Kim Flottum at Young Harris Beekeeping Institute

I'm very glad to share with all of you some of what I learned at Young Harris. You realize, of course, that you are only getting my take on what the speakers shared and that may not be entirely accurate! I encourage you, if there are beekeeping gatherings - meetings, conferences, local speakers - in your area, go to hear them.

Beekeeping is an art as well as a science. I learned SO much at Young Harris, as I did last year as well. Every speaker brings his/her own perspective and good ideas.

We were so lucky to have with us Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture magazine and author of The Backyard Beekeeper. I heard him speak on two topics.

Here he is talking about "The Many Uses of Nucs." He doesn't think of nucs as devices for making splits. Instead he uses nucs as a source of "spare parts" in the bee yard. By this he said he meant that with a five frame nuc that is thriving, you could take out a frame of brood or honey to give to a hive in need of either. And the use of nucs can provide special "spare parts:" extra queens, should you need them.


In addition to the above wisdom, he suggested a unique method of requeening. He starts the nuc with five frames (his rationale for the five frame nuc is that it is convenient to buy nucs that size). He only uses medium boxes, so he buys medium nucs.

He puts together the nuc with 2 frames of mostly eggs, one of sealed brood, one of honey and pollen and one foundation or drawn comb. He takes these frames out of strong hives and gives one shake to get most of the bees off of them, leaving the young nurse bees still on the frame, before adding them to the nuc. This is the core of a hive and with these resources, they make themselves a queen.

After the queen is up and working the nuc to build it up, if Flottum has a queenless hive, he removes five frames from that hive and substitutes the five frames from the nuc and presto! he has requeened. The five frames he removed from the hive go into the nuc (including a frame on which there is a queen cell or a new egg) and he begins the process again. Sounds like no fuss, no bother.

He sometimes even overwinters nucs...and he's in very cold state, not Georgia where we should fairly easily be able to overwinter a nuc colony.

After his talk, I went to the Brushy Mountain vendor table and ordered two medium nucs. I've had queenless situations in both of my two beekeeping summers and this sounds like a painless way around the problem.




In the second talk I heard Kim Flottum give, he talked about using the web to access beekeeping resources. I must admit that I have never looked at the Bee Culture website as anything other than a link to the magazine. Well, think again. It's a fabulous link to so many helpful beekeeping resources.

For example, if you click on The Science of Beekeeping, it takes you to the many universities who have bee labs, newsletters about apiculture, and research information. Among many others Flottum talked about the University of Nebraska where you can read about the origin of the powered sugar treatment for varroa mites, UC Davis, which has an outstanding newsletter from the Dept of Entomology. Assuming you don't get distracted by the wisdom-filled university web pages on bees and bee labs, if you continue scrolling down the science of beekeeping page, you can find links to the Department of Agriculture for all the states and for Canada.

You can also click on "Catch the Buzz" to sign up for Flottum's own newsletter. Since he had praised a number of University entomology newsletters, he joked about how after his talk, all of us would have very full email boxes!

Second Try at Making Homemade Hand Lotion

I followed the recipe in Kim Flottum's book, The Backyard Beekeeper. I used the ingredients and followed the directions. The picture in the book is this light-as-a-cloud lotion that is white. Mine came out green and hard as a candle. These results made me think of my mother.

My mother is a great cook. She understands how everything goes together and everything she makes is wonderful. Her banana bread is so delicious. Once I asked her for the recipe and she gave it to me on an index card. I went back home and tried it, but it didn't taste at all like my mother's banana bread. So the next time I went home, I asked my mother to make the banana bread and show me what she did.

Reading the recipe card and watching her make the bread were two quite different things! I grabbed another card and titled it: "What Mother Really Does." We now have a standing joke in my family: If you like a recipe, we always ask the cook, "OK, so, how did you 'mother' it?"

I believe that what the lotion maker in The Backyard Beekeeper actually did and what the recipe said were two quite different things.

Today I saw a friend who once upon a time made hand lotion from his herb garden. I asked him what the secret to success with lotion is? He told me to whip it up in the blender while it cools and it will be soft like commercial lotion.

I came home and popped the hard little candle-like lotion nuggets out of the containers in which I had poured them and put them in the Pyrex measuring cup. I placed the whole thing in a pan of hot water and re-melted the lotion. When it was liquid, I added a little lanolin (not in the recipe) and about a tablespoon of cocoa butter.

So here's the process of putting it all together:

Backyard Beekeeper recipe:
2 cups olive oil
1/4 cup palm oil (I couldn't find it at Whole Foods and used almond oil instead)
3/4 cup coconut oil
6 ounces beeswax
40 - 50 drops essential oil (I used lemon)

Melt the oils and butters. Add the beeswax and melt together. Test the mix by dropping five or six drops onto waxed paper to cool so you can see how hard it gets. If too hard, add more oil, if too soft or greasy, add more beeswax to stiffen. When it begins to cool, stir in six drops of Vitamin E oil. If you want fragrance, add essential oils after removing the pan from the heat.
THE END.

The above results in hard candle-like green bars (green because of the extra virgin olive oil).

What I really did (how I "mothered" the recipe (as we say in my family):

1. I heated the olive oil, almond oil, coconut oil in an 8 cup Pyrex measure sitting in a pan of boiling water.
2. When the liquids were hot, I added 6 ounces of beeswax and melted it in the hot oil.
3. I took this off of the heat and added six drops of Vitamin E and drops of lemon essential oil (it still smells like beeswax - probably not enough lemon - but I love the beeswax smell).
4. After this hardened and I wasn't happy with it, I remelted the whole thing,
5. I added 1 T of cocoa butter and 1 tsp. lanolin.
6. I cooled it until it was beginning to solidify.
7. I put the whole mix in the blender and ran it on "puree" for about 10 minutes.
8. I then let the mix cool for about an hour in the blender jar and turned the blender on to "puree" about every 10 minutes for about a minute's duration.
   
   What a mess this made! I gave my daughter who came to dinner a jar to take home with her. I am out of containers (ordered more from Majestic Mountain Sage last week) so I put the remaining lotion in a tupperware container. I believe this recipe would make about 1 dozen 2 oz jars. I filled eight jars and the 8 ounce Tupperware container.

Learning about Lip Balm

I made my first attempt at making lip balm today and it turned out OK - not great, but I learned a lot. Here's what I did:

1. I bought Coconut oil (organic and virgin) from the Internet
2. I bought 100 containers from the Internet and some from the Container store
3. I bought 1" circular mirrors from EBay
4. I followed the recipe in Kim Flottum's book: The Backyard Beekeeper.
5. I weighed and melted the wax
6. I put the glass jar of coconut oil into a boiling water bath to melt it
7. When both were melted and both were 150 degrees F, I stirred them together.

Now the problems start. The recipe said to take the mixture off of the heat and stir in the vanilla and honey. As soon as I took the mixture off of the heat, it started solidifying. I poured in the honey and vanilla but they never really mixed well despite my using a whisk.

So I put the glass measuring cup with the mixture in it on top of one of the boiling water baths with the burner turned off and the mixture came together much better. I filled the containers by using a syringe that the pharmacist at Target gave me. I put the container filled cookie sheet right beside the boiling water bath on top of which sat the balm mixture so that it wouldn't solidify before getting into the container.

Filling the containers wasn't easy - somewhat messy, but I succeeded in filling 90 small containers and five larger ones. As they cooled I realized that in about 20 of them, the honey/vanilla mixture was on the bottom of the lip balm and that those would not be usable because there was liquid below the balm mixture.

I don't know if I can wash and re-use these containers - I hope so - it's a lot of effort if I have to throw out 20 of them.

My camera lens had a smudge on it, but I made a slide show anyway to show you the pictures:

Preview of Coming Attractions!

Tonight I took Step One toward making lip balm out of my prize winning wax block - seems a shame to grate it up, but that's the direction I'll be taking.

I'm planning to use the recipe in The Backyard Beekeeper to make lip balm for Christmas presents. Tonight I found coconut oil (an essential ingredient) on the web and ordered it!

Here's the recipe:

1 cup shredded beeswax
14 oz coconut oil (what I ordered are 2 bottles - each 14 oz - of coconut oil)
5 Tbsp honey
5 Tbsp vanilla extract (I have great Mexican vanilla extract)

Heat the wax in a saucepan over low heat to 150 degrees. In a separate saucepan, heat the oil to the same temperature. When both are heated to the proper temperature, add the coconut oil to the beeswax, remove the pan from heat, and stir steadily until well blended. then add the honey and the vanilla extract. Continue to stir until well blended. Pour into tubes or tubs, allow to cool overnight, and then cap the containers and store at room temperature, out of direct sunlight.

Well, I'm fired up to do this - the recipe above makes 100 .15 ounce tubes of lip balm or 65 1/3 ounce pots. I've already been to the Container Store and have bought a few pots for the lip balm - we'll see how it turns out. The coconut oil has been ordered from a place in Texas and I'm ready to do this.

I found a great Internet site for making lip balm. Her site led me to another good site about lip balm. And in further exploring I found these tins to put the lip balm in. Goodness, after all of this ordering stuff, I hope I actually can successfully make lip balm!

Since next week is Thanksgiving, I imagine that this will be a post-Thanksgiving project - but you know I'll record it for this blog!

Book club Honey Feast

For my book club where we read Hive of Suspects by Sheila Pim, every item that we ate was made with honey. From right to left in the picture:

**A Waldorf type salad with apples, grapes, dates, walnuts, celery and a honey/mayonnaise dressing from The Backyard Beekeeper
**Honey glazed carrots from the Vermont Beekeepers' Cookbook
**Chicken fingers, rolled in balsamic vinegar and honey, then in breadcrumbs and baked from The Backyard Beekeeper
**Homemade biscuits with either plain honey in the honey server or comb honey in the box
**Lemon Hive Cake with a honey glaze and lemon frosting

The book was good and the food was good and I sent everyone home with a jar of honey from my bees.

Bees, Books and Honey

I am in a women's book club that meets monthly. At our meetings the hostess generally serves food that fits the book - either food that was mentioned in the book or food that relates in some other way to the book.

Last year in my first year as a beekeeper, I had chosen (pre-my own bees) Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as the selection for my turn in October. There's a wonderful passage in the book about bees, as it turns out. Janie, the heroine, has spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree. Here is the passage (it's rather seductive):

"She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to the tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!"

a little later:

"Oh to be a pear tree - any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her?"
So in response to this part of the book, I gave all of the women who came to the meeting jars of honey to take home.

This year I wanted to do the same thing - give the members honey to take home and I wanted to have a book for which bees played a significant part, so that I could make food that all had to do with honey. Everyone had read The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and just about everyone has either seen or read Fried Green Tomatoes (although wouldn't that be fun to have fried green tomatoes!) so I couldn't suggest those titles.

I searched Amazon and ordered a number of books:

The Beekeeper's Apprentice - by Laurie R. King
A good book but has very little actually about bees. It's based on the premise that Sherlock Holmes retired and became a beekeeper. There's a wonderful passage right at the beginning about bee-lining, but other than that the bees are like wallpaper for the mystery and play a very side-line role.

The Honey Thief - by Elizabeth Graver
I liked this book about an unhappy little girl who befriends a neighborhood beekeeper. Early on we learn that the child takes things that aren't hers and this applies to her beekeeping relationship as well. Somehow it didn't quite work for me as the book for this year's book club.

Beeing: Life, Motherhood and 180,000 Honeybees - by Rosanne Thomas
This is a nonfiction book about a woman who learns a lot about life and herself when she becomes a beekeeper. She sort of fell into beekeeping so I identify with her and her struggles parallel some of my own with the bees. While I loved reading this book, I thought my book club members who were not actual beekeepers would not particularly find it as intriguing as I did.

A Hive of Suspects: An Irish Village Mystery - by Sheila Pim
This wonderful little book has been republished by Rue Morgue Press. It is about a murder, closely linked to bees. The victim was a beekeeper and for a while, it looks as if the bees may have murdered their keeper. The author, who was also a fabulous gardener, weaves so much interesting knowledge about beekeeping into the fabric of the story that I thought even the non beekeeper would find it fascinating. The beekeeping while always playing significantly in the background does not dominate the plot. I thought it would be perfect.

The meeting is on Tuesday night, and I've had some feedback from a few members that they liked the book, but we'll see for sure on Tuesday.

I'm serving all honey based food. We're having:

Honey-baked Chicken from Kim Flottum's The Backyard Beekeeper (p. 129)
Honey Carrots (also from The Backyard Beekeeper (p. 142))
Apple Salad from The Backyard Beekeeper (p. 148)
Biscuits with my own cut comb honey from The Gourmet Cookbook (p. 596) - which despite the terrible yellow unreadable titles for the recipes is one of the best cookbooks I own, and this is the best biscuit recipe ever - better even than my southern mother's recipe.

My daughter gave me for Mother's Day a cake pan that bakes a honey skep cake from Williams Sonoma that came with its own recipe for Lemon Beehive Cake - so we'll have that for dessert.

I'll take pictures and let you know how it all comes out.