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We'll see if I have any in the spring! Hopefully I'm not just fattening them up for their demise! Rumor has it we're going to have a nasty winter again this year. So far things have been nice. It's been chilly but very dry here. I'm using the rain tanks almost daily for watering my cold frames and livestock. No frosts up on my ridge yet but the bottom lands have been hit several times.

The bee lady keeps stressing, "if they're gonna go, let'em go." Don't coddle them or medicate them. Keep them healthy. There's no sense in keeping them medicated so they can carry their problems to flowers and pass them to other people's hives who aren't medicating.

Hopefully you have good luck this time around, Guy. I keep wondering how many times I will replace my own before I give up. Luckily I'm one stubborn old goat.

Here's my honey harvest for this year. Nice and dark and full of flavor. I think this might be from a large buckwheat field by my house.


After letting the comb sit and drip for a week I dumped it out on a sheet pan and gave it back to the bees. They cleaned that up too in short order.

Your Honey harvest looks great. I am sure you will have more than enough to use and be able to give some away. There is a difference in the flavor of honey depending on the type of flower pollen used to make it. I do like the darker honeys for flavor. Because of your location I would guess that there is a lot of tree pollen in your honey. Locust makes a good dark honey as well as some other trees. All I can say is AT-A-BOY for doing a good job with your bees. I wish I had done a better job with mine, although I have to say, I do not think I caused all of the problems The bees had.

Wow, great harvest there Manny. I think you have to make mead now.

Oh jeez, one batch of mead would use half my honey! I drink waaaaaaaaay too much for that. I'm sticking to the over abundance of fruit.

Luck beats skill anyday, Guy. I doubt you did anything wrong... or that I did anything right.

My bees asked for a fall time snack, so I made a spacer to place below the top cover which will create an area to place these sugar cakes I made.

I mixed a 4# bag of sugar with 1/3 cup apple cider vinegar and pounded the mixture into some bits of a cardboard tube I cut up. After doing so, I placed them into the 170° over for 1.5 hours with the door open. I turned off the oven, closed the door and went to bed. The cakes came out as hard as rocks this morning.

Check it out:

That sounds like a great idea. I have not seen anyone do that before. Let us know how the bees like them . Most of the feeders I have seen serve liquid sugar which could be a problem in winter. Your idea sounds like a great way to feed bees during winter. Keep us posted, just because I think its a great idea does not mean the bees will agree, they have their own ways.

Thanks PA, but I cannot take credit for the recipe. I saw it over on beesource.com

The folks over there seem to like to make large sheets of this stuff which eventually needs broken up so I figure I'd make smaller cakes. They also like to add chemicals, vitamin C, bee heroin, electrolytes, etc., but I'm not into all of that stuff. I kept it simple.

Yes, I like the idea of KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid. That always seems to work best for me.