Steven from http://stevensbees.blogspot.com/ suggested I contact Marc Sevigny, who is a beekeeper in Harvard. So, I did, and Marc was kind enough to take an hour and a half of his day to show me how to open a hive, what all the honey and brood etc look like. It was a gorgeous day, perfect beekeeping weather - sunny and warm. Bees are more docile when it's nice out, and today was no exception. Marc has 4 hives, one of which is new from a package this spring. One was going gangbusters with the honey, and he'd put 3-4 honey supers on it, so it was nearly 5 feet tall. One other one was looking pretty slow, with very few field bees coming in and out, so he determined that would be a good one to look at more carefully.
Marc graciously provided me with a full body bee suit, which was a comfort for my first encounter with open hives. I wasn't scared, per se, but a little unsure what to expect. Marc puffed a little smoke into the entrance of each hive and proceeded to crack the first one open. It was pretty well stuck down with propolis, the sticky, nasty substance that the bees gather from trees and use to seal up cracks in the hive. Unfortunately, they have a habit of sticking down the cover of the hive and pretty much everything in the hive. Marc said not everyone has equal problems with propolis, and his wasn't terrible, but it was somewhat annoying for him.
After taking off the top, there are just a ton of bees exposed on top of the frames. You expect them to all rise into the air, like if you disturb a cloud of flies, but they're totally not like that. Nearly all the bees just stay where they are, doing their work. We had pretty much no trouble with the first two hives we opened, and only a couple guard bees warning us off one of the more active hives.
The interior of the hives was incredibly interesting - thousands of bees working hard to put away nectar, tend the brood, etc. Marc showed me the brood patterns the queens had been laying in his hives... some were very good, some were not so good - a good pattern being totally packed together with no chambers left empty. He showed me capped honey comb, which is of course, most of the point of keeping bees in the first place. His big hive looked to have about a hundred pounds of honey in it, he said. One of the medium supers he had (about 6 inches tall, compared to 9 inches for the deep supers on the bottom, where the brood is laid) was mostly full, and was really heavy! I can definitely see why almost no one wants to use deep supers for honey - the mediums are bad enough!
Marc was a veritable fount of information. I was really glad I'd read a couple beekeeping books already, so I could keep up... but definitely seeing things in person made a huge difference.
After we'd opened all four hives and looked through them, we stopped a bit to talk about a variety of things. He told me about the house he'd bought there -it's a fantastic old property in what was originally a Shaker village in Harvard. There was even the ruin of a stone barn on his property! It was gorgeous, I just couldn't get over the setting. It's like something you'd see in a movie. I noticed some chickens running around, so we talked poultry for a little bit, since Mrs. Finch and I have chicks we've been raising. Marc also has sheep and a guard llama, which is incredibly interesting for my wife, since she knits and is planning on getting cashmere goats.
All in all, it was a fantastic experience and a great introduction to beekeeping. Marc said there are about 10 other beekeepers in Harvard that he knows of, and that they all more or less know each other. I am hopeful that I will be able to meet more of them, since I'm sure I'll have a thousand questions and will need plenty of guidance.
Is it spring yet? I want hives!
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