Complimentary Blueberry Juice

It’s been two weeks, and our beekeeping mentor couldn’t make it.

So, into the hive solo we go!

My favourite (and preferred) way of learning is to just do it yourself. Go for it. Get in there. How else are you going to know?

Books are great, YouTube is great. But there comes a point where there is no more training wheels. You can’t know all the in’s and out’s and all the variables until you face them, for real, in the real world, in real time.

This goes for beekeeping, for planting a garden, it goes for driving, for teaching, for wine tasting, for scuba diving, for public speaking, and for running a business. It doesn’t really matter what the application is, there is no substitute for real world experience.

And so today, at the two-week mark of our fledgling honeybee nuc, it was time for an inspection.

It was the first time I:

1) opened a hive by myself,
2) lit a bee smoker,
3) pried the bee-glued frames apart with a hive tool,
4) lifted each frame for inspection,
5) looked at honeycomb and differentiated what from what,
6) found my queen,
7) made my first real bee decision to add a honey super.
8) installed a queen excluder,
9) added a honey super

And it all felt really good!

I thought it a little crazy that in just two weeks, I had a 5-frame beehive, and now, it’s a 9-frame beehive and everything is full and there’s no room! The outside frames were completely empty two weeks ago. Now they’re full of stuff. There’s tons of bees, they’re bringing in food, nectar and pollen, the queen is laying eggs, larvae are hatching and it all seemed bursting. The only option that seemed relevant to me was to give the bees more space to grow, as they are clearly growing.

They’ve been busy and have been able to forage and find food. Which is great piece of ecological information: there’s a healthy queen, and there’s a healthy environment for honeybees at the moment.

Much of what we’ve done here at the farm over the past 10 years has been experimental. Almost all of it has been “idunno, maybe this would work.” And then doing it. And then re-assessing, and re-assessing again. Trial and refinement. Mulch, irrigation, tools, seeds, varieties, methodology, all of it. You name it, we’ve probably done it (and we keep trying new things for better or worse)

A lot of it is failure to be honest. A lot of it is problematic. A lot of it needed a hard rethink. But if we had waited until we knew what was perfect for us, we would have never gone down these bumpy roads, and we would have never have realized that what seems like the obvious path to go down were even possible.

There’s a lot of great things that can happen if you take a certain kind of leap and just decide to get on the slow-moving-boat that is enrolling on the journey.

There’s only one way to know.

Do the thing you’ve been wanting to do.

Stay curious.

(and take a lot of notes and photos)

Graham

thanks for reading Complimentary Blueberry Juice