Working Together

Last week Mark helped out his former employer - City of Seguin - with a wild hive in Central Park. It was fun to tag along and watch him work to get the bees off the pecan tree. They were rather gentle but you never know with a wild hive so better to remove them now before they become aggressive, as wild bees here in Texas tend to get. And how fun to ride a cherry picker. :)

Bees & Flowers

My life is all bees, honey, and tips at work right now so you're going to have to bear with bee-oriented shots, which I assure you is far more interesting than IT-oriented tips I'm working on in my day job. :) We're extracting honey - most honey we've ever had for two reasons. 1) At one hundred or so hives, we have more bees than we've ever had before. I think that's double what we had last year even after selling a number of nucleus hives (starter hives) in the spring. 2) We had a great raining winter and spring and it's keeping the flowers going and now the Mesquite is as well. Here it is early June and I'm still amazed at the flowers that are in bloom, fueling our bees. Awesome! Mark was particularly happy that the last bit of rain rejuvenated the Indian Blankets, as the bees love that and this kept them going with honey production. The first shot was at Rattlesnake bee yard near Marion (Tx). I was watching Mark, David and Ira pull the honey supers off the hives in order to begin extraction. I loved what was left on these frames when they pulled one of the supers off - looked like a skyline to me. And I wanted to eat it! lol. I shot the picture below at Deadman Creek bee yard at the Lazy U Ranch (a certified organic ranch).
 

Purple Sage

Have you noticed the explosion of purple blooms on the sage bushes lately? It's everywhere and this one is in our front yard which is great because our bees love going to it as you can tell in the picture above. Sometimes when I get in the car to head to work and the bush is alive with blooms, I sit still and watch the bees buzz all around the bush, which is right next to the end of the driveway. Once or twice I've even seen the entire bush just humming with a ton of bees. Kind of neat as long as I'm sitting behind the glass. :-)Here's what the bush looks like when you step back a bit.

What a Wet Spring

Well we sure can't complain about a drought this year. In the past eight days, we've gotten over five inches of rain. YAY!! And the bees are making a ton of honey - great news for local folks like me who suffer from allergies. Great job bees.

Bee on Indian Blanket

Hello my friends - I'm on vacation while family is in town so I'm behind on all sorts of things including posting. Here's a shot I snapped last week when I visited the Lazy U Ranch where we have one of our bee yards. I love it out there - it's an organic ranch. Pretty cool concept in my opinion. I didn't even know there was such a program for ranches before we met the owner here.

Easter Bee

Happy Easter everyone! Hope you all have a wonderful day with your loved ones.

Wisteria and Bees

Good morning, everyone! Just a quick hello from Seguin. Haven't had much time to post as we had a big event this past Saturday for our new beekeepers. Here's a shot of the latest thing to bloom in our yard - upright Wisteria. I love it and so do the bumble bees. Yesterday I saw three of them buzzing around the tall plant. Their flight behavior is so different from our honey bees so I enjoy watching them dart around in start/stop fashion (versus the more smooth flight of the honey bee). Here's a shot of our class from Saturday. We had a SUPER FAB time and now there are at least 24 new beekeepers in South Texas, keeping gentle bees. That's not counting the folks who got a jumpstart on things and picked up nucs weeks earlier. Let's hope we all have a great honey harvest this year!

Spring Breaks

Happy Spring Break, everyone! Seems like the whole state is on break this week. The work parking lot is mostly empty. Makes me just want to skip work and take pictures of all the blooming loveliness about town. I snapped this beauty out at the nearby My Father's Farm nursery on Highway 123 close to our house, which is very near the center of town. I always wonder if people realize there are over thirty bee hives on that nursery property. They are doing quite well out there between the abundant wild mustard blooms and now all sorts of different wildflowers are coming out. Very lovely to see.

Fall in Our Lil World

As I got in the car this morning, I was struck by the beautiful coloring of our peach tree. I love having the bee boxes in the yard.

Revitalizing Rains

 
It's been a couple of weeks since our last great rainfall but we continue to see how alive the landscape has become with just a touch of rain. No amount of hand-watering can work the magic that real rain provides. It's wonderful! Things are green again and we even have flowers blooming, which is great news for our bees as well as for us. The color bloom we are seeing most is yellow - blooms of all sizes, large and small. The bees are loving it!

It's nice someone is enjoying the great, hot outdoors. See the green grass? We pay a nice price to keep it going for our bee classes. Who wants to learn about bees or light a smoker when the grass is brown and crunchy. I get scared just thinking about it.

Hot As All Get Out!

Have you heard that saying before? We used to say it all the time when I was growing up and then I grew out of it. But these days, I have been using it again because it's funny. Makes me smile. Speaking of it being hot, this week is suppose to have record high temperature days. Awesome! Not. I wish we had a pool summers like this.

So this picture is what happens when you go to a bee yard and you have your phone in your back pocket one minute....and then next thing you know, it's not there. Luckily it was a small parameter I kept walking so I could easily retrace my footsteps. Took me two rounds but I found it! Face down in the dirt for maybe ten minutes. Luckily it did work after it cooled down for a while in the truck. Safe and sound. Below is a shot of the yard where I lost it. :-)

Intro to Beekeeping - Explore the Hive Video

This is part of our beekeeping class we did in our backyard last Saturday. I just realized it was posted on the KWED YouTube channel. Cool!

Bee Suits, Not Aliens

No, aliens did not land in Seguin this weekend, in case you drove by our house and wondered that. It was the first official beekeeping class in Seguin, as far as we know and have heard. We had a great time and we think the students did also. It's a lot of fun to introduce new things in our community to people. Already looking forward to the next one on Saturday.

Here are two write-ups on the class in case you're interested:

Our official GBR post from the beekeeping couple's perspective (or the wife part of the couple, at any rate - Bee Ranch Blog

Our friend and reporter, Jessica Domel's perspective (very hilarious) - Jessica's Blog

Watermelon & Bees

Hope everyone had a great fourth of July today - filled with friends, family, parades, good eats and plenty of fun and laughter. But one thing I know we didn't have at all this year are the fireworks - banned due to the drought. Oh well, it is better to be safe than burnt up more than we already are. I'm glad for the precaution because we are still in need of rain.

This is a gloriously sweet watermelon a friend brought us in exchange for some honey. Her family apparently has quite the garden and we bartered for fresh veggies and fruit. Wonderful deal for us! We've enjoyed cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, squash and zucchini, cantaloupe and now this. It was so sweet and delicious. Nothing said holidays more to me than snacking on watermelon all day. Especially after a hot spell out in the sun as Mark helped a faithful honey fan get rid of some bees whose home had tipped over to reveal all that honeycomb. Luckily they were not Africanized. The watermelon on the trip back to Seguin sure quenched our thirst.

Pictures, Honey, Pictures

Ever wonder how I spent time? It is still behind a camera oftentimes, but now it's behind a camera at a bee yard a lot. I am very blessed that I enjoy working with Mark and I get to learn about bees while still doing one of my favorite hobbies - photography! Here we are doing a product photos shoot for our new website we are working on furiously. Hope to get it up and running this weekend but we needed some specific product shots of each type of honey we have. It's always a lot of fun to add props and especially nice when we get to include nature in our photographs. I had a lot of fun doing this one.

Bee Biz Hits Groupon

Hi everyone. I am so excited I just had to share this - our little bee business has just hit Groupon! We are venturing into formally educating people about beekeeping, something we both enjoy a great deal and have been wanting to do on a larger scale and in a structured environment. This partnership with a honey company out of Round Rock will benefit both parties we believe. So far, we've had over 20 takers of the coupon. By the way, if you haven't checked out Groupon yet, give them a try. They showcase different coupons localized to your area or you can search by big city. Pretty neat and growing in popularity these days as we all try to stretch our money.

Gardening, Bees and Jets

Still no rain this month. I don't even remember the last time we got a decent rain. Please, please rain soon. In between everything else we've had going on in life, I did manage to clean up three sections of our garden. It had really gone to the weeds since we had no time for a garden last year, nor did we manage the space at all. Oh well, there are six tomato plants, a ton of Asian long beans, one surviving egg plant, two yellow squash and two zucchini plants - let's see who makes it this long hot season. I can tell it's going to be a tough summer because we are only in April and it's already been in the 90s. Not unbearably humid YET. But it's coming.

And here is a beautiful sky shot (missed my Sky Watch Friday post) from one of our bee yards which is now located where the Schulz Nursery on Highway 123 was, ever so briefly. Pedro, who owns My Father's Farm, relocated there and we moved our bees from his first farm location to this one. It's an organic farm operation. These jets flew by for a while. I think there were five or six fly-bys and I think they were all different planes but I could be wrong on that so don't quote me.

Wildflowers & Artfest/Trade Days

Today's post is brought to you by some of the gorgeous yellow wildflowers currently in bloom in our lovely state. Hope you have been able to get out and see some of the blooms in the fields. This year we've not had the rain we needed, yet flowers are popping up all around. Perhaps the dry winter and spring gave these rare flowers an opportunity to pop up more noticeably. Not sure. All I know is that I've not seen these before so I thought I'd share here. Anyone have any idea what they are called?

It's been a crazy week for us so we haven't had a chance to share that Artfest is happening down on the square tomorrow from 9a to 5p. There's also a Trade Days and that's where Mark, Belinda and I will be all day - selling our delicious Gretchen Bee Ranch honeys and bees wax products. Hope you will stop by our booth near the gazebo if you are down there tomorrow. We'll have our first double booth with our big ole double canopy. We're big time now! :-) Mainly, just come by, say hi and sample some honey. We'd love to see you.

Still Dry Out There

On our way to the Capote bee yard today, we were worried to see what looked like a big fire. Later we learned that it was about one hundred acres and something like seven fire departments worked together to get it under control. I hope they did and that everyone was okay. This winter has not seen as much rain as last year and things are still a little bit "crunchy" out there. Pretty easy to toss a cigarette or something out the window and cause some trouble. I see burnt patches of grass and field here and there as I drive about my business so I try to be conscious of the hazard.

Besides that bad news, we did manage to have a great day with our bees. Hope you got out there and enjoyed the warm weather a bit. So nice for a bit of glorious sun, right? The bees loved it and so did I. Here's hoping tomorrow will be just as lovely. :)