Another Swarm

Around 5 PM last night, Henry and I were hanging out in the driveway talking when he suddenly stopped and started looking around. It didn’t take but a minute for him to locate small swarm of honeybees. I had been hearing a buzzing in my subconscious, too, but had ignored it because there’s always a lot of buzzing at our place from the 60+ hives scattered around the property.

At first, the bees were all in the air. They were flying around in one area for five minutes or so until they began to land and cluster on a small branch about 25 feet up the trunk of an oak tree. Henry ran off and grabbed his pole saw (with an extension) and hung a bucket with a frame of drawn comb doused in sugar syrup on the end of it. He positioned the bucket squarely under the growing ball of bees and forcefully rammed the branch with the bucket to jostle them loose. Some bees fell into the bucket and a bunch took flight but stayed nearby. When the cluster began to form again, Henry knocked the branch with the bucket a second time. The queen must have fallen in the box at that point because the bees started to regroup in and on the bucket instead of on the branch.

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A Honeybee Swarm Moves Into a Hive

I was at home with kids about a week and a half ago when around 1:00 in the afternoon, I started hearing a loud buzzing. I’ve seen and heard enough honeybee swarms in my day (including this one) to know right off that I was hearing bees on the move. I ran up to the upper landing with my camera and soon was standing in the middle of a cloud of bees.

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Honeybees on Meadowfoam

On Mother’s Day, we took a little family beekeeping excursion out to check on Henry’s hives that he had dropped off in the heart of the Willamette Valley about a week earlier.

Seed farmer, Cody Younger (one of Henry’s friends from college who I wrote about last summer in this post), contracted Henry’s bees to pollinate one of his family’s meadowfoam fields. This arrangement with Cody is Henry’s only pollination contract this year. It’s sort of a test run to see if he wants to pursue more contracts in the future or if he’d rather build hives up in more rural areas.

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Honeybee Extraction from a Porch Wall

On Sunday, we went out on a little family beekeeping adventure. My long-time friend Kelly who lives in the heart of Oregon’s wine country contacted me months ago about the possibility of having Henry remove an established hive from the wall of a porch on the back of her home. Kelly’s young son has pretty serious allergies, so Kelly didn’t want the risk of living with bees, but she didn’t just want to kill them either. Kelly’s house is about a two-hour drive to the north for us and really is out of Henry’s beekeeping territory, but because Kelly is a friend and the job seemed doable, we decided to make a family event out of the extraction.

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Cut-Out Extraction from an Attic

Last Saturday, Henry and I scheduled a date. We dropped the kids off at his mom’s house, picked up a couple burritos, took a scenic drive out to Blodgett, and then crawled into an uncomfortably warm, insulation-filled side attic, and riled up a couple thousand honey bees. We really are so romantic.

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Bees Flying in Winter

The sun came out yesterday, and the bees went nuts. They hurried out of the hives and clouded the air. I walked right into their territory to pick some kale (bottom right) for lunch, and in just a few moments, I had bees in crawling in my hair, on my clothes, and on my camera. Though I’m not the beekeeper in the family, I’m getting used to having bees up in my business, and I can generally just carry on with what I want to do.

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