Cold Weather, Quiet Bees

Honey boxes full of foraging bees

What's new on the farm:

It's been a cold first week of August for us, which is not what you want when you're in the middle of honey harvest season.

Cold and dry, Andrew's least favorite combination. The bees aren't flying, and the crops are drying up.

Last week I described how the weather was too humid, making it difficult for the bees to dry the nectar into honey.

What we needed was hot, slightly drier weather so the bees could forage on nectar that would be easier to process.

Unfortunately, when it's cold out, the bees really don't want to fly around. So the nectar is left to dry out on the flower and no one to collect it. A day off is okay, but now we've had a full week of non-flying days.

On top of that, we don't have any rain in the forecast. This means there won't be much nectar left when it finally warms up enough for the bees to start flying again.

One telltale sign of this is when the bees start "robbing".

Robbing is when the bees go out to collect food from an easy source (i.e., not from plants).

When we finish harvesting honey boxes, we put the boxes outside the honey house. The next time we go to a yard to put more boxes on, we load them onto the truck to reuse those same boxes.

Those boxes always have a bit of honey left in them because we can't get every single drop out when we extract the honey.

When there is plenty of nectar in the fields, the bees will ignore the boxes. They prefer to collect the nectar from the flowers.

However, if there isn't much nectar out there, they will go for the next best thing...and start robbing honey from the extracted honey boxes to put back into their honey boxes.

This is not ideal because it means there isn't enough food out there at the time.

However, it's still early August, and there is still time for things to turn around for us. We need more flowers to bloom and release nectar while the sun is shining and warm.

The alfalfa at our home yard was just cut a few days ago, and if the weather cooperates we may get a second flowering later in the summer.

There are also lots of wildflowers around this year which always makes really delicious honey.

And the plus side right while bees aren't flying right now, the humidity is low enough to make it easier to dry the honey in the hive.

Sometimes we harvest all the way up to Labour Day weekend, so we hope the weather and bees start to work together over the next few weeks.

The good news is that the honey we are extracting is turning out to be a wonderful, light honey. It's fragrant and floral, and it's going to end up beautifully in the jars.

Beekeeping can be such a challenging way to make a living...but at least the product is sweet!

"Korean" Beef and Rice Bowls

I came across this recipe while looking for an easy weeknight dinner. It was a welcome change, as this summer I have been cooking way too many pasta dishes.

Asian dishes often use sugar as a seasoning in savory dishes to add a little more depth and to balance any salt or acidity. Of course, I always swap it out for honey instead, which has even more flavor and nuance.

This recipe starts as a great base of ground beef and rice. You can stir-fry some garden veggies and throw them on top, or my favorite is to add pickled red onions and cucumber too. Very easy, and the longest that takes to cook is the rice!

Check out the recipe from The Recipe Critic.