Sweet Golden Goodness!

Last Saturday during our beehive inspection in Brooklyn, we looked at the honey super to see how things were going. We were mainly just checking to see if they had built out the wax on the frames. But to our surprise, in just two weeks time, they had literally built out a whole frame of honey! We were astounded! A whole frame of freshly capped honey! Just two weeks ago, this was a brand new frame with new foundation! This is incredible! They are so prolific and fast!

I had to fight ever fiber of my being to not unzip my hood and lick the darn thing. Hahahaha. The smell is also incredible. If you ever get an opportunity to get up close to a fresh frame of raw honey, do it. The smell is so sweet and intoxicating. Counting down the days until we can harvest these bad boys! I can hardly wait!

A Look Back at Mother's Day Flowers

Two week's ago, I went home for mother's day and bought and planted some flowers for my mom. It's pretty much a tradition in my family. We buy flowering plants for mom and we plant them in the yard. I much prefer giving plants to giving fresh cut flowers because they last so much longer! And if you buy a flowering perennial, they bloom year after year. It's a gift that keeps on giving! This year, I bought her these pretty begonias. How insanely beautiful is this deep yellow color?

I also bought her some mini dahlias. I just loved these deep orange and red colors. So pretty!

My mom's dogwood tree is also blooming right now. I love the color!

Over 10 years ago, we bought my mom a peony bush. Year after year, it blooms a spectacular show of flowers! I picked one to bring home. How pretty is this?  My mom loves the bush, whenever it blooms she says, it reminds her of that mother's day.

Here is a view of the bloom 2 days later. The scent is amazing. Peonies are definitely my favorite flowers. I just love them! They definitely are show stoppers! Just gorgeous!

Baking Sourdough Buns

I finally had time to use my sourdough starter monster to make some bread. I call it a monster because if you don't use the starter, it multiplies and multiplies. I wrote about it here, my one starter turned into 4 jars of starter! It was getting bad, you open my fridge and all you see are these mason jars of starter! So I looked for an easy recipe that I could try and found this one on King Arthur's website. The recipe was for buttery sourdough buns. The best part, you could use unfed starter for this recipe. So the prep time was minimal. Just the kind of breadmaking I like! I followed the instructions and made the dough. Then I set it aside to let the dough rise.

An hour later, it doubled in size! Awesome, it was time to roll it out and make buns!

I cut the dough into two halves and rolled out each half.

Then you roll it and cut it into 2 inch rolls. You put it in a buttered pan and put a little more melted butter on top.

Here's how it looks right out of the oven. It was so good straight from the oven. Slightly crunchy crust, and soft doughy in the middle. The only thing I would do differently next time, I would add an egg wash over the dough so that it gets more color. The buns didn't get much color so I cooked it for longer so that it would turn a little browner.

Here is one single bun. As you can see, it made a perfect dinner roll. I ate this up. And 2 more at once. Y U M.

Raising Another Queen

This week I ordered new front feeders for the beehives because our bees seemed to not care for the top feeder. The ones I ordered are just plastic cap holders that you screw on top of mason jars. At $3 a pop, this will work just fine. I like to use Mason jars as feeders because you can clean them easily and get all the gunk out that builds up when the jars are in the sun.

The main goal for this hive inspection was to look for Queen cups or evidence of a new Queen. At the start of this season, this hive was Queenless. Then we raised a virgin Queen which died. So we moved fresh brood over to attempt to raise another Queen. Since it's still early enough in the season, and we have another hive that is very strong, we decided to take the risk of raising another Queen instead of buying a mated Queen.

When we looked closer, the hive was brimming with activity, so this is definitely a good sign.

The first frame I pulled from the middle of the top box had a Queen cup. Woohoo! And all that spotty brood are drone cells. That means there is a laying working somewhere in the hive as well.

Here's a closer look at the frame. At this capped stage, the Queen should emerge in 7 days, and then hopefully a week after that takes her mating flight. I saw around 4 Queen cells in the hive so the first one to hatch will kill the other Queens.

 

Here's a look at the new blue hive. It's just waiting for my new Nuc to arrive. I spoke to the Beehive Barn and they said with the cold weather we were having this spring, they are about a week late with the Nucs being ready. I am hoping that we can pick up the Nucs the last week of May. I'm eager to get the Nuc installed so that I can get this hive up and running.

Since the day was a bit overcast, the bees were super aggressive when I inspected. I suspect that most of the bees were close to home because they sensed it was going to rain. I actually got stung 3 times! Twice on my legs, (one sting on each leg).

AND... I also got stung on my neck. Somehow, a bee got into my veil and stung me square in the neck. Oh man, did that one hurt! It got pretty swollen and my neck pretty much "disappeared". I get a really bad reaction to beesting. My doctor says I have a mild allergy to bee venom so I carry around a prescription bottle of Cetirizine, which is an anti-histamine that my doctor prescribed for me for times like this when I really need a strong dose to calm the swelling.

After getting stung 3 times, I went straight home to take a relaxing shower. I found a bee stuck on my clothing. She must have been one of the bees that stung me. Poor bee. If you ask me, she got it worse than I did.