If you're looking for marijuana it's not here. Marijuana is wind pollenated. Bees have zero interest in it. Pretty funny that a dispensary is our name reversed but with 14 of them in town it was bound to happen eventually.
By the way: Northampton Honey is an Apiary masquerading as an art project masquerading as a business. You can rearrange those parts, apiary, business and art project any way you want and it still makes about as much sense. We just like keeping bees and having fun with it.
Now we just have the one hive and I keep keep on top of it pretty well. You'll note the two solar panels in the side. These are the power supply for Wyze Outdoor Cameras.
These cameras let us keep an eye on two things, one is how the bees are feeding inside the hive. Winter is coming and we had a pretty severe drought around here. The whole second half of the season was too dry. There were flowers but mostly with very weak nectar and pollen. The hive made bees but never really stored honey or pollen. So we had to feed them.
The bees will almost always take sugar syrup but are less interested in it when there's a good nectar flow on. These bees are very interested in this syrup even though at the time of the photo the best nectar flow of the year was on, goldenrod.
In the upper right had corner of the photo you will see a small white box. That's a Bluetooth temperature, humidity sensor. Using that I can tell how warm the bees are keeping this part of the hive compared to the brood nest and the outdoors. I can see if the bees feed in cold. So far I have seen that in cooler temperatures the bees seem to plug the hole to the brood chamber at night. They're insulating that interior of the hive with their bodies.
The most important part is the thin grey area in the middle. That shows the temperature of the brood nest. As long as the bees keep it between 92 and 98 the brood will survive. The bees keep the center of the hive, where the brood are at this temperature no matter if the temperature outside is 100 or if it goes down to 30 degrees. Since they start raising brood just after New Year's Day around here that outside number might me minus 10. They'd have to lift that temp 105 degrees, insulating with their bodies and shivering to keep warm.
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Here, above, you can see these bees are keeping the temp in the center of the zone with variance by less than a degree despite the outside temperature fluctuations. These sensors read down to the 10th of a degree accurately. Note the outside temperature goes up and down.
On this hive we have one scale, two cameras, three temperature sensors and two humidity sensors? That six sensors. I started keeping bees 15 years ago, we've had up to 30 hives. I've had plenty of chances to observe bees.
Still, after all this they're a mystery to me, more so now maybe then when they when I started. I know more than ever how little I know.
I kept chickens before I had bees. Chickens have two arms, two legs and a head. They're basically like us. A beehive is a superorganism. I stopped long ago thinking of it as made of individuals. I hive, the whole of it, the wax, the bacteria, the bees in all their casts are one body that blows up every warm sunny day and spreads itself out over 20 or 30 square miles. It thinks with 60,000 minds that communicate with dance, vibration, pheromone, and sound.
Right now these bees are raising "winter bees". These bees have a switch flipped in them that allows them to store energy as fat. It also makes the bee more durable to last the winter. Summer bees are like cars. If they run out of gas (sugar) they die. The beat themselves to death flying to flowers and dodging raindrops. They're expendable. The the nature of the hive is change now, change to a winter life where they line between success and failure is death for the whole superorganism, not just one bee.
That's why fall is the start of the new year. It's the plan, the change, for winter.
Where these bees came from I have no idea, but they survived. They prospered enough to split and land in my yard. They took the risk that they would be able to divide their resources and come out of summer strong enough to make it though winter again.
Bees now fight pests imported here from around the world. Mites from Siberia, beetles from Africa, virus from everywhere. They live in a world with more drought and more rain too. We're in this together the bees and us. In return for my care they provide endless fascination.
We're keeping bees again after a long time off. Work and life just made it too hard to keep bees for a while. Then, this spring, a swarm landed in some old equipment we had and suddenly we were beekeepers again. The equipment was in a horrible state with wax moth, mold, and mouse damage but the bees cleaned it up. It was shocking, really.
It was like they bought a fixer upper and really went to town, all marble countertops and prosumer appliances. I'd have never put bees on that equipment in a million years. Still, with some help, they thrived. I've never seen such good bees. The docile, not prone to fight, the queen lays in a really nice pattern.
I should have paid more attention to them in the drought but they came late, being a swarm, and I had to move them to a friend's property for a bit. Out of sight out of mind as they say. Still they soldiered on and look like one of the best colonies I've seen.
I was lucky enough to keep bees with Ross Conrad in Vermont this summer for a day. I learned quite a few things about mite treatment and where it's come since we stopped. Ross was just also a fantastic bee keeper, so smooth and efficient. Keeping with him really lit the fire again. You wouldn't think beekeeping could be like athletics or dance but it is. When you see someone really good at anything it's just graceful.
Anyway, these bees seem to be in great health. I enjoy them roaring away in the evenings with that stinky sock smell that only comes from goldenrod nectar. They seem to me like one of the strongest hives in September I can recall. Maybe I'm just misty eyed about them.
Next year we'll be a real apiary again, with a few hives at least. And these bees, yes, they really do roar at night.
