Honey Harvest 2009 August 17, 2009

 

It’s once again late summer and time to harvest honey.  This year’s harvest was an interesting challenge, though I was really pleased to have the help  of an experienced beekeeper, Emma.   She brought along her fume board sprayed with Bee Go to help drive the bees down and out of the honey supers.   I was eager to see how effective this method of removing the bees from the supers was.  Unfortunately, the fume board works best in hot sun – versus the cloudy day we had – that heats up the board and releases more vapor into the hive.   The bees did not leave the supers very willingly so we had a hard time of whisking away the supers without taking a load of bees with them.  

 

Step 1:  Crack the hive and apply plenty of smoke; Step 2:  Carry one very heavy super loaded with honey away from the hive; Step 3: Realize there are still a ton of bees in the super and try hard to smoke them out ; Step 4: Contemplate a new strategy for getting the bees out of the next super. Repeat. 

 

Another challenge proved to be the unexpectedly high level of brood in the hive.  There is no queen excluder on this hive and I was traveling during the hive’s peak production in July so the hive no doubt got quite crowded and so the queen moved up through the supers to lay her eggs.  As a result, we only got on medium super and a few additional frames of honey from a second super to harvest.   We had hoped to get four full supers so this was a real disappointment. 

 

 

 

Still, the honey we extracted was absolutely delicious and dark – some of the best I’ve tasted yet.    In addition to Emma, a few other folks joined us in helping to extract the honey and their help was very handy.    The honey has been filtered and remains to be bottled, but it appears we got about 2.5 gallons.

Bee Diagrams February 24, 2009

I’m popping these two excellent little diagrams into this post so I have them here for future reference.  These both came from the magazine, Mary Jane’s Farm , which had a wonderful issue dedicated entirely to honey and bees. 

 

 

Wintering the Bee Hives October 13, 2008

 

This week as part of our entamology class studies, we had a demonstration of how to prepare bee hives for winter.  Winterizing of bee hives should take place sometime in October, depending on the temperatures and coinciding with frost.  Hives can survive without this extra pampering, but their chances are greater with a little help.

 

 

There are basically two camps of philosophy for how to carry hives through the winter: cold and warm.  The “cold camp” believes you should keep the hives shaded through the winter, surrounding them with hay bales or other such material so that the sun doesn’t warm the hives up too much during the day and fool the bees into going out of the hive when its still bitterly cold.  If they do leave the hive, they can usually survive because the hay bales are providing a windbreaker and give them a place for the bees to land quickly to do their business before scurrying back to the warmth of the hive.   The pros to this system are the bees have a greater chance of surviving the outside elements either by not being fooled into going out by the heat of the sun or by having some shelter if they do.  The cons of this system are that the bees tend to stay very compact within the hive’s center, not wanting to leave the warmth of their communal ball of bodily warmth.  As such, they tend not to move around to feed since they risk dying of cold if they go too far away from their brethern.  Hives can essentially starve themselves even if they have enough honey in the outer combs. 

 

 

The “warm camp” believes you should take advantage of the sun’s rays to keep the hive as warm as possible through the winter, wrapping the hives in black paper to both absorb more solar heat and to serve as some protection against the wind.  This system’s pros are that bees tend to move around much more inside the hive since its internal temperature is much higher than that of a “cold camp” hive and so they don’t die off as much within the hive due to poor feeding or moving away from their centeral heat.  However, the cons of this system are that bees can be easily fooled into going outside, thinking it’s as toasty out there as it is in their hive.  Once outside, with no hay bales to break the bitter winter winds, bees often fall to the ground and die.

 

 

Buck White came to demonstrate these two systems to our class and to talk more about bee behaviour in winter.  He recommends putting either bee “fondant” or manufactured pollen cakes in the hive at the time you winterize them.  These cakes of essentially pure sugar will serve as another food source in the event the bees use up their honey stores.  If using pollen cakes, Buck says to be sure to get the ones with some natural pollen in them as it helps the bees take to the cakes faster. 

 

 

Another “tip” Buck offered was the concept of drilling a “communication hole” through the center of all the combs.  With a little hole in the center of each comb, bees are able to crawl from one side of a comb to the other and on to another and another without leaving that central ball of communal body heat that’s so vital to their survival.  Without this centralized communication hole, bees would have to crawl to the outer edges of the hive to go around the ends of a comb to get to the honey on the other side of a comb.  This journey to the outer edges, while seemingly short, can be deadly on very cold days.  The drilling of the centralized communication holes can be relatively easy with the use of a long drill bit that can be started on the outside of the hive box and drilled straight through to the other side.  The outside hole should be plugged up with wax or caulking to keep the wind from getting into the hive. 

 

 

While I found all the information for wintering bees over to be very interesting, I was most fascinated with the way the bees interacted with our class during all of this activity around their hives.  We did not smoke the bees at all and no one, not even Buck, got stung once!  The bees did enjoy landing on us though, a harmless act as long as we stayed calm and didn’t try to swat them.

 

Honey Harvest August 6, 2008

We harvested honey from our established hive on July 29th.  Here are photos from the “fun” of harvesting.  We did it in the equipment garage with the door pulled down to keep the bees from coming in after their honey.  The lighting was terrible and the temperature was soaring, but the 50 or so jars of glorious golden honey were worth it!

 

Transferring Bees July 24, 2008

This past week, the new bees we’d gotten earlier in July needed to be transferred out of their “nuke” boxes into hive boxes that they could use to expand their colonies and produce much more honey.  The process was rather time consuming, but very interesting, especially because we got to see so much of the inner workings of these new hives.  Here are lots of pictures to depict the process.

 

Taking out the frames and cleaning off excess comb.

Looking for the queen so we can mark her.

Found the queen!  Now to trap her.

Trying to put the queen in the little holding tube to mark her.

Oh crap, we lost her!

YOU try finding the queen!

Opening a new hive – all those bees were on the underside of the lid.

Smoking them to calm them down.

Bzzzzzz

Cut comb being used on new frames for the new boxes. 
Keeping this old comb in the new boxes helps the bees identify their new hive
by smell.  You can see the pollen (yellow) and eggs (white) around the edges.

Attaching the old comb to the new frame.

Workers swarm around the trapped queen about to be released into the new box.

We found the queen “cage” at the bottom of the old box – this is used
by beekeepers to transport queens.

Classic beekeeper shot for the record.

Bee Update: They’re Hot! July 19, 2008

 

The new bees seem to be taking to their new home well.  We’ve stopped feeding them and hope they’re going out to the gardens and meadows for their sustainance.  Kerry-Ann alerted me to some cool bee action the other evening.  The days have been really warm again, and the bees were fanning their hives to moderate the temperature.  The hive on the west was obviously the hottest at the end of the day.  The sound coming from their buzzing butts was pretty intense.

 

17 Facts About Honeybees July 8, 2008

Bees

 

We recently had a very informative workshop on beekeeping with Jim Bobb, the president of Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association.  This man knows his bees, and I could hardly keep up with my note taking.  Here are the snippets I found most interesting:

 

#1 – A single hive can have 50,000 to 60,000 worker bees in it at summer’s peak.  In addition, there are about 800 drones and 1 queen.

#2 – In the honeybee world, females do all the work

#3 – Worker honeybees live on average for 35-42 days during the summer before literally     falling over with exhaustion.  In contrast, they live up to 4 months during the winter when they stay in the hive most days.  The queen, however, can leave for 2-3 years since she very rarely flies. 

#4 – A hive needs about 60 pounds of honey to get through the winter.  Any less and they’ll starve.  For hives that are being kept by humans, they usually produce about 120 pounds of honey during the summer so we get half the fruits of their labors.

#5 – Feathery hairs on a worker bee are what actually gather the pollen.  This pollen then gets pushed back by the bee’s legs into a “pollen basket” on one of their back legs. 

#6 – Bees have 5 eyes: two big ones like us, but then three little ones on the top of the head to help them fly straight.

#7 – Bees can’t see red.  To bees, red looks like black.  As such, honeybees won’t go to a purely red flower.

#8 – Scouts go out and literally choose what to pollinate.  If a scout picks a patch of clover and tells the worker bees to go collect it, those worker bees won’t be put off course no matter how many sumptuous flowers they fly over.  

#9 – Bees are actually somewhat picky eaters.  They will eventually pollinate just about every flower available to them, but they start with their favorites (salvia ) and leave their least favorites until last (pears).

#10 – There are over 30,000 species of bees in the world.

#11 – It takes about 21 days for a new bee to go from the egg stage to working in the hive.

#12 – In the bees’ diet, pollen is protein (fed to the larva only) and nectar is sugar (fed to both adults and larva).  In case you’re curious, honey is nearly all nectar, although some pollen does appear in small amounts.

#13 – 96 degrees Fahrenheit is bee utopia.  

#14 – Hives “split” by swarming, taking about 75% of the worker bees and the original queen to a new location.  The remaining hive has a queen larva and lots of worker eggs ready to hatch so the hive can re-establish itself.  This splitting process is a natural means for reproducing the overall bee population.  If a hive has split during the summer, be careful not to harvest too much of its honey as the old population that took off for new ground gorged themselves on honey before they left, diminishing the amount stored up.

#15 – 3/8 of an inch, known as “bee space”, is the exact amount of space bees like to have between their honeycombs. 

#16 – The drones, or males, only have one purpose in life: to mate with the queen.  Few of them ever get to do such and those that do immediately die after completing their mission. 

#17 – There is a little-known alternative treatment for severe arthritis and MS called apiatherapy.  This treatment involves purposefully stinging the patient with bees a few times a week in an area where they wish to stimulate nerves and relieve pain.  It is proven to work dramatically on some patients.  The “venom” in the bee’s stinger triggers weakened nerves and joints.

New Bees July 3, 2008

 

Four new hives of Russian bees arrived for the PGs on June 30th.   So far we haven’t done much with them, other than feed them store-brand grape soda spiked with extra sugar.   When hives are getting established, it helps to feed them since they haven’t found all the best pollen sources yet.  According to our bee supplier, Buck, they like this grape soda, smashed bananas, fondant, and cherry lozengers.   He was very specific about the flavors too. 

 

 

I’m looking forward to taking stewardship of these new hives.  However, I do feel some loyalty to the old hive that on the other side of the shed.  It’s still struggling since it swarmed and split.  I plan on feeding it some grape soda too to see if that increases activity.  Tomorrow we have a class on bee keeping and I hope to learn more about what to do with all these bees then. 

 

Bees Swarmed May 27, 2008

 

I wasn’t here to witness it, but I did want to make a record of the bees swarming over this past weekend.  Apparently the supers are too full so the colony split with half leaving and half staying.  I am a bit confused about why they felt the supers were too full since Matt and I just put a new one on a week or two ago.  I guess this shows that bees have minds of their own (or at least collective phermons).  

 

Meanwhile, those of us that are beekeepers had a little meeting tonight to discuss moving forward and the hopeful arrival of new hives.  Also, it appears we need to plan for harvesting the honey from this hive that just split sooner than I had originally planned. 

 

My First Act As Bee Keeper May 15, 2008

 

I suspect bee keeping may just be my coolest hobby to date.  I’m not sure just yet if it tops the belly dancing I did in my early 20s, but it’s pretty darn close and a good bit more practical (in most settings at least).  After just one afternoon of working with the hives, I’m hooked.  All I can think about since is “BEES!”

 

Actually, my first act as bee keeper was to deconstruct a hive that had died over the winter.  I was fortunate enough to get the help of Matt Eby, nursery go-to-guy, who has some very applicable experience (as a PG, he took care of the same hives just a few years back), otherwise I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do. We started by taking apart the “supers”, which are the stack of boxes that provide the exterior framework for the hives; in other words the outside walls.  Then we wiggled out the comb frames, some of which were filled with dead bees, some that were just plain empty, and, most importantly, some that still had lots of honey in them.  

 

 

Since this hive was dead, we didn’t have to worry about getting stung for this part of the process.  Later we did add a new “super” to the living hive and checked out its status.  Working with the live bees required the classic bee keeper’s gear (netted hat) and an old-fashioned smoker to control the buzz factor.  Watching the bees when the smoke hit them was pretty interesting…as Matt described it they dive for the combs of honey, jam their heads right in there and drink themselves silly, trying to take as much honey with them since they think the hive is on fire.  However, since they drink so much honey that their bellies are literally bulging, they can’t fly straight, and thus they become much less of a threat to the bee keeper. 

 

 

The living hive was doing quite well from the looks of the inside of it: plenty of bees and plenty of honey.  We left the honey in there though since taking honey from live bees is a bit messier than taking it from the dead ones.  So back to the task of deconstructing the dead hive.  I had a lot of questions about why the hive was dead, what with the recent scourge of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in the bee world.  As we deconstructed it, we could rule out some answers and possibly support others. 

 

 

The bees had not starved to death since there was a decent amount of honey in the combs still.  It is unlikely that there was a disease that wiped them out since the other living hive was only two feet away and it’s very healthy.  It is also unlikely that the queen abandoned ship and thus took the rest of the bees with her since there were a few dozen dead bees in the hive itself among the combs.  So, Matt’s theory at least and the one I’m going along with since I don’t know much myself and it makes sense:  the bees froze in the winter.  Normally a hive will generate enough heat to keep the temperature inside above freezing.  However, if the numbers in the hive dwindled for some reason (mites are known offenders for raiding hives), they might not have had enough body heat to keep the rest of them alive. 

 

 

I have so much research I want to do now on bee keeping and how hives thrive and how hive die.  But for the time being I had to content myself with cleaning up the combs of the dead hive (we reused some in the new “super” added to the living hive) and harvesting the honey.  Typically honey is harvested once or twice a year and in very large quantities that require a fair amount of large equipment and time.  This harvest, my very first, was not typical.  Instead of fancy equipment, I used a knife to cut off the wax cap of the combs and to scrape out the honey into a cake pan. Then I used a mesh strainer set over a soup pot to strain out the comb bits.  It was a sticky job, but a fun one!

 

 

All told, I got about a quart and one half pint of honey from five or six combs.  And what wonderfully sweet and floral honey it is!  Some of the best I’ve had, aside from that which I got in northern Portugal this past spring.  Can’t wait for the “real” harvest to get lots more and package it up!