The Capital Buzz Is Showing Tomorrow, Downtown

If you'd like to see the excellent documentary about beekeeping in the District, here is your chance to see in on a big screen at the E Street Theater at 11th and E St, NW.

Here is the link for the information:
https://tickets.dcshorts.com/Showcase14

This film is part of the DC Shorts series and is now nominates in the top 8 of "Best DC Shorts."  Come show your support and cast your vote, and support urban beekeeping!

Jeff.

Fall Beekeeping Class October 13 and 14

Back by popular demand...our two-day beekeeping class.

We eat and drink:

We build hives (which you take home with you):

We play with the bees on my roof (sporting your new veil we provide you):

And we make products from the hive including soap, candles, lip balm, and honey if it is in season.

Seriously, this two-day course (from 1-4 at my home in Georgetown) teaches basic beekeeping and handling on the first day, and we spend the second day making products from the hive.  You leave with a basic hive, a veil, and a great beekeeping book called The Backyard Beekeeper.

We limit the class to only six so the discussion is relaxed and interactive, with lots of time with the bees.  The cost is $300, but with all the equipment you are getting its almost like getting the class for free!


Please email me at Jeff@DCHoneybees.com if you are interested.


Jeff.

A Harvest and Hive Inspection At Church Of the Pilgrims - VIDEO

We harvested honey from the three hives we have at the Church earlier this spring, but since it had been a while since we inspected these hives, and since the right Reverend Dr. Ashley Goff:

New Queen Supplier - White Oak Apiary

We are busy putting together nucs to over-winter for next spring.  We typically do this by taking two or three frames of brood, a frame of honey, and a shaking of some bees from the hive and put them in our 6-frame nuc box, outfitted with a frame feeder.  We then feed with pollen substitute and syrup to get them plenty of population, drawn comb, and carbs to overwinter.

We Move a Hive Off a Roof In Logan Circle - VIDEO

Our friends who put a hive on their roof purely for the benefit of the bees are now moving to Houston, and thus need to decommission the hive.

We do this in two steps.  First note that this hive has a two-deep brood chamber with an (empty) honey super on it.  We are using ten-frame equipment, so there are 20 frames of bees in the brood chamber to move.

We divide these frames into sets of five, and put them in five-frame nuc boxes, these cardboard ones we purchase at Brushy Mountain.  That's a total of four boxes.  If the brood and honey/pollen frames are evenly distributed (3 frames of brood in each of the four boxes, plus honey frames) one could simply make four nucs to sell out of this one hive after requeening the three queenless boxes.

In this case, because it is late in the season and thus there was not a huge amount of brood in this hive, we will reconstitute this hive elsewhere as a single entity, and nurse it with syrup and pollen patties to confirm it has enough bees to go into winter.  We also will requeen with one of our excellent queens from Long Lane Honeybee Farms.

We transfer the four boxes of frames away from the hive (to my dining room) and will come back the next day to retrieve the equipment.  Hopefully at that point the stragglers will have left and I won't have to carry bee-covered equipment through the home of our friends.

Check out the video:



Also, don't forget to check out our store!

Nuc Building Part ?? Our Bread and Butter Deep Nuc Revised.

I love the nuc that I designed with lots of help and from internet and other influential parties, as a nursery for future hives.  This original 6-frame nuc was originally highlighted here and had a number of advantages:

• Used stock 1 x 12 lumber without ripping so needed nothing but a handsaw and screw driver;
• Cost only about $22;
• Was quick to build;
• No fancy joinery;
• Can hold FIVE FRAMES PLUS A ONE GALLON FEEDER, so great to overwinter nucs;
• Long lasting with a painted finish.

The negatives were few, but one that I identified was the requirement to add the plywood inserts that act as a shelf for the deep frame. 

The Capital Buzz Will Be Showing At The DC Shorts Film Festival

The Capital Buzz, a film about DC beekeeping and yours truly, has been making the rounds nationwide at numerous film festivals.  Coming soon to DC, here is an article about it!

http://www.gazette.net/article/20120829/ENTERTAINMENT/708299681/1149/george-washington-grad-student-makes-a-bee-line-for-dc-shorts-film&template=gazette

Please check it out if you can!

Our New Online Store Is Now Open

Please visit us at the Georgetown Honeybee Company Store.

Purchase local honey, hives, bees and bee products.  The site remains under construction so please email me with any requests, comments, or commendations!!  Jeff@DCHoneybees.com

Jeff

We Get To Tag Along With A Commercial Beekeeper-VIDEO

Jerry Mattiaccio, of Rock Hill Honeybee Farms, was kind enough to invite me to join him on a pollination run to southern Virginia to visit and feed some hives on pumpkins.

Jerry could not resist describing me as a "city boy" as I wondered out-loud how many tanks of gas it took to get to his hives.  But it was an excellent learning experience, and a window onto the backbone of the bee industry, the pollinator. 

We cannot be hobby beekeepers without them as they provide the bee root-stock that gives us bees.  And honey.  Oh, and high yields that keep food prices low.

It was an awesome time, hopefully more experience to come!  Here is the vid.

Our Friend Charles Gets Some Love From the Washington Post

Charles is a beekeeper in the Anacostia area of Washington, and is a very active member of the community.  I have worked with Charles on not only bee-related stuff, but also in wearing my other hat as representative of the Mayor's office.

You may remember Charles from this post:
http://dchoneybees.blogspot.com/2012/03/bees-east-of-anacostia-river.html

These pics of him show him after a rather eventful and reactive encounter with his bees, and his face was in recovery at the time!

Thanks, Charles, for keeping the momentum!  Still waiting for that honey...

Here is the link to the Post article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/a-local-beekeeper-brings-honey-to-anacostia/2012/08/23/fb78a8a6-e555-11e1-8741-940e3f6dbf48_page.html?hpid=z5

Nucs Arrive In Memphis Safely!

The two nucs that we sent on Monday from our local post office arrived yesterday (Thursday) in Memphis via Parcel Post from the US Postal Service.  That was much better delivery timing than was quoted (seven days) and bolsters our belief that we can now make a habit of mailing our DC-raised bees and queens to folks around the country.  The cost for shipping for each nuc was about $30.

This fall and winter we will be setting up a limited number of nucs to over-winter.  Those that survive we will sell in early spring, with the bees in a position to actually collect some honey for harvest next season.

 Let me know if you would like to reserve one! Jeff@DCHoneybees.com

Test Driving Mailing Nucs

 We have a client in TN who was anxious to get one of our nucs!

Hooray for us as we had some that were in great shape, but we had never shipped nucs, only provided them for pickup or drop-off.

We first tried overnight shipping through UPS.  They specifically do take bees, but don't take them to the UPS Store...you're not going to get the best understanding of their policies or their legendary customer service.  I would argue that the UPS Store was a bad move for UPS as it debases their otherwise excellent reputation.

The cost to overnight the nucs was over $110 each.  WOW.  And then a few bees escaped and they aborted the whole thing and returned the nucs to me in a sealed box and with our queens dead.

Charges returned (thankfully) we took the nucs a week later to the US Post Office.  I know, right?
Who uses USPS anymore unless you have a catalog to send.

Full disclosure, we are using Brushy Mountain nucs for shipping.  They are waxed cardboard with lots of ventilation.  But we needed to use the inner cover (which we have been neglecting) to fully enclose the bees. For some reason the shippers are not fond of bees escaping their colony.  UPS shipping did not get our best effort at full containment.

Lesson learned.

We have now modified our program to guarantee the containment of the girls.  We used a plastic wrap product to wrap the entire box in cellophane.  From Uline, it is this stuff.

After speaking with the Don, I think we are in good shape as long as the bees do not get overheated.

Please stay tuned as we hear about the health of the arriving bees.  There may be an opportunity to share our genetics with folks outside out market if it is successful!

We Have Local DC Honey For Sale Now

After this year, in spite of a few crashed hives, we were able to harvest about 60 lbs per hive out of many of our urban colonies.  we now have honey to sell.

This is honey we harvested using the crush and strain method and has not been filtered, only strained to leave in all the goodness of the local pollen.  We have varieties collected from Georgetown, the Mount Vernon Triangle, and Takoma Park (DC).  All delicious!

Please email me if you would like some!  jeff@dchoneybees.com

Friends at Paris Barns Are In Trouble

As you may remember, we have a bunch of hives out in Fauquier County that we help with.  This is at the Boneta Reserve where they rescue livestock, raise agricultural products, and do farm demonstrations.

 
Apparently, the local government has been giving them a rough time for the "commerce" they are undertaking on the property, in spite of their possession of a business license.

From the Washington Examiner:
Farmers in Fauquier County are planning to bring their pitchforks to an Aug. 2 hearing before the Board of Zoning Appeals to protest the arbitrary treatment of one of their own. On April 30, Zoning Administrator Kimberley Johnson sent Martha Boneta an official cease-and-desist notice for selling farm products and hosting a birthday party for her best friend's 10-year-old daughter on her 70-acre Paris, Va., farm without a special administrative permit.

Johnson threatened to fine Boneta $5,000 per violation if she did not stop the alleged unlawful activities within 30 days. In doing so, Boneta's fellow farmers say, Johnson stepped far beyond her authority. They're supporting her appeal before the BZA because they rightly fear that left unchecked, this infringement on one farmer's freedom to make a living will spread to other agricultural enterprises like a dangerous pest.

The Virginia Right to Farm Act prohibits local authorities from treating agricultural activity as a "nuisance" -- which seems to be what's happening here, since Johnson was reportedly responding to complaints from nearby residents. Boneta already had a business license the county issued her in June 2011 that allowed her to operate a "retail farm shop" on her property. Her license application specifically noted her intention to sell handspun yarns, birdhouses, soaps and other handicrafts in addition to fresh vegetables, eggs, herbs and honey.

The following month, the Fauquier County Board of Supervisors changed the classification of "farm sales" to require a special administrative permit for activities that were in compliance with the ordinance just one month before. But documents received under the Freedom of Information Act showed that Boneta is the only farmer in Fauquier County who has ever been cited -- even though the county's own website lists dozens of farms that sell similar products to end-use customers.

On July 12, supervisors voted to limit the number of visitors allowed at food- and wine-tasting events to 25, and to limit such events to two per month, even though they were warned by the county attorney and Virginia Secretary of Agriculture and Forestry Todd Haymore that such restrictions are illegal. Virginia's growing wine industry and its small artisanal farmers contribute millions of dollars to the state economy while providing urban residents with a taste of country life. But even in picturesque Fauquier County, their future is clouded by the growing burden of capricious government regulation.

Here is more commentary on the subject:
 

http://disruptthenarrative.com/2012/08/06/tyranny-coming-to-a-neighborhood-near-you/

Why is this beekeeping blog covering this?  We certainly we want to support our friends the Boneta's who have been huge proponents of the bees.

But also important are the impacts of this kind of government intervention on your beekeeping operations, or your honey sales, or your farmer's market activity.

Making a Few Queens, Part 2 VIDEO

After a poor first attempt, where I failed to provide a queenless hive for our bees, we try again with some queen-rearing equipment from Mann Lake to improve our success.