A Wedding, Honey, and A Fuzzy White Bee

David and I married in the backyard on August 12, 2007. Our ceremony was short (and sweet), and attended by a few close friends and family. About an hour later, the other hundred or so close friends showed up. Everyone received a bottle (or two) of honey.

A couple of weeks ago, David and I extracted the honey from last fall (falling in love put me behind a bit...). Because I'd left so much honey for the bees, I only had about 30 lbs of my own, a dark, fall honey. I supplemented with another local beekeeper's honey from this spring's basswood flow. We bottled them separately, found oval labels online, and designed the label with our picture and the words, "Life is the flower, love is the honey."

I know other people have done honey for a wedding. Usually, they give those little glass jars, 5.5 oz, pictured below. They're pretty, no doubt about it, but I wanted people to have a real bottle of real honey--a whole pound to enjoy for awhile to come. I also have to admit that I'm prejudiced in favor of the new no-mess caps. I think more people would eat more honey if it weren't so hard to get out of the jar without making a sticky production of it.

Because we had the party here, we wondered what to do about the bees. Should I close up the hives the night before? We worried about people being bothered. After considering it, though, I realized that the bees were unlikely to bother anyone's Diet Coke or Riesling or Killian's Red. That just left the worry about the party's children bothering the bees. But we had a couple of child-minders on hand, and asked them to keep kids away from the hives.

As it turned out, several guests were interested in where the honey came from, so I, proud beekeeper and bride, took little groups on a tour of my tiny apiary. I always love talking about bees anyway, and it gave me a chance to do some good PR for our melliferous sisters.

One tip for all of you out there: don't stand next to a colony in a long skirt. Bees can get under it, and you know what happens when they get tangled up in clothing!

Yes, the bride got stung. No one else did, and no one noticed that I did. After telling people how gentle and easy bees are to keep, there was no way I was going to dance and swat at myself. So I did what any good beek would do, and ignored it.

Yesterday I went back out and opened the hives. I figured it was time to pull honey, since there may not be many more warm days. I guess the girls had other ideas, though. I only had one super of capped honey in the south hive, along with a super of uncapped and partially filled frames.

The two supers on the north hives are full of brood. I guess that colony is upside down! I drove all of the bees into what ought to be the brood chambers using Bee-Quick, put on a queen excluder, and then put the supers with their capped brood back on. I'll check them again in a week to so and see how they're doing.

Both hives have good brood patterns, though. I saw young bees chewing their way out of cells.

I have to do some kind of mite check soon--either a plain drop or a powdered sugar drop, but I'm not seeing any evidence of heavy mite infestation. Everybody has good wings, and there are no phoretic mites in sight. I know--it's no proof of anything, but at least they aren't collapsing from mites or anything else. Considering that they started out in a single medium super in May, I'm very pleased with both colonies.

One question for anyone who stumbles across this: do you know why the occasional bee will have bright white fuzz? Every once in a while, I'll see one of these, and yesterday I managed to snap a picture. I assume it's a mutation of some sort, but I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere.