Eight Acres

 I'm always looking for ways to use the natural materials that we produce on our property, and one of those is beeswax. I've been using beeswax to make beeswax wraps, various balms and salves, beeswax wraps and leather dressing. And I've been selling beeswax to other people to make their own DIY products, including candles. Beeswax candles One thing I hadn't tried yet it was beeswax candles myself, so I did some research on the options for making beeswax candles. You can either pour the beeswax into a jar with a wick or you can use a mould (usually silicone, but also sometimes metal or plastic) to make a freestanding candle. I decided to try making candles using silicone moulds, so I ordered a couple of moulds online and some wick cotton to make the candles. I watched a lot of YouTube videos to learn how to make the candles. Prepare the silicon moulds for candle-making The first thing you have to do when you get a new silicon candle mould is to cut the mould so t...

 In Australia, bee boxes are usually made from hoop pine, which is an inexpensive soft wood. The only problem is that it is prone to wood rot in hot humid conditions. The result is that boxes that are not treated with fungicide may only last a few years before they fall apart. Most commercial beekeepers dip their hives in fungicide - either copper napthalate or copper-chrome-arsenate (CCA) to prevent wood rot. Another common technique is dipping the hives in hot paraffin wax to seal the wood. As our main objective in beekeeping (and growing our own food generally) is to avoid exposure to toxic chemicals, the last thing I want to do is put copper napthalate or CCA in bee hives when there is a good chance that these chemicals will end up in the honey and beeswax that I want to harvest. Additionally, these are both pesticides, and can't be good for the health of the bees either. Paraffin wax is better, but still a product derived from petroleum and hardly natural.  When we made...

 Our latest batch of honey has gone completely solid!  I opened the tap on the bucket and nothing came out.  Honey has a habit of doing this sometimes, depending on outside temperature, nectar source and the amount of pollen in the honey.  Every batch of our honey is different, it just depends where the bees have been getting their nectar.  And our honey is completely raw and just filtered through a sieve, it contains pollen and beeswax particles, so it is very unpredictable. Fortunately, candied or crystalised honey is not "bad" , its just solid!  And even that is temporary, as soon as you heat it up, the crystals dissolve again and the honey can be poured.  Some of my customers LOVE our candied honey and will ask for it specifically, others prefer to wait until we have "runny honey" again.   What causes honey to go candied? Honey is just a mixture of sugars (glucose and fructose) in water, with some minerals, enzymes, vitamins and amino aci...

 I get a lot of questions about bees.  Its funny when you start talking about bees with someone who hasn't really thought about it before.  You don't realise how much you've learnt from until you start trying to explain to someone how to catch a swarm or why we don't know exactly what type of trees our current batch of honey has come from.    Before we got bees, I really hadn't thought much about bees at all, and now I think about them all the time, there are just so many bee things to think about!  Here's a few bee facts that might interest you too. There's more to bees that just honey bees! In Australia we have a number of native bees ( and New Zealand has some too , and so does the USA ).  There are ten Australia species of social bees that build hives and make a small amount of honey (known as "sugar bag"), and they don't sting.  They are known as native stingless bees .  Lots of people keep them in little boxes in their yards, th...

The more I learn about the bees, the more I'm fascinated by them and amazed at the things that researchers have figured out!  To be successful beekeepers we need to try to learn as much as we can about the bees in our care.  Some of the books on beekeeping use a kind of rote learning approach and tell you exactly what to do with your bees, but they can't possibly cover every situation, so you need to also learn to think for yourself using bee-knowledge to make the best management decisions for your bee hives. The book The Buzz about Bees: Biology of a Superorganism  (affiliate link) was recommended by the awesome Rusty on Honey Bee Suite  so when I decided that I needed to know more about bee biology, I purchased a copy ( using Amazon credit from you guys clicking on my affiliate links, thank you!! ).  This is a good-sized book, packed with information and wonderful close-up photos of bees (they look all fuzzy and cuddly at that size!). I learnt s...

We've had bees for just over two years and it feels like we have learnt so much about bees, but at the same time we are realising that there so much more to know about these amazing creatures.  I was asked a question on one of my Instagram posts: Where would we start when we decide to have our own bees? So much info out there. We are on 2 acres on the Sunny Coast and have a great bushy spot to keep the hives, just unsure what system etc we start researching? We love our Bee Pollen, is this another process entirely? Thanks :-) I was not going to try to tap our a reply to that on my smart phone!  As you can see from my post, that is a big question, and perfect for a blog post.  Here's where I think you should start with bees, in no particular order you should do as many of these things as you can BEFORE you get your own bees. Join a beekeeping club - we joined our local Barambah Bees. Find a beekeeper (hobby or commercial) who will let you look inside a hive or ...

While honey is not the only product from a beehive, its the one that most beekeepers are interested in and it usually takes a year or so to let the bees build up numbers and store enough honey before there is enough to harvest.  There are a few different ways to extract honey from frames.  We have a manual turn 2-frame certifugal extractor.  A lot of people with only a few hives will just crush and strain the comb.  This post is about how we've been extracting honey so far (four times now), and there are links at the end to other bloggers who use different methods so you can compare. Choose your frames Effectively the honey is emergency food stores for the bees, so you have to be very careful not to take too much from the hive.  You need to be aware of what is flowering and going to flower next and the climate.  Particularly in areas with cold winters, where the bees cannot forage for some time.  We are lucky to have something flowering most o...

Since we got our own bee hives I've been able to enjoy the many benefits of bees.  Honey, improved pollination and lots of beeswax (and the occasional bee sting).  I was excited to receive a review copy of  The Beeswax Workshop: How to Make Your Own Natural Candles, Cosmetics, Cleaners, Soaps, Healing Balms and More , by of Chris Dalziel (Affiliate link).  This book came at a good time, we have harvested honey several times and have rather a lot of beeswax to use up (see my post about how to refine beeswax ).  As you know, I already use beeswax in salves , lip balm and honey and oatmeal soap .  The Beeswax Workshop takes that even further, instructions for making everything from candles, to foodwraps, lotions and wooden cutting board polish...  I've made a list of all the projects that I want to try, but it was the cutting board polish that stood out. We have a collection of wood cutting boards, having retired a set of nasty plasti...

We got our first little nuc of bees back in July 2015.  Since then we have been slowly building up numbers, we bought another nuc and three full hives that were already on our property, and we've made several more nucs and hives from splitting those first hives and catching swarms.  Over the last 18 months we've become hyper-observant of all the flowering plants on our property because bees increase their numbers when they have access to plenty of nectar to make into honey.  Suddenly Pete is interested in all the flowers that I've been pointing out for years!  We are also observing our bees and their response to different flowers. Some of our hives Since we got the first nuc we have seen hives fill with honey and bees to the point where they are too full and the hive will swarm (a group of bees will fly away with a new queen to start another colony), at other times we have seen them eat all their honey stores, lose numbers and get over-run with the dreaded sma...

If you're thinking about getting bees, you might be looking at all the equipment in the beekeeping shop (or website) and wondering what you actually NEED and what is just nice to have.  We were lucky to buy a lot of gear pretty cheaply from an older commercial beekeeper who wanted to get rid of all his beekeeping gear, and we have gradually figured out what its all for and what we need to keep.  Here's what I think you need first up and what you might need in the future. Hives and bees You are going to need at least one hive box and if your hive is productive you will need to give them more space in the form of a "super" pretty quickly.  In Australia you typically buy a nucleus hive or "nuc", and depending where you buy it, you may need to provide the nuc box as well ( more info on buying bees ).  You will need enough frames to fill your boxes (see building frames and wiring frames here).  This is assuming that you've decided to use Langstr...

Beeswax is a wonderful natural product.  I love the smell of it and I use it to make balms and salves, as well as melting it in a wax melter with essential oils instead of using candles.  In the past I have bought it from beekeepers in big blocks, but now we have our own bees I've had to learn how to refine it myself.  Here's how to convert raw honeycomb directly from the hive into a clean and useful beeswax product. Whenever we check on our hives we take a small bucket with a lid so that we can collect any comb that we have to remove from the hive.  Bees will tend to build what we call burr comb, which is bits of comb in odd places, including the lid of the hive, which can get in the way, so we scrape it off and put it in our little bucket.  The other source of comb is the "uncappings" when we extract honey we have to cut the top off the comb containing honey.  Finally you might remove very old and dirty frames of comb from a hive.   ...