Craig’s been hard at work getting the bees ready for winter. The three biggest things that need to be done before winter are treating for varroa, making sure the bees have enough honey to last until spring, and making sure the hive is prepared for lower temps, freezing rain, and snow. Moisture in a hive during the winter will kill them.

Back in 2019, I posted about our process for winterizing the hives. The biggest difference between then and now is that we’ve upped the varroa treatment and this year, for the first time, Craig decided to insulate the hives. After losing all our hives in 2020, we’ve been wondering what else we can do to help our bees overwinter. After much hand-wringing, soul-searching, bellyaching, and griping to anyone who would listen about the plight of bees over the winter, we stumbled on the Honey Bee Obscura Podcast with Kim and Jim. They convinced us to insulate. We’ll keep everyone posted, but prayers for our bees might also help!!

Still have to fill my squirrel house with nuts, but hopefully we’ve done enough for our bees!

Did anyone else see last night’s lunar eclipse?

It was amazing! Our whole family got up at 3:45 a.m. to watch. I wasn’t sure if it would be worth it, but it was. Even though it wasn’t a full lunar eclipse, the long period of time the moon was nearly fully eclipsed gave us time to look through our little telescope and take pictures. My younger daughter took these with her iPhone. Neat, huh? If you missed it, the next lunar eclipse will be in the spring.

Reverse image of 11.19.21 eclipse taken through a 60mm refractor telescope

Last Saturday for the Hereford Farm Market!

Tomorrow is the LAST DAY OF THE SEASON for selling at the Hereford Farm Market. Wow!! It has been a terrific season!!! When I started selling jam back in May, my only goal was to simply sit at the “Hats & Honey” table so that I could chat with people in my community again. I had no idea if I would be able to sell enough jam to justify being at the market every week as a vendor. I figured, if my jam didn’t sell, I’d just be a guest vendor when our honey was finally harvested. But that didn’t happen. The jam sold, I went nearly every week, and it’s all because of YOU!!!

If you’re one of the people who bought jam, honey, or other items from us this season — THANK YOU FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART!!!!! It was truly a pleasure coming to the market every week. It was fun finding new recipes and making new batches, but even better was being able to talk about bees, honey, jam, farm markets, Hereford, kids, dogs — you name it! — with anyone and everyone who stopped by our table.

Special Shout Out to Mandi!

Mandi, owner of Rosie Posie Design Co., is my table partner and the other half of “Hats & Honey.” She was a HUGE part of the success of this season. She and her husband, Rob, are super laid back, fun, and easy going. Selling was never stressful with them. Although Windtree Bee’s season is winding down, Rosie Posie’s is in high gear. Her hats and knit accessories are the perfect handmade gift for friends and family this winter. If you haven’t already, check out her website. She has all sorts of winter goodies still available: hats, beanies, cowls, mittens, and the most adorable miniature hats that double as ornaments or wine toppers. She offers knitting kits and her own designs for knitters too.

What am I bringing to the market?

Because it’s the last day, I went a little overboard this week and made double what I usually make. I really wanted to make some things with fresh cranberries, which can be hard to find sometimes, and also pie filling, which is more time consuming than basic jam or jelly, but worth it. Here’s what I’ll have:

Honey Maple Cranberry Sauce: Made with fresh cranberries, organic apple cider, honey and maple syrup, this isn’t your typical store-bought canned cranberry sauce.

Spiced Cranberries: Made with organic cranberries, orange juice, sugar, and a trio of autumn spices, this is another great choice if you want something different than tin can cranberry sauce.

Caramel Apple Coffee Jam: I made this at the very beginning of the season and reprised it because it’s so darn good. The perfect jam for coffee lovers!

Spiced Apple Pie Filling: This is available in one pint jars. Most traditional pie tins take two pints to fill. One jar is perfect for a personal pie pan or for filling apple tarts. This stuff makes pies easy! Just buy premade pie crust, roll it out, and add this. Or make your own crust, pour this in, and still have a 100% homemade pie.

CranApple Jelly: Made with Pomona’s Pectin, so there is a much lower sugar content than traditional jellies have. Plus, no high fructose corn sweetener. This jelly has only three ingredients — fruit juice, sugar, and pectin. Super simple but not super sweet.

“Black & Blue” Jelly: Black currant, blueberry, and apple jelly. Also made with Pomona’s Pectin, so a lower sugar alternative to store-bought jellies.

Special order over the winter!

If you want to buy jam, jelly, marmalade, preserves, or conserves this winter (or dog treats! 🙂 ) click HERE for my new special orders page.

After this weekend, I won’t be blogging as frequently as I did during the market season, but I will post from time to time. I have several winter projects I’ll be working on and I’m looking forward to sharing them.

We’ll be at the Hereford Farm Market, 17004 York Road, in Parkton, Maryland, from 9:00 a.m. until noon tomorrow. Look for us at the “Hats & Honey” table beside The Contented Rooster.

Craig harvested about the same amount of honey as last year (roughly 120 pounds). I was hopeful for a bit more because we had one more hive this year, but… bees, ya know? Totally unpredictable – at least that’s been our experience with backyard beekeeping. (We don’t claim to know how the big commercial beekeepers/honey producers operate and, in fact, aren’t advocating for that type of practice. We both continue to think that beekeeping is best for bees if done on a small scale.)

So, we jarred up this year’s harvest and started selling. It’s been fun!

We’re selling at these places this year:

OAK SPRING FARM STORE: Tuesdays from 2:00-6:00

HEREFORD FARMERS MARKET: Saturday, September 21st from 9:00-12:00 (possibly additional Saturdays)

HEREFORD FALL FEST: October 19th (10-5) and October 20th (10-6)

Craig and his friend, Chuck, are also offering another free “Intro to Beekeeping” class at:

PERRY HALL LIBRARY: September 28th from 2:00-3:00

BEE REPORT

We decided to keep our little nuc instead of over-wintering it at a friend’s house, so now we’re up to four hives. I think that will be our max. As stated above, we’re not looking to go big. We’ll see how many make it through winter. For now, they’re looking good!

Winterizing the Hives

Here’s a neat thing about bees – they are super tidy. They like to keep their hive clean and will also clean any honey-covered equipment you leave in the yard for them.

After harvesting, we put the supers and buckets outside for a few days so the bees can clean them. Here are some other common things beekeepers do to prepare for winter:

HIVE CHECK UP: Basically, beekeepers want their hives as healthy as possible before heading into winter. This means assessing the strength of the queen, estimating how many bees are in the hive, seeing how much honey they have left, and checking for problems.

FEEDING: We try to leave lots of honey in the hives for our bees, but some beekeepers (us included) occasionally feed sugar water to their bees after the harvest to give them an extra calorie boost heading into winter.

TREAT FOR VARROA: Varroa mites are like vampires to bees. They suck a bee’s insides out while also probably infecting it with a virus. Lovely, huh? Varroa are pests whose full scientific name is varroa destructor for a reason. A varroa infestation can easily wipe out an entire hive and spread to another hive very quickly. But you don’t want to treat for varroa before the harvest, which means it’s usually a fall task.

ENTRANCE REDUCER: Once summer is over, there are less bees, making less trips. To help the bees keep their hives warm in the winter, and to keep out intruders like mice, beekeepers sometimes install “entrance reducers.” You have to be careful about using them though, because if the bees are still too active, the entrance can get clogged with bees and the whole hive will die. (Yep, that happened to us one year. Always heartbreaking when you lose a hive, no matter the cause. Doubly bad when you feel like it was something you did.)

VIVALDI BOARDS: These are specially built frames that help with winter moisture, ventilation, and feeding problems. We’ve never used them before, but this year Craig made them for all our hives. (Every year, our goal is to have ALL OF OUR HIVES SURVIVE. Will this be the year?) Click here for a link on how to make these yourself.

Craig has been beekeeping since 2015. Jill started selling honey in 2018. Currently, they have four winterized hives and a flower garden that needs to be put to bed. Their latest experiment: Vivaldi boards. Stay tuned…

Tag: Winterizing

Buttoning Up the Bees for Winter + Last Market Day!