Busy, busy butterflies!

This year has been a booming year for the monarchs in my yard.  I've been releasing them by the dozens.  Here's a pic of one of the day's hatching:

I've added a couple more milkweed beds and the monarchs have been laying eggs like crazy.  This little white dot is a monarch egg.

I've tried taking the leaves with eggs and putting them in my habitat but they don't seem to hatch once the leaf is taken off the plant.  So I go out and look for the just hatched caterpillars and put them in the habitat. These are ones I found just this morning:

If I don't get to them early enough the wasps destroy them.  This is a caterpillar that was attacked by a wasp.

There are other bugs that love the milkweed too.  Aphids are a real problem as the sugar ants actually deposit them on the plant, care for them, and eat the sugary residue from the aphids.  Aphids are also called 'ant cows' and you can see why.  These ants are 'milking' the aphids they deposited onto the milkweed.

But along with the aphids are other predators of the aphids to even things out.  I leave the aphids on the plants because it brings ladybugs to my flower beds.  If there's enough food for them and the aphids are plentiful, they will lay eggs on the plants and the ladybugs and their larvae will eat them all up.  They are my organic pesticide! This shows a ladybug under the leaf and the larvae on top of the leaf eating the aphids.  The orange and black larvae look like bad guys but they have ferocious appetites and are always welcome in my garden!

Honey + Figs = Fig Preserves! Yumm....

We moved into our house about 12 years ago and one of the nice surprises was that we have a very old fig tree growing by the side of our house.  This tree must be at least 40 years old or more since they grow very slowly.

Over the years I've figured out when to harvest the figs from this tree so that I can beat the birds and squirrels to them.  This year we had a great harvest and the figs were amazing.  Since I just finished bottling my honey and there was no way we could eat so many figs before they spoiled, I decided to use the fresh honey to make fig preserves this year.  It's the first time I've made preserves so wasn't sure how they would turn out.  Well to make a long story short, they turned out awesome!

I only had enough figs to make three jars but its amazing!  I will definitely be doing this again next year.  Fig preserves on a cracker with goat cheese and some red wine......Fabulous!!

Yay! Honey!!!

Hello again, it's been awhile since I wrote in my blog.  I was lucky enough to get to spend some time in Berlin and Prague and also some time with my family in Florida but that another blog altogether.  I've just finished harvesting the honey from my bees.  My girls did such a good job this year.  They provided 7 frames of citrus blossom honey for me to harvest.  Here's a sample of the jars that I've filled so far.  Yummm!

Here's my girls at work:

I have to say that I really enjoy beekeeping.  Its really very low maintenance and I love watching the bees.  They are such fascinating little creatures.  I'll just sit on the side and watch them do their little dances.  

I checked the hive yesterday again and found that the super I harvested is already full of honey again and its only been a little over a month since I harvested the last set of frames.   I put another super on to give them more room to store honey and will do another harvest in about a month.

You might be wondering what some of these terms are like 'super' and 'frames'.  Here's a picture of my hive:

The two bottom boxes that are painted white and yellow are the brood boxes.  That's where the queen and workers raise more bees.  The smaller blue box and spotted box on top are the supers.  That's where they store the honey and where I harvest it.  I put frames in the boxes for them to use as a foundation.  Fresh frames look like this.:

With this frame the bees have to work to build out the comb.  Whenever possible I try to furnish my girls with frames of comb that they have already built so that they can use their time in filling the comb with honey instead of spending time building out the comb from a fresh frame.  I take the frames that I have harvested honey from and put them back in the hive.  I have found that I can only put their own comb into a hive as they do not like comb from other hives. 

Here's a picture of a frame that has built out comb from a previous hive I had

Here's a close up of the comb.  You can see how much work goes into building the comb before the bees can even start filling it with honey.  This is why I try to give them their old comb back once I have harvested the honey from it.  It saves them time and it gives me more honey!!