Seattle Urban Honey

Robbing is just one of the ways that bees try to collect honey

We share our experience with queen-less hives, combining hives, and honey bee foraging options in Seattle, WA.

Honey for sale. Please join us for conversation, coffee, and a chance to do some truly local Christmas shopping. I make the jewelry and my friend (and hive host) Clara makes the soap in her Northgate area home. The bees that make the honey are here in Seattle.

We tested different varroa mite treatments on our hives in Seattle and share the results of our experiments.

Her Majesty was not deposed. The throne is still in the hands (wings?) of the nasty grumpy queen. We hunted all down through the hive-all 6 boxes and 60 frames of angry buzzing bees trying to find her. Then we went back up the whole six boxes looking again. We did not find her. We put the hive back together but took enough honey and...

I am not happy today. This is the result of 3 bee stings to the face through my bee vale. I am puffed up like a chipmunk trying to stash seeds. I guess this goes with the beekeeping territory but I wish I did not respond so spectacularly. We have a grumpy hive. This is usually due to genetics so the cure is to re-queen....

Yes! We have honey! It has been so cold this spring and summer in Seattle that I did not think that we would ever get honey. The bees have been packing it in. We took our first honey August 1 and got another harvest this last week. The result is honey to sell at the Phinney Farmers’ Market on Friday evenings from 3pm to 7pm....

Honey bee working a leek that has gone to flower A full frame of honey that is almost ready. Note the whiter area along the top of the frame. That honey has a thin wax cap across the top indicating that the bees have decided that it has been sufficiently dehydrated. We take frames of honey from the bees when they are at least 80%...

These seven hives are at the Urban Horticulture Center on the University of Washington campus. The hive on the far right is the swarm hive that was featured in the previous blog. It is coming right along. The hive on the far left is the hive that swarmed. We know this because it ended up without a viable queen. The old queen flies off with...

This is our Seattle Urban Honey logo on a sign at the farmers’ market last summer. Our bees are not yet producing honey that we can take this summer. This might delay the July 1 date that we had hoped would be the debut of this season’s honey. Our bees are hungry. The blackberry bushes are just about to bloom as are the locust trees...