Harvest time

We celebrated Zoe & Maayan’s birthdays over the past week. It is great to watch our girls grow in this land. We also celebrated our first honey harvest.

I willl write more about the harvest (we used the crush and strain technique) another time. We are very proud of ourselves for starting 3 months ago, learning lots, and hopefully in a few days, we will enjoy eating our first harvest. We have very little honey, just a few kilo. To give you an idea, a kilo is one jar that is sold in the supermarket. At this point, it is not the quantity that we are after, it is the experience. Wea re hoping that we will have lots more in the spring harvest.

End of the season

We are learning about the ways of bees all the time. I thought that our bees would continue building comb and adding honey till we harvested in the fall, but I just learned that the season is over. That’s it for the summer. Since we started from nucs, and late i the season, we will not harvest anything from our Yashtresh hine and will harvest a few frames from our hive # 1 in Beit Gamliel.

I went down to Nir Galim today and bought a “bee brush”. A bee brush is just a long brush with a few rows of long synthetic bristles that is used to brush off the bees in the super when we take the honey. Since we do not have a spinner to remove the honeyy we will need to find someone who will spin the few frames for us. We are hoping to harvest about 2-4 kilos of honey. I also bought some very small jars today to accomodate our very small harvest.

Eddie Izzard – Covered In Bees

Yael sent us this very funny link to a  video on Youtube.

Another super

Alison and I went to visit our hive on Yashresh this morning to add a super. When we got there we cleaned up the mess from the ants. I am told that feeding the bees will not be necessary if a super is going on the brood box. There were thousands of ants that had drowned in the feeder and there was still lots of syrup. I dumped the syrup and inspected the hive.  Alison is great at getting those frames out of the box. It requires a little skill and the ability to work in those spacesuits. First you have to use the J hive tool to lift one side up, then prop the other hive tool under the side of the frame. Pull the J tool out and start on the other side of the frame.  They make a tool that allows you to grab the center of the frame and pull it straight up but I have not seen it sold in Israel. Maybe when we have someone visiting (David Zvi & Yael, come on home!), I will ask for them to bring it.

The bees are doing great at Yashresh. I just wish we had started earlier in the season. I figure that if they continue at this pace we will have just a jar or two from Yashresh, in time for Rosh Hashana. The good thing is that they will have drawn their comb and we will be ready to catch the flow in the spring. It is tempting to scratch the capped honey with the hive tools and taste the honey but that veil gets in the way.

Capped honey

On this trip Alison and I pulled a few frames and photographed the pollen. The frame I chose to display here actually has three types of cells on it. On the left is capped honey, then to the right of that is capped brood, and beyond that is the pollen. We  did not look for eggs. Can someone verify that this is indeed pollen?

It was VERY hot today and we were wearing our bees suits wich make it worse, so we did not stay long. I did manage to photograph some capped honey and some open cells. It is pretty neat seeing the little cells glistening with honey before is is dried and capped.

The ants and the bees – advice needed!

Feeder with ants

David Zvi and I went to visit hive #2 today and found the hive hosting a ton of ants. We were going to add some sugar syrup to help boost their growth but when we got to the hive we found that the top feeder was almost full. In this hot sun we expected the syrup to go in just a few day but here it has been almost two weeks and the feeder is almost as full as it was two weeks ago. Also, you can see in the photos that there are lots of tiny ants. I did not see any inside the hive but there were so many in the sugar syrup that they almost covered the surface.

Closeup of feeder with ants

Can anyone tell me how to deal with this? Why are the bees not taking the sugar syrup? Is it normal to ignore the syrup? When I mentioned the ants to a local beekeeper, he was not concerned. I know that bees are in danger of drowning and that is why I put the pine needles in the box but I was surprised to see ants that drowned in the syrup. I decided to move the hive about five feet and brushed off as many ants and I could. I also dumped most of the syrup and a lot of the dead ants and filled it with fresh syrup.

I was pleased to see the amount of comb that is in the hive. Almost all the foundation has comb on it and almost all of the comb is filled. I will wait another week before putting on the queen excluder and super. I would like to get rid of the ants. Even though they don’t seem to be affecting the hive, I don’t like the fact that the bees did not touch the syrup water.

Capped brood and larvae

As I spend more time with the bees I take the time to get more acquainted with their ways. I took a close look at one of the older brown combs that came with the nuc. I was able to peer inside the comb and see the growing larvae. I tried to take some pictures and I hope you can make out the difference between the capped brood and the larvae inside the cells. The bee breeder mentioned that this queen lays her eggs in an ellipse. You can see the shape on the frame that David Zvi is holding.

David Zvi, who took pictures on our visit to hive #1, assisted today and was great. He got right in there and lifted a frame or two. Not a fan of bugs, he held steady and quickly grasped how the hive works.  For some reason, the bees were really buzzing this afternoon and they were all over us. Notice the bee above his head!

I would appreciate any advice from the experienced beekers on the condition of the hive. Please leave a comment so others can learn from your advice as well. Thanks!

David Zvi & Yael visit

After hearing amazing things about Yael from Suri and Allan Robbins, we finally get to spend some time with her.  On the left is a photo which I believe David Zvi snapped.

Family outing to exclude queens

Epstein Family - Beekeepers

This afternoon we all drove out to visit our hive at Beit Gamliel. It is our forst hove and doing well. It needs another level so I prepared the frames and foundation last night and we installed it today. We decided to put a super on for honey which means that we are locking th equeen out of the penthouse suite. She can continue to lay eggs in the lower brood box and the worker bees can store honey in the upper super.

Adding another storey

I took the girls out to our 1st hive this evening, and I was surprised at how fast these guys are moving. I pulled the end frame, which is usually the last to be filled, and it was one quarter filled with capped honey and the rest of the frame was full of uncapped honey. I pulled other frames and found it packed with brood.

I was not expecting to need another super for at least a few weeks, so I was pleasantly surprised. Tomorrow I was planning on feeding the other colony but these guys need a super right away. I don’t know if it is the sugar water I give them every week or if it is the Israeli sun and the excellent location – these guys are flying.

The girls had a great time, it was Zoe’s first time out with her bee suit. They were not afraid and were great assistants. They will be ready for their own hoves next year.

Beekeeping in Israel

Quick stats for beekeeping in Israel

• 450 beekeers in Israel
• 3,600 tons of honey are consumed annually in Israel
• 73% of hives are kept by beekeeprs in apiaries of up to 150 hives
• 17% of hives are kept by beekeeprs in apiaries of up to 500 hives
• 10% of hives are kept by beekeeprs in apiaries of over 500 hives
• 20-30 kg is the average yield per hive for small-scale beekeepers
• 50-60 kg is the average yield per hive for large-scale beekeepers

More details available from the Israel Ministry of Agriculture.

Kids’ bee suits arrived

We ordered extra small bee suits for the girls so they will be able to
join in on the beekeeping. We received a notice from the post office
that the suits arrived yesterday. Alison will pick them up and hopefully
we will be able to let them have their first visit to the hive (up
close) this evening.

Stay tuned for pictures…

We Got Bees

We drove up with our empty hive to the queen-maker on a nearby moshav. He had a nucleus of bees that we had ordered and would transfer five frames containing the queen, brood and bees into our hive. We were all prepared with our newly painted hive, clean white bee suits and smoker ready to fire up. He saw the girls and informed us that he could not in good conscience sell us the bees because even though we had sealed the hive, the hive could pop open if we were involved in an accident. I was happy that our bee breeder would pass up a sale for the good of our kids.

We quickly arranged for a babysitter and returned, fully dressed in our bee suits.

A normal hive in Israel consists of 10 frames in a box. The hive system is designed to be a box without a floor and without a roof/lid. The hive sits on a wooden floor with a small opening that allows the bees to come and go as they please. When the colony starts to grow, the roof is removed and another bottomless, roofless hive is put on top, also containing 10 frames. The roof is then put on top of the 2nd story.

The frames inside the hive are designed to fill the inside of the hive, leaving the bees the exact amount of space they need to make their comb. To help them start their task, each frame has a sheet of beeswax stuck to wires that are strung across the frame. The wax is has a very delicate impression of a cell pattern. The bees recognize this pattern and use this “foundation” to start their own comb.

Alison with a Smoker

When the bees have increased their brood and you are ready to add another layer, you can insert a queen excluder board containing a wire mesh or screen that has openings that are large enough to allow the worker bees to travel back and forth between the two sections but prevents the queen, who is larger, from laying eggs in the upper section. This allows you to have a section that can be accessed by the regular worker bees who will create comb and use it to store their honey but will be off limits to the queen and her eggs.

Living in Rehovot means living close to nature. I walk to work every morning passing through some city streets till I reach the edge of the city. From there I walk through a field where the site of horses, camels andherds of sheep are not uncommon. We had to find a place to put our new hives so a few weeks ago I started contacting people I know who live on moshavim in the area. Two years ago I did an internship at Comverse in Tel Aviv and worked with Sue, who lives on Beit Gamliel, a moshav about 5-7 kilometres away from Rehovot. She and her husband Harry have been planting lots of exotic fruits as well as the standard Israeli crops of pomegranate, grapes and vegetables.

Harry & Sue

Their son is also starting to grow bees and they were kind enough to let us place a hive in their fields. More about beekeeping in Israel later….

That’s not what a hive looks like

Early forms of honey collecting entailed the destruction of the entire colony when the honey was harvested. The wild hive was crudely broken into, using smoke to suppress the bees, the honeycombs were torn out and smashed up — along with the eggs, larvae and honey they contained. The liquid honey from the destroyed brood nest was crudely strained through a sieve or basket. This was destructive and unhygienic, but for hunter-gatherer societies this did not matter, since the honey was generally consumed immediately and there were always more wild colonies to exploit. However, in settled societies, the destruction of the bee colony meant the loss of a valuable resource; this drawback persisted until the 19th Century, which made beekeeping both inefficient and something of a “stop and start” activity. There could be no continuity of production and no possibility of selective breeding, since each bee colony was destroyed at harvest time, along with its precious queen. During the medieval period abbeys and monasteries were centers of beekeeping, since beeswax was highly prized for candles and fermented honey was used to make alcoholic mead in areas of Europe where vines would not grow.

Lorenzo Langstroth (1810-1895)

The 19th Century saw a revolution in beekeeping practice through the invention and perfection of the movable comb hive by Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, a descendant of Yorkshire farmers who emigrated to the United States. Langstroth was the first person to make practical use of Huber’s earlier discovery that there was a specific spatial measurement between the wax combs, later called “the bee space”, which bees would not block with wax, but kept as a free passage. Having determined this “bee space” (between 5 and 8 mm, or 1/4 to 3/8″), Langstroth then designed a series of wooden frames within a rectangular hive box, carefully maintaining the correct space between successive frames, and found that the bees would build parallel honeycombs in the box without bonding them to each other or to the hive walls. This enables the beekeeper to slide any frame out of the hive for inspection, without harming the bees or the comb, protecting the eggs, larvae and pupae contained within the cells. It also meant that combs containing honey could be gently removed and the honey extracted without destroying the comb. The emptied honey combs could then be returned to the bees intact for refilling. Langstroth’s classic book, The Hive and Honey-bee, published in 1853, described his rediscovery of the bee space and the development of his patent movable comb hive.

The invention of the movable-comb-hive fostered the growth of commercial honey production on a large scale in both Europe and the USA.

From Wikipedia

From the Wizard of Oz

During Pesach we took a trip to the Negev and visited the ancient Nabatean city of Mamshit. We toured the ruins there and enjoyed the beautiful desert vistas. On the way home we decided to visit another national park, Beit Guvrin, but did not manage to get there before they closed.

Right across the highway from the site was a field filled with thousands and thousands of bright red poppies.

Tu B’Shvat

Yesterday was Tu B’shvat (new year for trees) and it was almost like it was the first time experiencing the holiday for us. We received notes from the gan last week asking us to get some dried fruit and send it to school with the girls. We were to dress the kids in Shabbat clothing and send them to school with a particular fruit that they enjoy. The kids sang traditional songs (Ha shkadia porachat…Tu B’shvat higia, chag hailanot…) and had a great time. There were many organized trips to plant trees in the forests and organized fruit picking for the poor. In some ways it is an Israeli “earth day” that brings people to show appreciation for the land that was given to us. Alison and I are feeling very appreciative of the land that has accepted us.

Last night while we were eating dinner Noa stopped and said to us: “Do you know how to say what happened?” She then went on to answer her own question with: “Ma Kara?” with this adorable Israeli accent. I thought “where is the video camera” (we don’t have one) since this was her first Hebrew sentence. We are amazed at how fast she is learning new words. Now, when she says Shma when she goes to sleep, she says it with an Israeli accent. I doubt that I will ever be able to sound as good as she does and it only took her 6 weeks.

This evening we went to gan for a “Family Night.” It seems to be following the excitement of Tu B’shavat and incorporated more dried fruits and goodies for the kids. The dried fruit is imported but it is the idea that counts…

Update

It has been a long time since our last posting. We have had a war and three kidnapped soldiers and life goes on. It really doesn’t just go on. Everyone knows the war ended and we don’t have our chayalim back. We wait and we hope that someone is making a deal or that they will find out where they are hidden and go rescue them. We wait and time passes and life goes on.

The girls are now pretty much fluent in Hebrew. Maayan knows words in Hebrew which she does not know in English. Noa is learning to read in Hebrew and English. A few weeks ago Alison took Noa to a store in order to translate for her.
Why is it that they pick up the language so quickly and we will struggle for years? You should hear their cute Israeli accents. It will come to the point very soon where we will have to make sure the girls only speak English at home to preserve the language skills they have.