Today I’m going to share with you my little secret for staying healthy through the winter months. Last year, I was in a community theater play and my friend, who is a voice coach, told me to drink hot honey lemon water to help my throat and keep my voice healthy with all the singing […]
The “I Grew Thanksgiving” Challenge Results
Last year, shortly after Thanksgiving, our extended family tossed around a crazy idea. Maybe next year we could eat only foods we grew, hunted, or gathered ourselves for our Thanksgiving dinner. Could we do it? Could we produce a homegrown Thanksgiving dinner? Would the less enthusiastic members of the family still want to come eat […]
Extracting Honey from Our Bee Hives
After three years of trying bees, we are finally extracting honey from the hives this fall! It’s not too hard (read: I had sweet husband do most of it), and quite fascinating. And since I didn’t know exactly how I would be presenting this to you while it was happening, I took some video and […]
Installing Honey Supers
As of last night, our bees have started making honey for us. Yesterday was a routine hive checking day. During the hive inspections, we’re looking for any sign of disease, checking production levels, and cleaning out any excess wax that is being built where it doesn’t belong. Hive 1 was barely ready for a honey […]
Using Honey as a Topical Antibiotic: The Honey Bandage
Honey is one of the more versatile foods you can store. You know it tastes good on toast and in your tea, but did you know honey also has healing properties? We recently got to experiment with honey as a topical antibiotic when our adventurous little dog, Huck, decided to go get his foot caught […]
Honey and Onion Natural Cough Remedy
Here’s an easy homemade cough remedy that you probably already have the ingredients for. It’s a honey onion syrup–before you get grossed out, it doesn’t taste like onions when it’s done. Really. And you just use the honey syrup, you don’t actually eat the onion pieces (although you could if you love onions). We’ve been […]
There is a Difference Between Bee Robbers and Swarming
If your bee hive suddenly has extra bees around outside it, how do you know if they’re being attacked or swarming? The other day our beehive had a sudden rush of activity. The hive that had been operating at normal capacity that morning quite quickly was buzzing with super numbers of bees around it. Lots […]
New Bee Hive First Week Checkup
About a week after putting your new bees in their hive, you’ll want to check in on them to make sure everybody is happy. Well, they’re actually generally quite happy without visitors, but we need to know what’s going on in the hive, so get your bee suit on and let’s get out to the […]
4 Things I’ve Learned About Bee Suits
In all our short experience with bees, I’ve already learned a thing or two about bee suits. They are really a necessary part of having a hive, unless you want to be stung more or be paranoid about that tickling on your neck the whole time you’re checking your hive. None for me, thanks. I’ll […]
Putting New Bees in the Hive
April and May are the best months to start a new beehive, so here we are trying bees again. After last year’s bee swarming disaster, we did a little more studying and got some help from some local friends with bees. We cleaned out the old hive boxes by scraping the waxy stuff off with […]
