Wallingfor Urban Honey becomes Seattle Urban Honey

Please continue to read this blog at seattleurbanhoney.blogspot.com There is a link under my profile. Also, to my three followers, I would like to invite you to follow Seattle Urban Honey. We are changing the name as our hives will be kept in a total of 7 yards in north Seattle (including ours).

Bee Log #17: March 17, 2010

Honey bee in heather taken March 16, 2010

Happy St. Patrick's Day!



The vote so far on changing the business name from Wallingford Urban Honey to Seattle Urban Honey is overwhelmingly in favor of a name change. 3 to 0. There is still time to vote if you have not weighed in.

I am off to Auburn, WA to get the bee-ware that we so desperately need before the bees arrive. Yea! It is just a partial order but it will keep us for now.

Starting a new business is a series of puzzles and worries and unknowns. The puzzles seem to be getting solved one at a time. The worries are just part of what I do and wish I didn't. The unknowns seem to be linked to the worries and the puzzles. So, one little bit at a time. Life is an adventure. Every day is a new installment of the story. Pray God for his providential care for today.

Bee Log #16: March 15, 2010

Honey bee on ornamental pear. Taken 3/15/2010

I have a question for my readers. Should we change our name to Seattle Urban Honey? We will have bees in Queen Anne, Fremont, Green Lake-Wallingford, Northgate and Bothell. If you are reading this please take a minute to let me know what you think.


The bees are flying. Some maple are putting out buds. The season for honey collection may be really early this year if the maple blooms this early.

We are trying to get the rest of our hive parts so we can get them painted, set up and ready before the bees arrive April 17. The sellers of bee-ware must be very, very busy if they can't stop to fill a rather large order. Perhaps there is a shortage of merchandise due to the great interest in backyard beekeeping. I don't know why we can't get the goods pronto and I shouldn't speculate ahead of the facts.

We are set to put hives in 6 yards in north Seattle. 12 packages of bees are arriving shortly. We need hive parts! NOW, PLEASE!

I have located a firm that sells product liability insurance. I had no idea where to look for that product and did not want to call just anybody. I guess I needed a referral from a trusted or at least known person. The broker that handles our home owners insurance had a knowledgeable agent. He did not even seem to be thrown by a backyard beekeeping business in the city that sells at Farmers' markets. I got a City of Seattle license. I registered the name "Seattle Urban Honey" with the state. I got a resale certificate so I don't have to pay sales tax on jars . Anything else?

Bee Log #15: March 2, 2010

There are 72 medium hive bodies assembled, primed and packed into our little shed. Our venture of placing hives in homes around north Seattle is off and running. I ordered 12 packages of bees. Ready or not here they come so we had better be ready! These are living creatures and require our attention. We are getting all the associated hive parts and will be setting up the hives sometime this month so the empty hives are in place and ready for the bees arrival sometime around April 17. Then the fun starts.

So many things are running through my head like insurance, bee feeders, sugar supplies. (The bees need to be fed for awhile until they get established and feed on their own. We do not have honey collection supers on the hives when we are feeding sugar.) We want our host families to be not just satisfied with the placement but excited and happy. We want a honey crop and a market for the honey and wax.

Bee Log #14: March 1, 2010

One hive (hive 2) consumed the sugar water with thymol and two hives did not touch the stuff. The two hives (hives 1 and 4) that are not consuming any sugar water were formerly given frames of honey from the deceased hives. I am continuing to feed hive 2 sugar water without thymol.

We have taken all sugar water away from the front of hive 1 and put on supers since it is so active. We peeked inside after seeing a lot of bees out front and saw that all ten frames were full of bees. This hive has been active at cooler temperatures then the other two hives since early in January. Earlier inspections showed empty frames that were not all the way drawn out in the top deep box. (A drawn out frame is one on which the bees have made wax cells.) It would be nice to prevent swarming in this box but on the other hand, it would be nice to perpetuate this queen bee's genetics since the hive is so vigorous at lower temperatures. We need to watch for queen cells and make a hive split if we spot them.

Bee Log #13: February 22, 2010

We lost 40% of our beehives to CCD (colony collapse disorder). We are trying to think what that would mean if we were chicken farmers. Nearly half of our chickens would die. If we were ranchers, 40 of 100 cows would die. When you start the winter with 5 live bee hives (had a swarm in July) and loose two that does not seem like too many but if you think in terms of scale, it is a lot.

One of our conclusions is that we need to treat bee maladies more aggressively. I don't mean going after every chemical on the market. We are trying to use herbal remedies that have scientific backing. Thymol is an extract from the thyme herb. We had a dose for solid crystals but were not able to find them so we purchased thymol as an essential oil steam distilled from the herb. The literature described dissolving thymol in rubbing alcohol but that is either isopropol alcohol which is a poison to humans or ethanol which has been denatured with something nasty to humans. We purchased a small amount of vodka to use as a solvent. It did not work as well as hoped. There was still an oily film on top of the vodka and then on top of the sugar syrup. We will try to remove the feeders before the bees take all of the sugar syrup so that the bees don't get a concentrated last sip of essential oil. (I used 1 ml ((scant 1/4 teaspoon)) in 1 oz vodka to put in 3 quarts 1:1 sugar syrup)

I think it might work better to put the thymol in grease patties either with or without the wintergreen oil. The essential oils should easily dissolve in the Crisco. I will repeat the recipe that I used last fall with wintergreen oil only.

Grease patties: wintergreen oil (1 tbsp) Crisco (2 cups), white sugar (3 cups), honey (1 cup) and mineral salts ground fine (3 tbsp). I mixed this together and put an ice cream scoop full on top of the top frames in the brood box.

Bee Log #12: February 19, 2010

I did my first bee inspection of the year yesterday and again today. It was about 52 to 55 degrees and sunny both days. Bees were flying. Hive 1 was the most active and appeared to be robbing another hive. That hive may have been lost this winter. I took off the inner cover of the hive being robbed and saw that there were no bees clustered at the top of the frames as there should have been at this time of year. Yesterday, I tried to take out the frames but the bees had the frames glued in really well and the temperature was low enough that the propolis was hard and unyielding. I took off the top deep which was really heavy (indicating lots of honey stores)and peered in the bottom deep. There was not a cluster there either. There is little hope for that hive. I put an entrance reducer in to limit the opening so that, if there are bees, they can more easily defend their honey. If we did loose this hive, it is classic CCD (colony collapse disorder) with the bees disappearing while honey stores are still sufficient. That hive went into the winter as the strongest hive we owned.

Today, I got the frames out of the hive suspected to be dead and found as I thought that the hive had died. The third picture above is what I saw. There was plenty of honey around what appeared to be the last stand of the cluster (Cluster's last stand?). Notice the moldy bees in cluster formation. The cluster must have been very small. There were some dead bees in the bottom of the hive but not beyond what is normal in an overwintered hive.

One other hive also died in the same manner. We took the honey that was stored in those hives and put it in the healthy hives. Our loss this winter is 40% to CCD. Last winter it was 25%.

The other two pictures are of normal hives. I did not pull out frames in those hives. Notice in the one picture the bees clustered around the grease patty. It is a Crisco, honey, sugar, mineral salts, wintergreen oil mixture. The recipe was listed in a posting of November of 2009.

When it is just a little warmer, I will do a full inspection checking for eggs, larva, adequate honey and pollen stores and visible mites. I will switch the brood boxes so that the cluster is on the bottom instead of the top and clean off the screened bottom board. I will medicate for nosema if there is evidence of bee dysentery. If one of the boxes is free of brood and honey, I will replace it with two new smaller sized boxes (westerns). We are going to switch to all western sized boxes because the deeps are too heavy when full of honey.