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Steve’s Update from the Hive:
December 11, 2002 My sweet little golden darlings are busy again. In Southern California, bees can forage for nectar through the winter due to the blossoming of Eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus honey is usually darker than wild flower, clover or lavender honey, but just as sweet. In July, we harvested about 12 gallons of honey. We make a gathering out of it and invite friends to help. This year we had about 9 people working a day and a half. The L.A. Times did a little story and a television crew shot it for some TV home do-it-yourself network. I haven’t seen it yet but I took them through the entire process. Some of them were scared to death – ha! Unfortunately, I lost one hive due to a condition that a colony can get called Chalk Brood. I replaced it with a wild swarm and then introduced a new young Italian Queen. She’s really a babe and quickly gained the trust and acceptance of the worker bees in the hive. Now they are a happy family – a little cold this time of the year – but they still go out everyday and milk the trees for nectar to make their sweet stuff. Hmmm, sounds like what I go through when I write a song. |
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Steve’s Update from the Hive:
March 3, 2002 12:30pm Hi folks, Had dinner with Brian Eno last night and checked bees today. Because this is a bee entry I don’t want to get into how fascinating Eno is because I could go on and on… There are 5 colonies on our property at this time, plus one in Hollywood and 2 at our friend’s house. The last pull yielded 478 pounds of pure honey and was only done in July. There are a lot of drones, so it looks as though several hives are preparing to swarm. Today was a beautiful day and the bees were being very friendly. I need to order 4 more medium depth supers. I’m not quite sold on the new plastic frames because the bees don’t necessarily like them as much as the wax ones and they are hard to grab with the hive tool. I will order some wooden frames and some plastic and see if they could mix it up. It’s going to be a large harvest and I’m thinking if I get the supers this week and put them on next week, then by May I could do a honey harvest. love
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