For the love of bees continued….

I was telling about how I got into beekeeping in the post titled “for the love of bees”, and this is the continuation of that.

So here we where in this nice large house with an equally impressive backyard.  At some point early in our first few months of just moving in, my wife says, “lets plant a garden, with vegetables and fruits”.  I thought that was the coolest idea, I lived at a boarding school from when I was in the 5th grade until I graduated .  The school was called Thornwell, and it was in South Carolina.  The school was established in 1875 and was originally an orphanage, for Civil war orphans.  While living at this boarding school, I learned some farming skills.  The school had a milking barn with at least 100 or more cows, that we milked.  We also had beef cattle we raised, and an extensive Farming operation.  The Farm, along with a large endowment, kept the school opened and running for many years.  I have kept in contact with some of the Alumni from that school, and from what they tell me, the school has gone down hill.  The farm has since closed and the farming equipment sold off.  Those in charge of the  endowment, invested the money  poorly, and totally mismanaged it, and the endowment is gone.  I guess, like they say, “that is another story”, but I learned the love for the land, farming, and caring for livestock, at an early stage, because of this school.

That brings me back to the garden in our back yard, in our new home that my aunt had bought….and who we paid rent to.  Angela and myself set out and planted a huge garden, we had corn, tomatoes, bell peppers, cow peas, green beans, sweet peas, cantaloupe, honey dew, pumpkin, cucumbers, and lots of spices. Most everything turned out wonderful and we tended the garden daily. I watched the tomatoes plants grow and produce lots of tomatoes.  The bell pepper plants did well, with a variety of colors.  The corn grew tall and I found those to be wonderful to watch grow.  I built my own trellis for the cow peas, and sweet peas and they also did well.  The cucurbits: the pumpkins, cantaloupe, honey dew, and cucumbers also took off, with beautiful foliage, followed by female and male blossoms.  I had planted a large pumpkin variety and I couldn’t wait to see big fat pumpkins in the garden.  The fruit of the cucurbits, would start and look promising, but the fruit would always abort.  ”Why wouldn’t the cantaloupe and pumpkins and cucumbers do well”, I would ask myself.  Not being one to give up easily, I asked around and researched.

Garden as the sun is going down

Pollination in the way of bees, was the reason, we didn’t have enough feral bees, bumble bees and the like, visit them.  So, I set out to see how I could bring the pollinators to our garden.  I discovered that I could buy orchard bees, bumble bee, and that I could make artificial homes that would attract solitary bees.  Then I came across honey bees, Apis melifera, wow what an extraordinary bug.  I knew that honey bees existed, but somehow I never knew about beekeeping and beekeepers; How could I have missed that.  The more I read about honey bees, beekeeping, and a strange word apiary, the more I got hooked.  Every night I would gather the children around the computer, and tell them about bees, and hobby beekeepers, and about package bees, and nucs.  The children asked lots of questions, and we dreamed of honey bees, and becoming beekeepers……just one small problem, my wife thought that she was allergic to honey bees.Here are some photos of my then garden:

Isla and Avery collecting veggies

cow peas

So, if Angela did have an allergy to honey bees, then that meant I had to dream and enjoy photos of beekeeping online.  I did not give up hope on my dream, I read that honey bees can be very gentle, and that having honey bees in the yard doesn’t spell trouble.  So, I kept reading, kept researching and kept learning.  Finally I was getting my wife on board, besides she wasn’t absolutely sure she was allergic to honey bees.  Then one day, a honey bee somehow got into the house…really….and it stung my wife, and she didn’t have a true anaphylaxis reaction (she did however have a local reaction).  That was when she conceded, and allowed me to have a single colony of honey bees.

It’s time for a break, and this is where I’m going to end, for this post.  I’m going to write some more later.  Happy beekeeping!

Images of the Orange Grove

Sunshine

 

Got Orange Juice?

After we moved the bees to the Orange grove, we took some photos.  The oranges trees, tangerines trees, and grapefruits trees hung heavy with fruit, soon they will be harvested.

Moved two colonies, today

Today, My daughter and I moved two colonies.  We moved them from one of our out yards to another, that is in an orange grove.  Here are a couple of photos.

For the love of bees…

Now that you have met the family, I can get to the business of my beekeeping experiences, and make, (what I hope to be), intellectual blog entries, that are informative and entertaining.  I’m not much of a writer, and this is my first blog, so please bear with me. I’ll make many grammatical errors, use phrases and probably  expressions out of context, and may even get off on tangents; hopefully, I won’t bore you.  The only promise I can make is that I will do my very best, and that’s all one can do. So, if you don’t mind, I don’t mind, lets see where this blog leads.

With that said, I can get to explaining how I got into beekeeping, how I got my first bees, where I first placed my bees, where they are currently placed, how I developed as a beekeeper, and how I am still developing as a beekeeper.

How did I get into beekeeping?  How does anyone get into any hobby?  I guess you find something that interests you, and you get involved with it, or maybe it finds you.  That’s a funny statement, “it finds you”, that sounds counterintuitive, as though the hobby walked on it’s own two feet and actively searched you out.  Well, that is how I got into beekeeping, and it’s how I discovered that I had a passion for Apiculture.  I guess to explain this, and for you the reader to understand how it “found me”, I would have to start at the beginning.

In the beginning there was a little bug….no that is much too much “from the beginning”, let me tell you, how it actually started for me.

My wife and I had been renting wherever we have lived; renting apartments, renting trailers, and finally we started renting homes. It was nice renting a home, we didn’t have the hassles of upstairs or downstairs neighbors that comes with living in an apartment.  It was also nice having a backyard, it gave our children a place to run around in, and it was safe neighborhood.  Our first house we rented was a bit small, and the outside of the house was a funky color blue, but it was a home, and it felt like it was ours.  Our landlord, never came over, and that further gave us the “feeling” that we owned our own home.  The rent was right and it felt like we where living the American dream, you know…being a homeowner, at least that was our American dream.  Our credit isn’t the best I’m ashamed to say, so owning a home of our own was a distant dream, it still is. So, here we are in our home, with a fire place even, and I must say that it was pretty cool for a first house. Unfortunately, all good things must eventually come to an end, sad but true.  In this instance, the landlord wanted to sell all the homes that had renters living in them.  Like I mentioned earlier, our credit is bad, but we wanted to keep our home, we had grown attached to it.  It had it’s problems, it was what you would call a “fixer upper” and big time.  It was a little bitty house, it had a large crack in the wall that ran all the way up to the ceiling, and the landlord wanted way more than it was worth, but he was willing to work with us. Besides, we where already in the home, had a great routine, and the children loved it, and it was a great peaceful neighborhood. Anyhow, the owner was going to allow us to rent to own, if I remember correctly he wanted a large deposit, that we didn’t have of course.   So, it was off to my Mother to see if she could “help” with the deposit, and as luck would have it, we got lucky.  Actually, I don’t believe in luck, I believe in God…. all the gifts I have, all the blessings I’ve received, and all that I will ever be, is because of God, and that is what believe in my heart.  Whenever you read luck, in my writings, it’s actually the blessings of the Lord, that I attribute these things to.  As I was saying as luck would have it, (God’s never ending blessings and love for me and my family), my mother and aunt where moving to Miami to live in my other Aunts home.  I guess I should back up a little bit here and explain a little.  My mother and her sister ,my aunt, and my aunts husband, my uncle Bob(who BTW, was one of my idols) where all living in Gainesville, Fl.  My uncle was a retired Lt Commander in the Navy of over 20 years, and was an extremely intelligent man.  He also made some really good investments and owned a lot of real estate, needless to say my aunt and uncle where comfortable, financially.  Well, unfortunately he became ill, had been ill for sometime and had progressively had gotten worse, and passed away (God rest his soul…he was in my eyes a wonderful man).  So the two sisters,( my aunt and my mother), decided to sell their Gainesville home, and move into my other aunt’s home in Miami.  So, as luck would have it (yea,you know who I mean) they where heading to move to Miami, and decided to visit my family and I, here in Orange City.  They took one look at the house, we where living in and the over, over, did I say over, yes I did the over priced home, that the owner wanted for the house, and decided to help.  My aunt said something to the effect “We will just have to find a house you like, and  in this price range (I don’t remember the actual price range), and we will have to buy it”.  Well, it didn’t take long for my wife and I to realize that my Aunt was being very generous, and not looking a “gift horse in the mouth” didn’t ask any questions.  We just diligently looked high and low, for a home in the price range my aunt had given us.  We found lots of homes; nice homes, really bad homes, some OK homes, and some great homes that where just out of the price range, that we had been given. My mother and aunt where even able to find homes via online from Gainesville,(they had not yet moved to Miami), and they would send us the address and we would take a look at them and describe to them how they looked.  Pretty soon, it became evident that they, my aunt and mother, would have to come to Orange City and take a look with us, and boy did we look.  What we found was that for the price range that they had given us, there where no homes that where worth investing into.  So, they raised the price range, and we found our dream home, and it was the most perfect home we had looked at, and we had taken a look at many homes, and had almost given up.  The home was big, (at that time it was just the four of us…my wife, my two little ones, and myself, and my son every other weekend, holidays and two weeks in the summer….I had my son every other weekend religiously.  The back yard was huge, I’ll have to place a photo here so you can see:

That is one views of our back yard, and two other views. The point was that it was a nice size back yard.

These photos where taken after we had the bees, I was going to hold of showing you these photos, but they are good views to show the good size of our back yard. Happy Thanksgiving everyone, I’m going to close here with one more photo at the bottom of this page it is the garden photo, before we had bees, before I even thought about beekeeping, and Clarice our oldest child is standing in the corn patch section of the garden.  This is a good place to stop for today, and I will pick up here, in my next blog post.

One big happy family

Here is a fun photo.  This is where I have united two colonies to make on strong colony.  The uniting of the colonies was well worth it, they are strong, have good honey stores and should produce well, next Spring.

our family logo

Cleaned up version of our Wallace Family Apiary logo

Gentle bees

Honey bees are very gentle, and are fun to watch.  Here I place a little honey on my hand, and the bees lined up to the feeding trough.

one of the first drafts of our Apiary logo

I came up with this logo, for our Family Honey Logo.  It’s simple and eye catching…at least I think it is.  It appears on our pens (which I have two boxes full of these pens), and it also appears on our honey labels.

So, that’s everyone

So, that’s everyone, and the posts that follow on our blog, will be of us doing our bee thing.  The coming weeks, I’ll be doing the rest of my chores to make sure that the “girls” will “winter” well, and then in the Spring the fun really begins.