August 05

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Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
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7	8	9	10	11	12	13
		Bottled Mead at Andy's	Bee Inspector Visit			Visited Bees.
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
					Took pictures at the farm.
21	22	23	24	25	26	27

28	29	30	31

Finished putting together more frames and foundation. I will add these to capture the goldenrod and aster flow that starts in August and September.

Last October, we went to my friend, Andy's house to make mead. Today, after 9 ^1/2 months, it was time to bottle the mead. I picked up 2 cases of champagne bottles at NFG Homebrew in Leominster. NFG is also a place to buy my honey. We added corn sugar and put the whole mess into 23 750ml Champagne bottles with caps and wires. Andy suggest that I wait at least two weeks to have the carbonation process to complete. If we did something wrong, well, it will be a still mead instead of sparkling mead.

The Massachusetts Apiary Inspector - Ken Warchol did a hive inspection of the hives at the farm. He called the day before and I gave him directions to the farm and exactly where to find the hives. Overall, we got a good report back. Ken found that the colonies were strong and had enough food for the winter. He didn't any evidence of diseases. He did observe some varroa mite, but nothing to high to cause for alarm now. Some of the top brood chambers had 5-6 frames of fully capped honey in them - this could cause the colony to become honey bound. When a colony is honey bound the do not store anymore excess honey for the beekeeper. It also cuts down on the amount of space for brood to develop. So being honey bound is a bad thing. I will fix this this weekend and see for myself.

I went to see the brood chambers on the hives, Ken was right there was a lot of honey in the top brood box. I moved some of the full frames of honey to the sides of the hive- this will give the bees a way to store brood in the center of the brood box and also allow them to get above the brood and store honey in the supers.

It was the last workday of my vacation and I had been out of town the whole week. The first 4 days of the week I was at Webelos Overnight camp with my son and acting as a den leader with Scott R. (also from Leominster). We had 10 boys in our den and overall they were well behaved. Yesterday, I was cleaning up from camp and then I went to the Patriot's preseason game - the lost. But onto today's action... I went to the farm and just took a bunch of pictures of things. The goldenrod is in full bloom and I wanted to get pictures of the bees working it. I had a few other pictures too - there was a brood of wild turkeys on the farm and I got some great pictures of some of the apples on the trees. Last year the farm planted buckwheat as green manure -to help condition the soil. Some of buckwheat came up again and is in bloom. The bees were working it too. There isn't much to get a full crop of buckwheat honey, but every gram of nectar helps. See the pictures here. Now I just need to leave them alone and pray for good weather.