Workshop with Randy Oliver

We hosted Randy Oliver (noted bee expert and author) this past weekend.  It was a very informative class for both newbies and the old timers. Everyone attending had a great  time.  Yes, Randy does not suit up when working with bees. 
We are looking forward to having him back next year.

Haagen Dazs Hibey Haven

The bee research department is having a party to celebrate the first

birthday of a bee garden. Here's the first paragraph of the website
announcement:
Garden tours, hands-on demonstrations, educational speakers and children’s
activities will mark the grand opening celebration of the Häagen-Dazs Honey
Bee Haven, set from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 11 at the Harry H.
Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, Bee Biology Road, University of
California, Davis.
More details here.
http://beebiology.ucdavis.edu/HAVEN/havenopening.html

Randy Oliver - Workshop

The emails have been sent to all those who have signed up and paid for the upcoming workshop with Randy Oliver on Saturday August 21, 2010.  If you have not received it yet, let Lisa Itatani know ASAP.

There are still a few more spots left if you would like to attend.

The bees that went to Sunset magazine

Photos of the bees that went to Sunset magazine's hives.

Sunset Magazine 2010

(from the Sunset magazine blog 7/28/2010)

Wa-a-ay back in June we introduced the new queen Flora. We were so proud and happy.

And then, a month later, our hopes were dashed. We opened Flora, expecting a booming hive and found nothing. No sign at all that we had a mated queen. Sure, there were bees working away, but where were all the eggs, larvae, and capped brood? All we could find were cells half full of honey.
Our mentors all suggested finding a queen-right swarm (a swarm of bees with their queen) and combining them with our now queenless hive.
About two weeks after our discovery, Doug Smith, beekeeper with the Santa Clara Valley Beekeepers Guild, let us know he was was cutting out a hive that had been living in a garage wall for the last six months. Did we want it?
Indeed we did! Doug graciously put those garage bees into one of our empty bee boxes, along with their garage queen and some comb filled with larvae and brood. Then in the evening, when all of the foragers had finally come home for the night, one of our favorite blog readers, Tina K. (Rescuer of Nugget) wrapped the whole package up nice and neat so we could take it back to Sunset that night.
The next day we opened up Flora so that we could combine new hive and old hive, and what did we find?
The hive was bursting with brood! Queen Flora had laid eggs out to the edges of the frames, even taking over territory usually reserved for a ring of honey (that's why Kimberley is smiling in the photo at the top of this post). Now the hive is full of bees, and every afternoon at 2, a cloud of young bees hovers at the entrance as they take their orientation flights.

Unfortunately, our old friends, the varroa mites, seem to be multiplying (see the little red bumps on the backs of the bees in the red circles?).
But as you can see, except for the mites, the Lang hives are doing well, with Fauna stacked taller than we stand. She's filling those three supers with honey.
And we have this completely unrelated box full of swarm bees that we are adopting (that's the new hive, on top of the blue box that houses Flora. We have to make an ant-proof stand for her).
We'll need a name for the new hive. Readers, any suggestions? sunset blog link