Every third Saturday of August, a vibrant celebration takes place in honor of some of nature’s most diligent workers – honeybees. National Honeybee Day, observed annually, is a day dedicated to raising awareness about the significance of honeybees and the crucial role they play in our ecosystem. As these incredible […]
Beekeeping and Honey Blog
33 posts
I finally got around to adapting the existing scripts to crunch the data from the house. Charting solar performance data is a great way to keep track of the output from your home’s solar array. By plotting relevant metrics such as total energy output, peak hour production, and more, you’ll […]
Looking for honey made right in your area? It’s easier than you think to locate the best local honey near you. With these tips, you’ll be able to find fresh, delicious honey made by beekeepers in your area, supporting their business and helping the environment. Identify honey producers in your […]
Have you heard the buzz about local honey and its potential health benefits? Proponents argue that local honey can be used as an all natural treatment to help alleviate allergy symptoms in some people. Read on to find out more about what the research says and how to incorporate local […]
Raw honey is a natural sweetener that offers many health benefits compared to processed sugars. It contains vitamins and minerals, enzymes, probiotics, and other components that can promote gut health, reduce inflammation, and help boost the immune system. Learn more about the potential health benefits and how to use it […]
Solar Roof Install: A Personal Goal This year I fulfilled a personal project of installing solar on my house. A few years back I installed solar on my garage. The house project started with replacing the roof. The roof had 3 layers of shingles one of which was the original […]
I wanted to try making a video of the bees using the slow-motion function on my phone and finally got around to it
Cold winter afternoons are perfect for hot tea and a cookie. Oatmeal cookies have been a long-standing favorite for quite a while. It always was a blissful day when the box of oatmeal cookies came in the mail from my mother when I was away at college
Cooking for a group in an NYC kitchen is challenging however it didn’t me stop me from going all out! While the main dishes are an important element and required careful planning to cover myriad modern dietary restrictions
Anyone can create a welcoming garden for pollinators. Turning your own yard or other property such as a schoolyard, work landscape, or roadside green space into a pollinator habitat is fun, easy and can make a difference for birds also. Planting a few flowers for your honey bees is like adding a few gallons of water to the ocean. Honeybees need on average about a square mile of good cover to forage on. However, adding a diverse mix of flowering plants to your garden will also attract butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, along with native bee species and the occasional wasps. These insects are essential to our survival and need to be welcomed into at the least a corner of our backyards. Besides providing a food source for pollinators flowers provide cover for other wildlife such as birds and also reduce neighborhood mowing area.
This is a guest post from my brother-in-law, Adam. He is a food connoisseur and Director of Training, Talent, and Community Partnership at Levy Restaurants: I wanted to make a refreshing and light summery mass cocktail for my housewarming BBQ in Brooklyn. I decided on making a spiked honey ginger […]
The Chevy Volt PHEV is the ultimate melding of the technologies and perhaps currently the most practical and immediate way to offset our unavoidable CO2 emissions
The holiday season is never complete without rum balls. This year we decided to modify the classic recipe and create a honey recipe version. The balls need to set a bit but an early sample seems successful!Here is the recipe we used.1 box finely crushed Vanilla wafers (11 oz box)2 […]
I was successful in porting the solar inverter data to MRTG! This is accomplished with a program called RRDTool developed by the author of the original MRTG. A script was needed to import the raw solar data into a database using a handy language called Python. RRDTool uses a database called […]
It was chilly overcast spring morning when we started. I wanted to get them installed as early in spring as possible to get a full season of sunlight. The next day the sky had cleared and the sun was shining bright on a crisp blue background. I threw the switch on the inverter and powered up the system and the capacitors started to hum.
Plants and insects have been evolving in unison for millions of years and have benefited from an elegant symbiotic relationship. This relationship has provided plants a willing host to convey pollen in trade for valuable high energy cocktail called nectar. Residual pollen is an added bonus protein source. A new dynamic is disrupting the alignment of this interaction. Climate change is affecting this coordinated inter species relationship by disrupting the flower blooming cycle. Plants have evolved a response to the spring warming cycle that starts the flowering process in most of the northern hemisphere.
Worked another extraction this weekend for a local building management company and every time I am on one I learn to be a bit more efficient and wanted to share my list. If there is the opportunity to make a small hole first when starting and extraction this is ideal. So the trick is to annoy the aggressive bees and get them out a small hole and grab them with the vacuum right away. This time around I broke through the drywall with a small hole and kept banging on the ceiling to annoy them. I then opened a hole about 6 inches square. This really helped as the aggressive bees rushed the opening and right into the vacuum. I did get stung on the finger once but was when lifting out some comb and I pinned the bee between my finger and some comb.
Even though the north east is under the barrage of a strong winter I am looking forward to a spring gardening and challenge of what the beekeeping season will bring. Last year many beekeepers were reminded that the weather is a relentless foe and we as beekeepers in the north […]
Average sized swarm in a row of Junipers
The call came in at 8:16 while I was getting ready for work. A gentleman by the name of John called me and he had a swarm on his front porch.