Tim: New people are always a little scary. That used to be the old milk shed where we used to store the milk for people to pick it up. (mumble mumble…) -----
Tim: … Kadley: Awwwe, they’re so cute. T: They are cute, aren’t they? … Hey there. Here ya go, here ya go. K: How old are they? T: They’re a couple of weeks old. Well, ten days old. K: Wow. T: Yep, you wanna hold him? Here ya go. Anika: Kadley holding a lamb. -----
T: Hi there. When they don’t behave we put them in this box right here and she, uh, she can’t get out so she has to nurse them through the boards.
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A: ... to be quite honest. K: That’s why we wanna talk about it. It’s interesting.
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T: First of all…These boxes here are called supers. Those things right there, they’re called supers and those are the boxes where the frames go that the bees will, um, the queen bee will lay her eggs and all the worker bees will make the honey. This is a bad, this is a bad one, that’s why it’s out here, but normally they would be, they would be, this whole thing would be covered with these little cells… K: Uh huh. T: …and if you see, those cells are all slanted, like this a little bit, so that when the bees deposit the nectar and things in them that, um, it will stay in there, and you see where I took that bee out of the comb, see that little thing there, that’s a bee. That was, that was the mother bee that laid an egg and we took this out before it could hatch, but that is a, it’s a bee obviously that never hatched and got out. Well that’s the way, she lays her egg in there and then there’s a process in which the bees go through to, and then they cap it out. But you see how much water is in that when you turn it upside-down. If you had it like this it wasn’t, it wouldn’t, it wasn’t that, the water wouldn’t run out. But anyway, this should be a solid comb and there’s lots of reasons for it. And this is a queen excluder, and the queen’s the big deal in the hive. And what you do when you stack these supers up is that you put, let’s say, two supers below this and that, that’s the area in which the queen can lay her eggs and do whatever else she wants to do, and then the ones above it are just for the worker bees to make their honey which you then can take off and turn into honey. So this is a bee excluder, I mean a queen excluder, and what it, what it, uh, it doesn’t allow the bee, the queen bee to go up through. She’s a little bit bigger than the other bees and they can go through this mesh and she can’t. This one’s kind of shot, as you can see. So what you’re trying to do if you’re trying to get honey, you try to get as many of those boxes filled with those frames as you can, and, uh, without, without any eggs and other stuff. Let’s see what else we’ve got in here… And this is one of those things that hasn’t been drawn out. The bees make those little combs in them. They’ll make, they’ll build those things up, but this is what they look like when they first start off, if they don’t have, if they haven’t been into a hive and the bees have been able to build up the comb. OK. Make sense?
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T: … the bears love to get into the, into the hives and they like to eat the food they draw, and all the little baby eggs, as well as the honey, but they can get into a mess, but most of the time if you have hives that are off someplace you have to put an electric fence around it to keep the bears away. K: Yeah, wasn’t it, Jim who told us that they had a bear come up and get into the honey and I think they actually shot it. A: And it fell on top of the hive. K: Yeah, it fell on top and it was completely covered with bees because the police came up to try to, like, deal with it and then they saw all the bees around and they’re like “No Way!” and they left *
La …yeah. T: …great big mesh. K: Yeah. T: But, uh, yeah, the bears are one of the nuisances, and the other thing that’s been a bad thing for beekeepers has been there’s been a mite. It’s a little thing that gets in and kills the bees, and that didn’t used to be around. Just in the last few years it’s killed an awful lot of bees. K: Yeah… T: So, what you try to do is put the hives in a position where they’ll get plenty of sun, if it ever shines and, uh, so they’ll be out of the wind and things. It’s too cold for them to fly today, so you don’t really need to be worried about it. Whoops, there’s a few there. See ‘em? Now that’s an old piece of comb that I had that was no good, so I put it out here - don’t stand between the bees and the hive, that’ll irritate ‘em – and what they’re doing now is that they’re picking up the honey that’s in that and they’re taking it back into those hives. Now you can see that excluder. You see I’ve got two on top and then the excluder there. Hopefully the queen is down below. A: Is there any particular season that’s best… T: For what? A: … for honey production? T: Well, it’s gotta have flowers, you know, if it’s in the spring when there are a lot of flowers, and in the fall you get goldenrod. As long as there’s something for them to go after. This is spoiling them to have this. They’ll come over and clean these things up. But normally they would, you know when the apple tree blossoms are out or when any other flower are out, they’re right there, clover, any of those things. A: Are these the only two hives you have? T: Well, I’ve got a couple others that I look after that are in different places. K+A: Uh huh. T: But, you can see them flying in. K: Yeah. T: They’re picking up something from someplace else. But you can have thirty- or forty-thousand bees in a hive. K: Wow. T: That’s a lot of bees. So, then when you finally take the honey off, you take those big supers off and get the bees out of there, out of the supers where the frames are, and then you put it on an extractor. An extractor is something that spins. Remember how I showed you that those things are slanted. When you spin it, it will throw the honey out. Then it goes through an extractor and then you go through and you filter it….
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T: It’s not a lot of work. The only bad part about it recently is been that they’ve got those diseases, those two types of mites that have come in. It’s really devastating to beekeepers. K: Do you sell your honey? T: No. Usually I just give it away. I’ve got a lot of people, well not a lot, but, a good number of people are used to using it and having it and I give it away. I’ll give you some to take home to your dad, or your mom, or whoever. We’ll go down here and I’ll show you one more thing. Do you have any other questions on it, or is that it? A: Um, they may arise… K: When did you start? T: Oh, probably 15 years ago or so. Well, actually my son was into it, and, unfortunately, well he was the one who was most into it, and he got badly stung and now he’s kind of allergic to the bees, so. K: Wow. T: So he had them and I just sort of took over. It wasn’t a good deal for him. K: So you pretty much learned from being around him? T: Well, no. There were two men. There was a fellow named Lloyd Hewitt, and he was a big time beekeeper over in Petersburg, New York, and he was the one who got me started on it and he’s a great source of information. He died a few years ago. But he and friend of his, they had hundreds of hives…
----- T: See, with the honey, you don’t really get very much… Try to find a smaller jar… K: Once you collect the honey, what’s the process that you have to go through to get it…? T: Well, you’ve got to put it in that extractor – here you go, you can split it.
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T: Remember those frames that I showed you? They go in this. You put them in that extractor, and then you spin it, turn it… it’s probably all locked up, but you turn it like this, and you see it spins. I’ll get you to look inside here. See, the frames go and here, and when you spin it, it will throw the honey out. The honey collects at the bottom of that, and you lift the lever up and it pours out. That’s it. That’s how it works. K: Wow. And then you just put it into the… T: Now sometimes you gotta, what’ll happen often is that it will crystallize, it’ll turn into sugar unless you do something to it that will stop it from turning into sugar. And it’ll look more like – and you can just heat it up and it’ll be fine – but it’ll turn into that. K: Yeah, I’ve seen it like that before. T: If you just heat that up all the crystals will dissolve and it’ll turn out just like that. The reason that hasn’t crystallized, you more or less pasteurize it, you heat it, and, I’m not exactly sure what it does, but it kills the enzyme in there that will let it crystallize so then it doesn’t do it.
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T: You only have to go in there three or four times in the summer, but it’s not like looking after other animals .
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K: So you just go out and check on it and… T: Yeah, you don’t want to do it too much because they don’t like you fussing around but you gotta go to be sure. What happens is that the queen lays her eggs, and if they get too many bees in the hive then they’ll what’ they call swarm, which means that they’ll go off and try to form a new colony. That’s the way they reproduce themselves. So they’ll go off, and you really don’t want to lose all your bees so you gotta do something to keep them in there, split them or do something. It just depends how much time you want to spend on them. But the real beekeepers, they go in there probably every three to four weeks to take a look at them, but I go in about every month or so just to make sure everything is alright and nothing’s happening. But it’s discouraging when you go in there and find them all dead. K: Then what do you do? T: Well, then you just have to start all over again. You can get one of your hives that’s strong and take some of the frames and put them in another frame. Hopefully they’ll raise a new queen and start all over again. Or you can buy some packaged bees and put them in the frames. They sell ‘em. K: Wow. A: Wow, that’s weird. K: Where do you…? T: Uh, Better Bee. Well, that’s where I get them. Better Bee, over in Greenwich, New York. It’s a good sized place, and they’ll sell you packaged bees, 5 or 10 pounds, well 3 or 5 pounds of packaged bees. K: That’s weird. T: Yeah . Or you can buy a queen and put other bees in with the queen. K: So they’re live? T: Oh yeah, yeah, they come in a package. They truck ‘em up in a truck and they come in boxes like this and they’ll have, it’ll be a lot of bees. They’ll usually do it by the pound, but 5 pounds of bees, I’m not sure how many are there, but it’s a lot of them. Or you can buy a queen if some of these hives are too strong – one of those hives up there is too strong and what I should do is take off some frames and put them in another box and put a queen bee in there and put them off somewhere, which is what I should be doing, but that’ll have to wait ‘til a warmer day. They don’t like the cold weather. A: Yeah. K: I bet. I don’t, I know that. T: Look at the geese down there, they just came in. K: Wow. Is that a natural pond or did you put that in? T: Well, there was a natural water there and we just enlarged it. Alright, what else? A: Anything, I guess. K: Have you lived here forever? T: No. Forever’s a long time. No. Probably 25, 30 years. Which I guess is a long time. K: Where did you live before you moved here? T: We were in New York and before that in West Virginia. So West Virginia, New York, and then here. K: So you just, when you moved here is that when you first started farming? T: Uh, yeah, uh, well, yes, really. I mean, we’ve always lived in the country so we’ve always had dogs and stuff like that but this is the first time we’ve had more or less of a farm, if it’s even a farm. Yeah, I guess, pretty much you could call it a farm. So, it’s worked out. Takes a good deal of time and frustrations about it, like when animals get sick and die, but it’s well worth it if you like working with animals. That’s one of the old horses that is too old, really, to ride a lot now so he’s just here, having a good life. K: How many cows do you have? T: Just five. We’ll breed them and get up to eight or nine, something like that, and we’ll sell some off. We like to keep it just about five, and sheep we like to keep, oh, five or six. The little ones you saw, we’ll sell them off or do something to them. K: Where do you usually sell them? T: They take them to, the cows and things usually go to auction, you know we’ll take them to, there’s auctions and things that they have around here. And the sheep we’ll sell to, sometimes we’ll sell to individuals, sometimes they’ll go to auction, too. And then we’ll butcher some for ourselves, too. K: And do you do that yourself, or? T: NO! That doesn’t interest me at all. After you’ve seen ‘em for so long, that’s the last you want to do is get involved in that whole process. Uh, is right. So when that happens I usually leave. That’s not fun. K: My dad grew up on a farm and he said that his dad, the chickens and stuff, they used to do that and that was enough, just chickens. T: Yeah! K: He didn’t even like… T: That’s Daisy. Hi. Down, Daisy. You want to go for a walk, I suppose, or go off and do something. So… If that’s it. A: Yeah, I guess so. T: Okay.
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