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Incredibile scatto del vincitore del National Geographic Award 🏆📸

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it's me and my caffeinated drink against the world

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Weekend Bee Work? 1.18.25

My husband regularly reminds me that I work too much and give too much of myself to the business without the same return, specifically from the owner, and he's not wrong. But I love what I do, I care genuinely for the bees and my customers and the wellbeing of the farm, and I have a strong moral drive to do the right thing every time, so I'm often dragged into work at inconvenient times. Sorry husbando!

I got a call from an employee who was frantically contacted by one of our hive management customers yesterday. We do colony management on private property for people seeking tax relief via agriculture valuation on their property, a super common thing out here in rural communities. There are a lot of options for ag val programs: cattle, prairie, timber, bees, etc. We have learned the basics for getting someone started in the process and the laws for maintaining the valuation, so that the customer can benefit from the tax relief without learning a whole new skill or taking on another responsibility but still improving the land.

ANYWAY, this customer had purchased a parcel of property from one of our larger ag val customers, which had about 20 colonies, and inherited the colonies and tax breaks. This parcel was close to a country highway, and the bees were behind a structure but close to and visible from the road, which we don't recommend for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is the temptation of vandalism and theft, which surprises most people to learn is common with bees. At some point shortly before they purchased the parcel, the structure had caught fire and burned down, exposing the colonies more and making the parcel seem abandoned I assume. So a few weeks after they took ownership, they came out to clear the land and found their colonies ransacked, and the bees were gone.

We promised to get them right again so that they weren't in trouble with the tax office, but the beekeeper who did the work didn't bother to communicate with the property owners at all, but simply came out, changed things, and left. So the customer was confused.

Granted this all happened last summer, so I don't know what took them so long to notice something seemed wrong, but whatever.

We previously had those 20 colonies to meet the needs of the parcel as it was attached to a larger piece of land. To qualify for an ag val with bees in Texas, you can only have between 5 and 20 acres on the parcel, and each amount of acreage requires a specific amount of colonies to qualify. Each county has its own rules and amounts per acre, too. Once the new owners purchased this now smaller, detached parcel, the amount of colonies they needed reduced, but they weren't informed of that at any point in the process, which annoys me to no end. Because then you get situations like this where the customer is freaking out about not having enough bees, and I am running an hour outside of town to potentially move bees in dangerously cold weather in order to make it right on my day off.

Thankfully I gathered all of the up to date, accurate info on the land parcel, could take visual cues and clues from what all the beekeeper left behind to track their work and sus out their reasoning (this particular beekeeper annoys the life out of me, and doesn't keep records of their work!!), talked with the landowners for a bit and got them up to speed, and inspected the colonies from the outside. Since it was a nice sunny day, the bees were active around the entrances, but not flying very much in the cold wind, so I could see that they were alive and well. The owner was understandably concerned, since if you didn't know much about beekeeping you could easily assume there were no bees there and all her colonies were dead or absconded and the tax office was about to throw the book at her. Unfortunately this lead her to unceremoniously (being uninformed, of course, not malicious) rip the lids off the two colonies pictured to try to illustrate to me that there were no bees, which I had to correct her for. You can't be exposing whole colonies to this kind of cold weather like that, it's dangerous for their survival. But now she knows and she knows those colonies are occupied, so hopefully that won't be happening anymore and she can rest easy.

Also, if you read all of that, thanks for listening and sorry for rambling lol. Please enjoy this silly banana cat photo my sweet employees made of me 😂

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i held hands with this spider earlier

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Work stuff, week of Jan 13, 2025

One stunning sunrise. An insane police chase that ended in a head on collision with the person being chased and the police and shut down the highway home for a day. The local feral cat came by for some kibble. The beekeepers' pepper plants are still thriving despite the cold. Hating having to disturb the bees in this weather to sell a service I wholly disagree with. :/

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It recently became department policy to purchase all our animal care supplies online and have them shipped, but my work location (public park) doesn't have a mailbox, so we've been getting things shipped directly to the post office. Today I went to pick up a shipment of several hundred superworms but the postal workers are insisting that it's not possible to have packages shipped directly to the post office. I gave them a tracking number which revealed they were delivered a couple days ago and now they're looking for them. Somewhere in the post office are 500 lost worms.

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My employees are so talented and cute!!

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Honey Harvest 2024

I've had this in my drafts since July 2024 lol, I don't know how I forgot about it.

This is me and one of the other beekeepers gathering honey supers for honey harvest from a small yard. I took a very brief video of myself using a shaker box set up to knock the bees out of the super before staking it in the truck for transport. The shaker box has a grate on the top with slots large enough for workers to fall through, but not the queen or drones, so that if we are using the shaker boxes to collect bees to make packages or splits, we don't accidentally take the colony's queen.

We load up the honey full supers in the trucks, and replace them with empty supers for the bees to fill up again.

You can see the bees flying around pretty calmly, even after being smacked on the shaker box, and you can see part of my coworker and that she's in shorts and a veil while I'm in a full suit. It's just personal preference. She always brings her suit with her when she goes to yards, in case she needs to suit up, but I just go ahead and wear mine if I'm doing some heavy duty work with more than 4 colonies. I remember on this day we harvested from two yards and it was a generally hot day, and though the first yard, featured in the video, was tame, by the time we got to the second yard late in the day, they were far less calm about it. She had to dodge into her truck and put her suit on, and caught quite a few stings up the shorts 😨

Honestly, I'm not looking forward to the stress and chaos of bee season in early spring, but I'm looking forward to working the bees again. 🐝

Btw, that box I'm tapping probably weighed around 60lbs, pure honey!

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Jo Whaley (American,b.1953)

Datura Wrightii, 2018

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Pls ignore the scrunkly hair lol.

I finally finished my second big piece! I had this men's western style Levi's shirt for bee work, when it's not so intense as to need a full suit. My favorite picture of me in this shirt in the past comes from a moment of derangement last spring while building up over a thousand Nucs with the beekeeping team in the back pasture for pick-ups lol:

No, wait, that's a different shirt? Whatever, same concept lol. A nice, slightly oversized long sleeved shirt to protect from occasional stings while working hundreds of colonies, right? Well the saddle on the shoulders inspired me to go full western style with it. I had a peel and stick pattern for the scorpion design on the back, but of course I got to choose the thread style and design. I had some variated thread that I wanted to try out, and it made a very interesting pattern on the strawberries and their leaves. I like it, but I think next time I will create light colored sun spots or variations by hand instead of relying on the random dye pattern.

For the front of the saddle I free-handed the strawberry designs on some blank peel and stick material, mirroring the design for the opposite side.

It took probably two weeks to get this all done by hand, a couple of hours at a time after work or whatever, but I am very happy with it. Every time I take on a new technical piece I learn so much about technique and design. I even wore it to work today to not so humbly brag to my coworkers lol. I would like to make cool custom pieces for friends and loved ones soon. I just want to get my skill to the point where I'm confident enough to offer such a thing.

I chose to make the Scorpion look like the tiny brown ones I see all the time here in SE Texas, instead of black, to give it more depth and locality, and I really like how it came out ❤️🦂

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wake again after rest

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Oh my god this person found a leopard slug with its eyestalks fused together??? One super long stalk but it still has two eyes on the end. That's the cutest thing in the entire world. And then it had a ton of babies but JUST ONE baby inherited the mutation!!

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Work Stuff 01.03.2025

I started my morning getting my tail light replaced lol. Last night on my way home, a state trooper was kind enough to just pull up and tell me the light was out (hint hint), so I figured I'd better address it asap.

Then I got to work just to get another epic side quest from my boss. I swear, half my job as manager at a bee farm is being the owner's personal assistant lol. He has an older family property that was essentially left to rot for a few decades. Recently he found interest in remodeling it, which I love, but that requires him and his son going through years of mementos and grime. He had also contracted someone to start some work on the old ceiling, but failed to prep the room before the guy started, and he was damaging the mementos. So I was asked to lend a hand in packing and moving the goods to a safer spot in the house.

The horse was back in our pasture again! But it seemed to wander off again on its own.

I got some spring season pricing done, looking into who has the best syrup and delivery options. We've had such a mild winter up to this point that the bees are still active, and HANGRY. We've been scrambling to feed yards this past week before the supposed deep freeze hits Monday night.

But I got most of my work done early, and left the store crew to hold down the fort for the afternoon 🥰

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Work stuff 01.02.2025

Got to the farm to discover that we had a horse in the back pasture?? We don't have horses lol. I sent the boss a photo and he knew to whom the horse belonged and got it wrangled.

Despite the cold weather, we are still offering our Apitherapy bees to some long time customers. I disagree with the whole concept of Apitherapy, as it needlessly kills bees and has no actual scientific proof or studies supporting it, but I have a job to do and this is often part of it. It's harder in the winter though, too, when just opening the colony can seriously injure it. You can see the winter cluster in the pictures above.

I have to snag 10-12 worker bees and gently put them into queen cages and ship those cages to customers to use on themselves for sting therapy. Many people believe it helps with inflammatory and chronic pain disorders. Did you know that it takes nearly an hour for a bee to die after stinging, during which time they are in constant pain from being disemboweled?

Spent the rest of the day catching up on emails, phone calls, and account balances from the holidays, and got the team working on taking down Christmas and setting up Spring decor and inventory. Planning ahead and prepping for Bee Season ™️. So not ready yet lol.

One of my beekeepers is in deep doodoo for a number of ongoing reasons I won't list here, but also because an entire, large, new yard that we set up for an important client was never fed after Thanksgiving and before the cold really set in, as she was told to do, and numerous colonies in that yard DIED from starvation. I had to set the boss up with 3 5gallon buckets of syrup feed so he could go feed the yard and clear the dead outs. I told him to tell me next time he needs help in yards during beekeeping off-season and I'll pick up the slack, but he just didn't know she wasn't doing her job until it was too late, so there was little we could do anyway.

We're expecting a deep freeze this coming week, for a couple of days, so we're winterizing the farm and yards this weekend.

My truck needs a wash!

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Dance as an act of rebellion. Dance as an act of joy.