6 Legged Robbers???

Hum, I am not sure what is going on in our bee yard. It has been about 10 days since I last checked on the bees. I went down then to remove the bee escapes I put on too early. I remember taking somewhat of an inventory. We had at least four supers full of honey that were well on their way to being capped off,  maybe 65% and at least three boxes full of uncapped honey.

I went down this morning to do a cursory check and see if it was time to put the bee escapes back on in anticipation of pulling more frames on Wednesday with Paula. I was a little dumbfounded to find what seems to be far less honey in the boxes, all of them. I was hoping to find the top boxes completely capped in which case I was going to put the bee escapes on just below the top boxes. Instead I found the boxes to be much lighter than they were 10 days ago. There are a few frames of capped honey in one or two of the boxes and some honey but nothing compared to what had been there.

Bees will try to rob honey from another hive. Robbing is usually seen in the spring before a nectar flow or in late summer with the nectar flow has ceased. When there isn't another source of nectar bees will look for other sources. Usually stronger hives will rob weaker hives.

What makes me really pause here is that I don't see any significant evidence of robbing behavior. There isn't a frenzy of fighting outside any of the hives. Wrestling at the entrance is a good give away but lack of fighting isn't proof that you don't have robbing going on. It could just mean the robbers have over come the guard bees. I have not found piles of dead bees in front of any hive, another indication a battle has taken place. Most importantly I don't see capped honey torn open, another telling sign. All our hives are strong but one. The strong hives all had plenty of honey,  and it seems like the bloom is good which would mean reasonable nectar sources. I can't see any reason for the bees to go out scouting for alternative sources of honey. We do have a week hive, Mr. Abbott's Little Bee but there has never been any honey in that hive to begin with.

That being said we are down honey, no doubt about it. It is very puzzling. Of course we could have robbers coming in from another apiary, who knows. Bees can be very sneaky which is why I don't see much evidence of anything suspicious. I am going back with Paula on Wednesday and hopefully she will have some insight after she sees the situation. Until then, keep your fingers crossed that more honey doesn't disappear between now and then.

Honeycomb Another Gift From The Hive

We collect it all summer long. Honeycomb, the hexagonal wax cells the bees build on the frames of foundation we place inside the hive boxes. It is here that all the action takes place. In the brood boxes the comb contains the larvae, pollen and stores of honey. Actually the bees will build it, frame or no frame, and they will build it just about anywhere we leave space for them. I will admit, we are not tidy beekeepers and we have yet to master the "respect the bee space" rule. Our bees, they build crazy comb, in fact that is how one hive got its name, Crazy Comb. Every time we would do a hive inspection in Crazy Comb her first year we were dumbfounded by the amount of crazy erratic comb the bees kept building!  Technically it is called burr, bridge or brace comb.

Bees secrete wax to build comb and it takes about 8.4 pounds of honey to secrete a pound of wax so really, it is a very precious commodity. The color of the wax comes from pollen and the cocoons embedded in the cells and the tracking of many bee feet, called travel stain. That is why brood box comb is darker than the wax in supers where the bees are hopefully just storing honey.

I am not going to get into the geometry of the comb. I am a beekeeper not a mathematician. Suffice to say it should be considered one of those wonders of the world.

Burr comb is comb that is placed in globs or bumps or connecting sheets perpendicular to the main frames of comb, or in any small space and is great for drone cells. Burr comb is also called brace or bridge comb. It clogs up hives and makes a mess and good beekeepers remove it to keep the hive tidy and manageable.When we inspect our hives, especially Crazy Comb we try and clean up the mess but it can be tricky. If the burr comb is in a brood box and we can't find our queen we don't want to go poking around with a hive tool, removing comb that a mess of bees are working on. After all Her Majesty might be lurking around and god forbid we remove her, hurt her or worse, freeze her to death.

What wax we do collect all goes into Ziploc bags from week to week.  It gets to be a sticky mess. Periodically I go through the bags, remove dead bees and other junk and transfer the wax to a large Tupperware that goes in the freezer. Our first two years of beekeeping we didn't have more than a frame or two of honey to harvest. The only way to get the honey was to pull if off the frame with our hands which destroyed the comb. Of course we kept it, several pounds total,  froze it and several months later Paula showed for dinner one night with a tiny little tea light candle she had made. I was slightly dumbfounded all that wax had been reduced to two tiny little tea light candles but squealed with delight. This year we have enough frames that we can save the structure of the comb on the frames by using an extractor, basically spinning off the honey in a centrifugal fashion. The combed out frames can be stored over the winter and put back in the hive in the spring giving the bees a huge jump start.

We will cut the wax capping off the frames and combine them with our summer scraps and hopefully  Paula will do her magic sometime this winter turning the mess into a candle or two. People eat comb honey as well. I am not a fan but my friend Patrick prefers his honey with a chunk of comb so I try and cut a chunk of frame comb for him. I am just not a fan of having a mouthful of wax to chew on and eventually spit out when enjoying my honey. To each their own I guess. The bottom line is that it isn't just honey that the hive produces, there is wax as well and in the spirit of not wasting anything I am grateful Paula turns our wax into something useful and fun.

Sweet Mother of Apis Melifera; Tears of the Sun god Ra

                                Photo Credit: Sue Ann Vruno

You are too good to be true. You have spent the summer building comb, foraging for pollen, nectar and water. You have buried your heads deep, nursed your brood, fanned your wings, tended to your queen, guarded your hive  and now this:

Frame after frame of capped honey. For three years you have teased me. For three years I have waited for this, the opportunity to take a worthy crop  and share it with my world. Finally I can have a proper Tibetan blessing for you and show you and all your glory off!  Mother of Apis Melifera, tears of the Sun god Ra, your tears turned to bees now sweet for me.

Paula and I hit the road at 5:30 this morning, my time of day! We arrived at the bee yard, lit the smoker and set up to start pulling boxes of honey. We have never been faced with a job like this and it is overwhelming to think about how to prioritize, organize, manage and pull off. We made made one mistake, nothing that can't be recovered. One bee sting later we left with four full boxes of honey.

We are hobby beekeepers. We don't have the tools or the equipment commercial beekeepers have to get the job done. We have the two of us, a bee brush and and Tupperware containers. It isn't much but it is enough.

It isn't the best photo but you get the idea. Brushing bees causes a bee frenzy. Last summer I got no less than 15 stings, all above my neck the day we harvested and ended up with a three month cough. This year we made sure our veils were not draping our necks and I ended up with one single sting on my leg, from The Turquoise Bee of course. No big deal. We worked Crazy Comb first and took an entire brood box of honey. We should get about 3 1/2 to 4 gallons of honey from the box and we are not done. We don't need to leave any honey in this hive as we won't over winter these girls. Hopefully over the next few weeks they will cap the remaining frames in at least one super and if we can isolate our queen we may be able to harvest some of the frames from remaining the brood boxes.

I brushed and Paula worked the large Tupperware containers, moving the lid on and off trying to minimize the number of bees making their way into the Tupperware and minimize our casualties. I will be truthful, there were some losses, it can't be helped. The bees are stubborn and they burrow into the honey and . . . After Crazy Comb we took boxes from Royal Ruckus, Drone Den and The Turquoise Bee. All in all we ended up with four full boxes of frames, probably another 4 or 5 gallons I am guessing. The super frames are smaller than the brood frames and Royal Ruckus and Drone Den are smaller boxes with one less frame that our other boxes, so it is a little hard to estimate but I am guessing at this point we have a good 8 gallons sitting in the honey closet.

We moved our fuller supers to the top of each hive and put on bee escapes just below them, a device that allows bees to move down in a hive but not up. The idea is to get as many bees out of the top boxes so there are less bees to brush. When I got home and looked at the calendar I think it was a little premature for this maneuver so I am going to go back tomorrow and remove the bee escapes, giving the bees more time to finish capping the top boxes, maybe another two weeks.

By the middle of August we should be able to remove another three or four supers and think about our wintering strategy. Royal Ruckus and Drone Den should have enough honey in the brood boxes to cover them for the winter. The other hives, if we can isolate our queens into the bottom box and hatch out any remaining brood we could take more from the brood boxes. We could also save some frames from these hives for early spring feeding. Lots to consider!

Once we finished we carried the oh so heavy Tupperware containers half way to the car and brushed each frame again, making sure we didn't have live bees in the Tupperware containers. We loaded everything into the bee mobile. Since I'd been stung I had a swarm of bees pelting my helmet and veil and couldn't loose the bees. Finally Paula was able to get out of her bee suit and I got into the passenger seat of the car with my gear still on and we drove to our coffee shop before I was able to remove the suit. I celebrated with my first cup of regular coffee in over 6 months. I don't intend to make a habit of it, and even if I did, so what.

When we got home we made one final bee check before carrying the containers into the "honey house", essentially the back room of our condo that becomes transformed into a honey house for extracting at the end of every summer. We transferred the frames back into their boxes and stacked the boxes in the honey closet. Last year we stored our uncapped honey here for a full week while running a dehumidifier. No need for the dehumidifier this year, these frames are all ripe and capped. I will probably take some honey to Natures Nectar to measure the moisture content, just to be sure, but I am darn confident about this harvest.

You can see the joy in both of us. Giddy with delight. It took me awhile to clean up and get the drippings of honey out of the Tupperware containers. By the time I was done it was 10 am and I had four cups of warm honey. Tina promptly made some toast and honey while I threw the bee suits into the washing machine and poured a small jar of honey for Paula. I am taking the rest down to our land owner tomorrow when I go back to remove the bee escapes. It seems fitting that he should get some of the first harvest!

Oh  Mother of Apis Melifera, tears of the Sun god Ra, your tears turned to bees,  now sweet for me. I am grateful to you. To show my gratitude I plan to show you off and celebrate your crop. Mark your calendars Monday, September 3rd, details to follow. Since the Tibetan Monks were not able to come to the apiary for a Puja in June I am hoping they can join us for a traditional blessing before we extract. This is an opportunity to talk about how important bees are, the issues facing bees that could eventually cause the demise of our entire agricultural industry and see how we go from nothing to honey. No doubt we will put you to work. The frames need to uncapped and the extractor needs to be hand cranked. Bring your muscle and your family. Tina promises something on the grill and I promise a small taste of honey to take home. It will be the perfect way to close out the summer and celebrate the honey bee!

Capping Honey

That is a picture of a full frame of capped honey, what every beekeeper hopes for toward the end of the summer. Last summer the bees never got around to capping much of anything and we ended up with a scant half gallon of honey only after storing a few frames of uncapped honey in a closet with a dehumidifier for over a week.

I am going to try and make this as simple as possible. Bees spend the spring and summer foraging, collecting pollen, nectar and water. They use their tongues (called proboscis) like a straw to suck nectar out of flowers and store it in their stomachs. They carry the packs of pollen on their legs. Upon returning to their hive they deposit the pollen into hexagonal cells, called comb build by the bees from wax. The nectar is stored temporarily in their stomach and gets mixed with enzymes to become honey. The bees will regurgitate the honey and pack it into the comb,  repeating the process until the combs are full. As mother nature would have it the bees know they need to prepare for long term storage of the honey to make it through the winter. To do this, they fan the honey with their wings to evaporate the water and thicken the honey. It is a huge endeavor as nectar is about 80% water and honey is about 10-15% water. So they fan and fan until the honey is ripe and reduced to the right percent of water. When this is done the bees cap the honeycomb with another layer of wax. When the frame is covered with white wax cappings the beekeeper knows the honey is ripe and reduced. A prudent beekeeper will actually check the moisture level of honey with an instrument called a refractometer. If the honey is too moist and harvested too soon it will cause the honey to ferment. Unless your making mead you don't want that nor do the recipients of your honey.

Seeing a frame of capped honey is simply a work of wonder and art. It takes my breath away. Seeing boxes full of capped frames is pure joy.

That is what we found today when we went to check on the bees, frame after frame of capped honey! Colleen and I headed down in the pouring rain, hoping beyond hope that we might get a break in the rain to check the supers. We sat in the car waiting for a break, went for coffee, stopped for a bite to eat, and finally we got a small window of opportunity, about 20 minutes to get in and get out. Four out of five hives have three supers each. The following is an accounting of the boxes, suffice to say we have tuns of capped frames.  The first supers of all four are completely packed with capped honey and we have entire brood box full of capped honey. I am not sure how we are going to get that box out of the bee yard, it must weigh 100 bounds. The second supers are completely combed out and mostly packed with lots of capping, with is more that what was going on 10 days ago. There isn't much going on in the third supers but we also added brood boxes to two hives which the bees need to comb out first. It was good to see that all of the brood in the supers of Royal Ruckus is hatched out and the queen excluder has kept the queen at bay. The bees have moved up into the new brood box and started to comb it out. Same story in Drone Den. We poked our head into Mr. Abbott and I should have thrown a frame of honey into that hive. I could see bees head first into some bone dry comb. There isn't much of a change in Crazy Comb, no additional comb in the second super and not much activity. The Turquoise Bee is capping in the second super but not drawing much in the third. Hopefully the rain will give a boost to the nectar flow and the bees will just carry on.

I am starting to think about our harvesting strategy. We have never had this much honey before so it needs to be calculated and thoughtful. I am hoping we can actually start to pull off supers as soon as next week and store them in our "bee room" until we are ready to harvest. It would be nice to do it slowly and not get overwhelmed with a day long project.

Honey Honey Sugar Sugar You Are My Candy Girls

Whenever we approach the bee yard we turn up the volume on the bee mobile CD player and jam to The Archies Sugar Sugar. It is our theme song and a good way to transition from our dialog to our bee keeping.  I like to keep the car running while we suit up and get organized. We can't help ourselves from singing and dancing and getting jazzed up about seeing the bees. Lately I have been cranking up the music after our work as well. I have been looking for other honey and bee themed music to add to the CD for a video I hope to make of all the photos we have taken during our adventures.

Today I found myself particularly jazzed up and excited about our findings. It was a longer than usual visit with lots of work. I finally caved and bought a new smoker, it just had to be done. The bummer is that I threw out the old smoker and the new one needs some burns before getting that lingering smoky smell in the car. We also discovered that the new smoker blows threw fuel rapidly and we had to fill it and relight it twice during the hour and a half we were working.

We had our work cut out for us, focusing on Colleen's Royal Ruckus and Drone Den but of course we couldn't help but stick our heads inside Mr. Abbott. It does seem like the Yellow Lady is finally gone. We went through each frame carefully and only saw the unmarked Queen. Her brood pattern is much much better, even compared to a week ago but still it is a weak remedial colony of bees who won't produce a lick. Honestly if killing a queen easily were in me I would do away with her and move the bees back over to The Turquoise Bee to improve her foraging power. There isn't a prayer these girls will overwinter so they are doomed no mater what. Hum, I might have to run this idea past Paula.

Royal Ruckus is just a darn nice group of girls! I love going inside this docile colony and seeing what they have accomplished. It is getting harder to find our queens, marked or unmarked because of the growing population of bees in each hive. We made our way through each and every frame of every box in Royal Ruckus wanting to isolate the queen and make sure she was in one of the brood boxes. She has moved up to the supers and laid some  scant patchy brood. It is also getting hard to find our queens with a white marking because there is so much glistening nectar and white wax that confuse the beekeeper. When drops of nectar land on the bees head or thorax or small chunks of white wax are stuck on the bees it can actually look like a marking. The queen in Royal Ruckus is Yellow and I spotted her in the second brood box. She moved so quickly that Paula didn't get a chance to see her but I am sure that was her. We quickly added a third brood box and toped that with a queen excluder. Hopefully the bees will draw out comb in the new brood box quickly so the queen can use it to lay. I don't like queen excluders because in my opinion they are really bee excluders and often times the workers won't pass them to comb out and pack the supers. We have one super above the queen excluder that is completely combed out and packed but still needs some capping. The second super is almost all drawn out and they are starting to pack that one too. So we ended up putting on a third super. If we got some rain I am sure the bees would fill the second and third box in no time.

Same story in Drone Den but her first super is completely capped. We also saw some beautiful pink honey on two frames that the bees have capped. I am not sure where they are getting the pink nectar, perhaps a humming bird feeder with pink syrup. I wished we had photographed it. We couldn't find the queen but were very confident she wasn't up in the supers anywhere so we went ahead and added a third brood box, the queen excluder and a third super. Drone Den was a little worked up and defensive, nothing like The Turquoise bee but not docile wither. When we added the new brood boxes and supers on both these hives we took frames of nectar from lower boxes and moved them up to the new boxes. Hopefully this will draw the bees up especially now that we have the queen excluders in play.

We also added a third super on The Turquoise Bee as she drawn out her second box and started to pack it. Crazy Comb hasn't done anything in the second super so we left her be with just two supers. You can see we have a growing apiary.

Royal Ruckus and Drone Den are really getting tall. All in all we have 11 supers in play. Four are full and I mean full. One of the full supers is completely capped and the bees are working on capping off the rest. At a minimum we should get four full supers of honey which should be close to 8-10 gallons of honey. Three other supers are well on their way to being completely drawn and packed so if the bees cap those three off another 6-7 gallons. I doubt they will fill all 11 but if they do we are looking at 30 gallons or so. Regardless we are going to need some manpower to harvest our crop! Honey, Honey, Sugar Sugar you are my candy girls!

Duh, "Thank You Captain Obvious"

Smarter minds prevailed at the MN Hobby Beekeepers meeting last night. Marla's side kick Gary tackled my situation with two queens in one hive   Good thing Marla wasn't actually on hand or I would have just lost myself in her voice with that girl crush thing. Worse I would have felt like a fool for asking such a question. Beekeeping 101: Always impress Marla.

Gary Reuter, scientist, a.k.a. Gary-of-all-trades is Marla Spivak's right hand man. You remember Marla, the drop dead gorgeous Entomologist that I am always drooling over. The distinguished McKnight Professor at the University of Minnesota,  MacArthur Fellow and Genius Grant recipient. Back to Gary, this post isn't about Marla but I can't help myself from carrying on about her when I have the chance.

Gary pretty much runs Marla's bee lab at the University of Minnesota. He maintains all of the research colonies and helps train PhD students in the field. He designs cutting edge equipment, and runs the Extension short course in beekeeping. He is also a member of the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association and does the "Hive Management" portion of the meeting every month. He also hosts hive demonstrations before each meeting so folks like myself can go learn from the experts, hands on and in the field. He is generous beyond measure and funnier than anyone I know.

According to Gary it just isn't that unusual to have two queens in a hive. Really Gary? Just when I think I know a thing or two about bees Gary proves me still a novice. Logic defies two queens coexisting in a hive and while I am still a novice I wasn't that off with my idea of a slow mother-daughter supersedure.

 Gary thinks our original queen, the marked Yellow Lady just didn't have good queen bee juju. You see honey bees have something called pheromones which are substances released by individual bees into the hive or the environment that cause changes in the physiology and behavior of the bees. It is actually a very complex system of communication. Its like having secret chemical messages secreted by queen bees or workers to elicit a response from other bees. When a bee sends off a pheromone other bees detect that chemical message with their antenna.

There are different kinds of pheromones, personally I am most familiar with the alarm pheromone, a somewhat nonspecific pheromone made up of about 40 chemicals that is secreted when a bee stings an animal or a person. It sends a message to surrounding bees to come over to the location of the sting and act defensively. Some people have actually speculated this pheromone smells like banana. Occasionally when we open a hive Paula can smell banana and we just close it up. You can imagine what the drone pheromone does, attracts other drones to create a drone congregating areas in areas suitable for mating with virgin queens and of course attracts virgin queens too. I could go on and on about all the different pheromones but you get the idea.

So Gary thinks our Yellow Lady didn't have the pheromone levels it takes to be a queen including a pheromone that allows worker bees to distinguish between eggs laid by the queen, which are attractive, and those laid by the workers which are useless. A queen needs enough of this pheromone to be accepted as the queen so the workers tend to the brood and don't start laying unfertilized eggs.  In addition to this egg marking pheromone a healthy queen will have something called the Queen mandibular Pheromone which is a super pheromone that affects the reproductive capability, and social behavior and order of the hive as well as  some other kind a pheromone called the Queen retinue pheromone which attracts the workers to the queen.

The bee beard photograph above is an excellent example of a queen with stellar Queen retinue pheromone. When a somewhat cocky or crazy beekeeper, and in this case Gary, wants to show off they create what is commonly known as a bee beard. It is quite simple really. Catch your queen in a queen cage and secure her. Stuff some cotton or tissue into your ears and nose so the bees stay clear of those sensitive orifices. Tape the queen cage with the queen inside to your neck and her following will rapidly make their way to their beloved queen. In the mean time keep your mouth shut.  It is a quintessential Minnesota State Fair Honey House activity. People love it! When the show is over just get the queen back in the hive and violá all the bees return to the hive.

Clearly the Yellow Lady was either missing these important pheromones or lacking in appropriate levels of them all along. Here is where good record keeping is helpful. In going back and reviewing Mr. Abbott's Little Bee hive records the Yellow Lady never really started laying well, the brood pattern was always spotty. So if I follow Gary's logic, that she just didn't have enough juju for the workers to think she was a queen her fate as a failure was inevitable. She had enough pheromone to lay eggs but not enough to convince the workers. The bees, thinking they were without a queen fed the brood royal jelly to make a new queen. The Yellow Lady carried on in her sloppy haphazard manner for another  month, just long enough for a new queen to hatch and get mated (which is about when we saw the new, unmarked queen).  The workers are happy because they have a new queen (and in fact our brood pattern is starting to shape up a little) so they think the Yellow Lady is just another drone and are letting her run amuck.

Gary thinks she will eventually disappear, by what means I am not sure. Both Gary and Marla are big proponents of letting the bees sort themselves out. Beekeeping 101: When in doubt do nothing the bees are smarter than the beekeeper and will figure it out.

So I am inclined to sit back and enjoy the show of what I still believe to be a rare occurance!

The Bee Mobil

Meet the Bee Mobil! Little did Tina know four years ago when she gave me this car as a gift that it would turn into The Bee Mobil!

I didn't need a car. The car I had was just fine and had less than 70,000 miles on it, but Tina decided I did need a new car.  She and our nephew Chase picked out this spanking new Sapphire Blue Honda Fit. Sapphire Blue just happens to be my favorite color.

She surprised me, out of the blue one August afternoon and asked me to meet her in a parking lot out in Eagan, near her mother's house. She wouldn't tell me what was up, just that she needed me.

I remember being a little put out. It was hot and I was anxiously waiting for some biopsy results and didn't want to be away from the phone in case my physician called.

When I arrived and saw this cool little car I was confused and thought she had purchased it for herself. It seemed an odd choice for someone who spent an hour commuting to work each day.

Adding to the confusion was a mass of people waiting for my reaction, nieces, nephews, sister-in-law, mother-in-law . . . Once it sunk in that it was my new car, and she had even sold my old car I was very excited.

When I took up hobby beekeeping three years ago I didn't realize at the time how great a vehicle I had for such an endeavor. The Bee Mobil is a hatch back, perfect for loading and unloading. It has a huge amount of space inside, despite its small stature from the outside. The back seat folds down three different ways, opening up the entire back of the vehicle or leaving either one or two seats open for passengers.

As you can see I have it packed with equipment I need at the bee yard, smoker, smoker fuel, bee suites, extra hive boxes, and tool boxes with my hive tools, nails, baggies for scrap wax, magnifying glasses,  and a plethora of other bee stuff. I don't like to get caught without something. The bee yard is too far away for that. I keep a shovel and a weed whipper on hand as well as we find ourselves leveling land and keeping the grass in the yard cut back. Rarely if ever do we need more space than the Bee Mobil offers. However, come harvest time this year I think we are going to need a pick-up truck to hall the supers home. There's no way all the supers will fit into the Bee Mobil but I don't really want honey dripping all over my honda fit.

I will admit the Bee Mobil smells of smoke and honey. It is impossible to temper the smoky reside from the smoker we use at the hives to temper the bees and mask the alarm phermone from the guard bees. Personally I love the smell of smoke, especially from the bee smoker so I don't mind the lingering effect in the car. Since Tina is not so fond of the smoke we almost always drive her car when we are together which is another little perk if you ask me. I love being driven around town. There is also the persistent smell of honey coming from spare frames and the scraps of wax we collect while doing our hive inspections.

The bees like to comb out any spare space in the hives. We could spend all day removing the burr and brace comb that isn't needed and messes up the hives. It is a never ending job and in the middle of a nectar flow the wax is packed with honey. When we scrap off the excess from the frames we collect it into plastic bags. By the end of a visit we might have a pint of scrap wax dripping with honey that we place into a zip lock bag, occasionally trapping a bee or two. The wax goes into the freezer and in the fall, after the harvest Paula will turn it into candles.

I spent the day reorganizing the Bee Mobil today to fit in the new brood boxes and supers we need to bring down on Thursday, saving one seat in the back for our third beekeeper, Colleen. It always feels good to clean out the cabin and collect the scrap wax for the freezer. I try and keep it clean and organized through out the summer and in the fall, when the season is over I treat the Bee Mobil to a full cleaning and detailing.