz around my head. I had to remind myself not to swat them. A few landed right on the veil, right in front of my eyes and nose. Again, it was pretty strange to just let them buzz in my face like that. I just kept chiding them, saying "It's okay. I'm on your side, girls!"  (FYI: most bees you encounter are girls. They're the worker bees. The boy bees -- called drones -- don't even have a stinger.) I'm happy to report that neither one of us were stung (apparently, Italian bees are the most docile). Part of me wants to get stung so I can stop worrying about that first sting, you know?"

 And some thoughts about being a new beekeeper (a new-bee? ha ha).

"It's weird to feel this sense of ownership...no, that's not the right word...I guess responsibility for thousands of insects. In fact, I woke up in the middle of the night last night, and asked Kevin, in a half-awake stupor, if we'd put the queen's box in the right direction (we did). We're going back up to my parents' house today for my brother's birthday (happy birthday, Matt!) and I'm excited to check on them. I still feel a little nervous about the inspections (it's one thing to install them at their most docile, another to open up a busy hive that they'll want to protect), but I'm mostly just excited about it all. And the honey! I know it's only our first season and we'll probably not get as much, but it's going to be so cool to use honey from our hives and think of the small part we played in getting it."

To read my bee installation post in its entirety, check it out here.

Since I'm mentioning all of this on this blog, the question must be asked: Is beekeeping frugal? Only time will tell. There are definitely some start-up costs to this new endeavor. But honey at the store isn't cheap.  I imagine the honey we harvest will eventually make the hives pay for themselves. It all depends on how much honey we get. I'll keep you posted. Plus, from what I've heard, store-bought honey has nothing on the honey from your own hives. I can't wait to find out.

How I Reuse Dryer Lint for Camping, Emergency Preparedness, and Beekeeping

Yep, you read that right -- I reuse dryer lint.

It may be the most random reuse I've written about yet. It seems weird and even a little gross, I know. (I wonder what it is about dryer lint that's kind of gross. I mean, it's just little bits of our clothes, right?)  But don't worry, this reuse is nothing really outlandish, I promise. (Speaking of weird reuses, I couldn't help but think of this book, especially since there is a bit of cat hair in the dryer lint pictured above...)

As you probably know, dryer lint is really flammable, hence the need for regular cleaning of the lint catcher and dryer exhaust vent. Why not use that flammability to your advantage and make a fire-starter?

I first learned about this from a woman at church, who was teaching a class about emergency preparedness (it was the same class where we learned to make these emergency heaters). Too bad she moved out of our neighborhood -- she had so many useful ideas. Anyway, she showed us how to make fire-starters with dryer lint, a cardboard egg carton, and some melted wax.

To make the fire-starters, fill an egg carton with dryer lint, really packing the lint into each egg compartment.  Next, melt some wax. When we made these, we melted down nearly used-up candles in an old stockpot (all those scented candles created a pretty interesting combination) and also used some new, unscented wax from a craft store (nothing fancy, of course. It's for coating dryer lint, after all). Pour the wax all over the lint in each compartment, making sure the lint gets covered completely. The wax will soak through to the cardboard bottoms, so put something underneath it. Let the wax cool and harden. When you're ready to use one, simply tear off one of the egg compartments.

Here's the reason behind these fire-starters: they hold a flame while you're adding fuel to a fire. Often when building a fire, you'll go through a bunch of matches lighting and relighting the kindling in your fire as you wait to for the actual firewood to catch the flame. A gust of wind will often put out a fledgling flame, or too much firewood will smother it, or something like that. That's where the fire-starters come into play.

These fire-starters, once lit, will burn for several minutes, keeping your flame going strong until the fire starts burning the firewood. Using these dryer lint starters make building a good fire easier and less wasteful, making it great for camping and backpacking. In an emergency situation I imagine they would be not only good for the aforementioned reasons, but also as a way to conserve matches.

But what about beekeeping?

This Saturday we're getting two packages of bees for the hives we just purchased! It's a joint venture with my parents since we split the start-up costs and hives will be in their yard. In preparation for the installing of the packages and future inspections, Kevin and I decided to practice lighting and using the smoker beforehand. (PS -- Pay no attention to my horrible looking picnic table. It's getting a paint job soon!)

We decided to try one of the fire-starters in it. As intended, the fire-starter held the flame right away. We added some dry leaves, too, but not much.

It worked so well! Not only did it produce a bunch of smoke, but it was the cool, white smoke that is ideal for beekeeping, too. Using the lint starter alone might not give enough smoke depending on how long your inspection lasts, but it definitely seemed to work better than using paper or dry grass/leaves. When we use it our smoker, we'll probably use the fire-starter and then some fuel like burlap or green weeds. When I took my beekeeping class, the instructor said, half-jokingly, that lighting your smoker and getting it going can take longer than the inspection itself. With the lint starters, we had our smoker going full-force in less than a minute!

So, yeah, even dryer lint has a reuse. Keep an empty egg carton in your laundry room. Who knows? You might be glad you saved the stuff someday.

{This post is linked to Homestead Barn Hop and Your Green Resource}