Solarbeez is a gardener, beekeeper, and sustainable living “bioneer” living on the Oregon coast. Emilyingreen is his daughter, a freelance editor and web designer. They created this website to share the experience of natural beekeeping, organic gardening, solar energy and ways to limit the use of fossil fuel.
When my daughter started this web site for me, little did either one of us know that less than a year later she would give birth to a beautiful baby girl. She has allowed me to write about the experience.
Because the bees are experiencing the rainy cold winter, as I am also, I will be writing about things other than bees when they are quietly surviving the weather.
Keeping bees has started my wife and I on a journey. We are veggie gardeners, but in our desire to provide habitat for the bees we have researched bee loving flowers and planted as many as we can. It has reignited my love of photography and everyday is filled with photo opportunities from bee activities, hummingbird pollinators, butterflies, and dragon flies. Recently as I was watching bees, a hummingbird chose a garlic seed ball to pollinate. I had a magic moment when the hummer turned towards me and hovered eye level for what seemed like minutes.
Now we are becoming aware of other insect life that we never saw before. Is it because of the flowers we planted or because we’re more observant? I wonder.
Adventures in Natural Beekeeping 
What a fascinating blog. Its so interesting and informative; and it’s really nice to read about people who care about these wonderful and industrious little creatures. And I LOVE Bee Beard. Good luck with your bee keeping. I’m now following. 🙂
Thanks for the follow. I absolutely love watching the bees, so much that when the sun is out and I have a camera in hand, it’s darn near impossible to get any work out of me. Right now I’m building a bumblebee video blog. It seems we’re fortunate to have loads of them. So far they are pollinating flowers that the honeybees have avoided, so there doesn’t seem to be competition…which was a concern for us when we decided to set up a couple of honeybee hives.
It’s cloudy now, so I guess I better get to my deadlines. 🙂
Hi Pat
Bee Beard is really cool. Keep up the good work. But there is one problem, I saw a few of my bees going in, and I want them back! Haha
Talk to you later.
Mick
You can have them back AFTER they pay the lodging tax…
Pat
I had nominated you for One Lovely Blog Award… http://ybertaud9.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/one-lovely-blog-award/
Glad to have you as a follower of my blog. I think we both look at nature, including the bees, in much the same way. (Love your “car-free days” tweet!)
You are the first one who has mentioned it. Thank you. We try to improve from year to year, but we are way behind last year, when we achieved our goal of 50% car-free days. This year I’m hoping end above 40%. It’s our small way of lowering our carbon footprint.
This is an interesting and inspiring blog. Keep up the good work – bees need friends!
Pat, I’m so sorry – I thought I was following your blog, but due to some glitch I just realized it didn’t take. I missed a few of your posts, but I’ll catch up! I enjoy your posts about bees and beekeeping.
Just thought I would let you know about an article I just read in another blog, Mountain Rose Herbs, (http://mountainroseblog.com/) , I found interesting. I have not tried this recipe, but we all know bees drink water and if tea with the right herbs would help, it would be a very good thing.
Great site!
I’ve enjoyed getting to know your blog this year and hope you might pleased to know that I’ve nominated you for the Versatile Blogger Award. You can skip over to my blog to check it out and see what to do. Cheers!
GREAT BLOG! Congradulations on your nomination.
I kept bees with Langstroth hives for probably 25 years, mostly in Idaho and the Willamette Valley. When I moved to Coos Bay, the bees I kept in the yard just didn’t like the climate (plus Varroa destructor drove us crazy). I haven’t had bees here for about 10 years, but I am missing them and have just built a Kenyan style top bar hive. I have some questions about bar width and their determination of either brood or honey storage. One source I found said 1-1/4″ for brood, 1-1/2″ for honey only. Then, another said only 1-3/8″ for all top bars. Any help would be appreciated.
My first hive was a Kenyan Horizontal Top Bar Hive. I think we used 1-1/2″ with 1/8″ spacers for the honey bars. I’ve since steered away from the KTBH for two reasons…well mainly one reason, I guess. I wanted to do LESS maintenance instead of more. I found out the hard way that you’ve got to constantly open the hive to keep that comb straight, like every two to three weeks. If you don’t keep bending the comb back straight, when you do inspect the bars one at a time, you’ll be pulling up two or three at a time. Then you face the decision of cutting into the comb (brood and larva) to get them separated or just leave them alone. I’ve moved to Warre’s which don’t need inspecting that often. They can cross comb as much as they want because you treat each box as a comb, plus you have the verticle-ness to maintain heat in the winter. With the KTBH, the bees will build outboard of the center hole entrance. If they put honey away on both ends, you’ll have to push the bars towards the center come winter so they don’t have to cross the gap. That said there are beekeepers that love the KTBH even in colder climates, so what do I know? 🙂
I’m really glad I found your blog! My husband and I found a small group of bees trying to live in a pair of gloves we had sitting on a ledge just inside our unfinished garage door. When my husband would get home from work, we would sit and watch them buzzing around and moving in and out of their ‘glive’ every day. We want to provide a proper hive for them to live in, and we want to do it naturally like you do.
Ghub has found plans for a Warre Hive, but I wonder what your suggestion might be about what kind of hive to build. We were going to simply place the glive inside the new hive, but I’m not so sure that’s the way to do it.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
PS I have lots of work to do, but I can’t seem to stop clicking and reading your posts!
Sorry this got hung up in the ‘awaiting approval’ section.
A “glive hive?” Now that is truly unique. 😀
I like the Warre hives at beethinking.com. Matt Reed builds a great kit with observation windows so you can look at the bees without pulling their hive apart. I guess you could put some top bars in the box, and maybe shake the bees into the box, or just put the bee-ladened glove inside and let them sort it out. By all means, get some in progress photos. Let us know how it works.
Cool to hear of Echium wildpretii thriving in Oregon. I’m trying to work out if they’ll tolerate (just a little!) shade in coastal northern California.
hi i am interested in starting up bee keeping, i live in seal rock and i have a couple of questions but i cant make it to the wensday meetings can you email me so i can ask you directly?
thanks a million
Hi my name is Bryce. I am a new beekeeper and am moving to Florence, Oregon. I am bringing my colony of Bees that I caught as a swarm in June with me from Coeur d Alene, ID. I seen that you are somewhere close so was wondering if you might be interested in mentoring or just counsel me on the down low of Beekeeping on the Oregon Coast. My biggest concern is Bears. I thought of a solar electrical fence but dont know if there is enough sun in winter to run it. I’m still not sure where I’m going to put them yet as the place that I’ll be staying is in a residential area.
Hi Bryce, Thanks for the reply…I just saw it because I haven’t been keeping up and in the process of re-upping my WordPress account, found it. I was just up in Florence yesterday, a beautiful sunny day but very windy. For best advice, I’d recommend joining a local bee club. The biggest problem I’ve found with beekeeping on the coast is the wind and the rain. Place your hive out of the wind/rain and into the sunshine if that’s even possible.