Trip to VT

Beautiful VT country side

Just an animal skin on the front porch

The places I have gone, and the people I have met while keeping bees has been the best part of this hobby. An awesome example of this was a trip that I took with my beekeeping partner Jack and our friend Ryan this past spring. 

A friend of Jack's family owns a farm in northern Vermont on which his son has started a wooden ware company, and now a rather large apiary. Their farm is about one square mile, and it is impressive. When you first pull in, it feels a bit like you are entering another world. A long ascending hill cutting through a dense forest. When you approach the farm, it is clear that this is a working farm. There were quite a few head of cattle fenced in, and what was rather striking was the large flat stretch of land with wind socks everywhere. Right in the middle of the farm there is an airport.

Lots of cattle

The owner of the farm is named Bob, he works as a big wig executive at a large financial institution in Manhattan. I guess he got tried of driving up to his retreat in VT from the city, so he bought himself a small plane and built an airport. Pretty cool if you ask me.

When we arrived we passed two large plane-hanger sized buildings, and we approached the house at the very top of the hill. Bob's son (affectionately called Guido) came cruising over in a pick up truck to give us the tour. Bob and Guido first showed us a hanger full of lumber. Since Bob purchased the farm they have been harvesting wood from all over their property and milling into usable pieces of lumber. The plan, as I understand it, is to eventually build a post and beam home with all the hard wood lumber they have in there. We are talking two feet by two feet beams that are probably 50 feet long. It was extraordinary.

Bob and Jack in the workshop

We then went to the next hanger where the wood shop is located. In this shop there must have been over $100,000 worth of wood working equipment. Along with the equipment there were parts of beehives everywhere. Pallets of unassembled boxes and frames. All of which are made with pine trees that were fell, and cut into lumber right there on the property. I felt a little bit like I was in heaven. I could have stayed there for days making boxes and experimenting with some ideas I have about feeders and landing boards.

Our tour continued with a quad ride around the property and a short hike to a scenic view. It was a beautiful cool spring afternoon. There is nothing like drinking a beer with a view like this.Yes, that is a bucket of beer with us.

Surveying the land

Oh yea! There was a donkey too

The whole trip felt kind of surreal. After our quad trip we grilled up some burgers made from meat butchered from their cows. A burger flipped with a small hatchet might have been the best tasting burger I have ever

"Guido" making the greatest burgers

had.

We left late in the afternoon with a trunk full of unassembled boxes and a promise for a return trip to help them out when they get bees. 

Later in the spring, Billy, the son of Bob who is running this operation purchased over a hundred nucleus hives from a beekeeper in Florida. He flew down there and drove a truck full of bees back to CT. Jack is going to return to the farm this weekend to help him do full inspections on all of the hives he installed. Which I think is around 80! When this family does something, they go big. I wish I could join them, however my wife is due any day now and leaving for any period of time would be a sketchy choice.

Uncle Dave SWINKIN! Also the collie patrol.

Another awesome part of the trip was a stop at Jack's uncle Dave's house in upstate New York. It was only about 30 minutes from the farm in VT, so we headed over there to spend the night. He was a great host, we ate dinner and sacked out until our drive home the next day. Dave is always an entertaining character, and you can count on him for having a great story to tell. We stayed up talking about bees and the renovations Dave wants to make on the house.

One thing to add about the stop at Dave's chateau was Ryan's ridiculous level of snoring. I posted a video because it was so extreme. If we had bees with us they would have swarmed to avoid his snoring.I don't know how his wife Lisa deals. I slept on the couch.

We had a fun productive trip and met some crazy survival guys up there in Vermont who I chose to keep out of the blog for fear of them finding out I posted their pictures or names on an official place like the internet. They were pretty serious, they had lots of camouflage clothing and chewing tobacco. Also the boxes we got were great for the nuc hives we bought from Gilman this spring. Things have really come together for the apiary.

Anyone looking at this blog and are interesting in purchasing any of this fine Vermont grown wooden ware, please message me and I can easily get you in contact with these guys.

Honey Harvest!

Some of the Honey Bear army

It has been a while since I have posted. I have so many things to share. I haven't been blogging because I have been so busy with work, and a pregnant wife. With all the stresses of the regular world I have continued to keep my apiary going the best that I can. I want to get some pictures out there about the harvest that I just finished bottling this evening.


A quick recap: over the winter I lost two of the three hives I had in the fall. It was a sad spring for me. One had too few bees and froze, the other didn't have enough food and starved. However the one hive that did survive was really strong. I split that hive by purchasing a mated queen from California and put her in charge of a few frames from that awesome survivor hive.

Sad frame of starved bees :(

I also purchased 3 more nucleus hives from Gilman. All of which are doing really well and are located at a farm that is close to my house. Which has been awesome and super fun. I will have to make a separate
post about all of the adventures I have had this spring already.Also, I had a crazy adventure at a farm in Vermont that I need to share with my bee blog.

A picture of a bee coming for a landing on one of the Gilman Nucs

The awesome thing at hand however is the harvest from that  survivor hive. I got a little over 5 gallons of honey. We rented an extractor and the accompanying equipment from our beekeeping club which was totally awesome. Actually, the club received a grant from the federal government to support local beekeeping to purchase this equipment and rent it out at a discounted rate. So all the equipment was only 25 BUCKS! What a deal.

The extractor

Cutting off the wax cappings with a hot knife

Anyway, we followed the procedure by cutting off the wax cappings and putting the frames in the extractor. We bought a few honey buckets to store the liquid gold, and we went to town. What we ended up with was a really light in color, rather dense honey, that tastes FANTASTIC. I know other beekeepers say this, but my honey is the best tasting honey in the world. I hope you enjoy some of the pictures and I promise more posts to come.

Liquid Gold

Maybe my next post will be an update on the baby that will be here any day now.