Harvesting!

     The first year is one where the bees builds up comb on new frames and then fill it with honey to provide sustenance for the colony through the winter.  Once the two hive bodies are filled, any additional honey can safely be harvested.  We got our bees almost a month later than usual because of the cold and rain in Georgia this spring so we weren't sure if they'd have enough time to build survival stores let alone a surplus but the "over-achiever" hive did just that. On Tuesday, the first extraction took place.
     In preparation, I cleaned off all the kitchen counters, rolled up the kitchen rug and readied paper towels, wet sponges etc. Not everyone was as excited as I was about the honey, two family members were more excited with the re-decorating, but then I didn't expect much help from them anyway.

Now, remember that I'd put the escape board on to get the bees to leave the honey super (which I would harvest from) and I went out to bring it into Harvest Central. It has nine frames instead of the usual ten to give the bees more room to work.  Three of the frames had honey on them that the bees hadn't capped yet and that's not good honey to harvest. Once the honey has a low enough moisture content, the bees will cover it with wax.  At this point, the honey is very low in water, won't spoil and will stay fresh for months-their technique to store honey in the hive for a long period of time. If one were to harvest this honey, it could spoil and that wouldn't be good.

                                                                            (uncapped honey)



I put the three frames with the uncapped honey back into the hive and hoped that the bees can finish them off by Labor Day.  This is the designated time that most beekeepers set as time to take off the honey supers. The bees will use the time between Labor Day and bitter cold to finish storing honey, repair any comb etc. etc.

The other 6 frames were capped and I used this tool to lift off the wax, exposing the beautiful liquid.



Then I took four frames and put them into the extractor-the piece of equipment that will spin the honey out of the comb.

      Next,  I put the clear plastic cover on and started to crank it up.  Our instructors had warned us to spin it gently the first time around as the comb is new and could be "blown out". I covered it, cranked it up, flipped the frames around to extract both sides,  cranked it again and eagerly opened the top to see............nothing.
Apparently my definition of "gently" was closer to "inefficiently", so I closed it up and put more muscle into it.  The next time I looked, I could see honey pooling at the bottom of the extractor. Now, that's exciting!
      I opened the valve and let it all drain into a bucket with a sieve attached. The sieve will separate any bee parts, wax or any other detritus and allow the honey to be nice and clear.

      Once all of the honey was drained from the extractor-from all six frames-I covered the bucket and let it sit for 24 hours to let all the bubbles rise out of the honey. In the meantime,  I was left with honey covered equipment and a very sticky extractor. Nature has all kinds of great solutions to "problems" and again following my mentors suggestion, I took all the equipment outside and put them about 75 yards away from the hive.  Within 20 minutes, they were covered with "my" bees, wasps, and bumblebees all drawn by the smell of the honey.

(this is after 10 minutes, after an hour, I couldn't get near it for the cloud of insects)





     All of the bees etc. will either assume they've found a fast-food site and eat like crazy, or will take this honey back to their hives.  The reason the sticky equipment is placed away from the hive is because if it's closer, the non-hive residents could decide to "rob" the hive of it's stores-associating honey in the hive with the free honey on the equipment.
     Within four hours most of the equipment was spotless. Within 24 hours, the extractor looked like it did when I took it out of the box. Truly amazing and very easy. 
     The next day, I gathered my honey bears and jars and bottled 20 containers of beautiful honey-probably about 2 gallons in total.

     My co-workers, friends and family will be sharing this yummy stuff with us. One of my co-workers thinks she can taste honeysuckle in it so I wonder if there's some nearby.
     This was really exciting and very rewarding. As I said, next weekend, I'll pull the honey supers off for the season and will harvest whatever they contain. If the honey is still uncapped, it can be harvested and then fed back to the bees. I'll spin it in the extractor and then pour it into their feeder trays. They'll store it in the comb in the hive, cap it, and keep if for their consumption during the winter.
       Now it's only 5 days since I was so excited with the hive and today I'm worried about them.  We're anticipating Hurricane Irene and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my "girls" will be ok. Jack and I went out last night and lashed the hives to their platform and put extra bricks on the top cover so I'm hoping that will keep them safe.

     May everyone and every bee stay safe and secure throughout this weekend.

Getting ready to extract honey

     A little background info here before I begin. I belong to the Norfolk County Bee Association (NCBA) and took a 10 week course this spring before starting this adventure. The school is great and not only do they have a solid mentoring plan, they also have a few scheduled classes over the summer and yesterday was their most recent one.
     The instructors talked about winter preparation, what to expect in the cold months and what to look for in the spring. Most pertinent for me right now-they talked about the process of honey extraction. I had thought to leave my honey supers on until the end of the current nectar flow (golden rod and loosestrife are two of the most prolific plants right now) but they suggested that I extract immediately.  Their theory is that if I extract now and then put the cleaned and empty comb back into the hive, the bees have another couple of weeks to produce even more honey for us to enjoy.
     Of course this all took me completely by surprise and therefore unprepared. I scrambled to put in an order for jars, lids etc. and then started looking into getting the actual extractor machine.
        Now if you remember, the frames of honey look like this:

This frame has capped honey at the top and uncapped at the bottom.  This picture was taken back on the fourth of July so by now, all of the honey has the white wax cappings over it. Those cappings keep the honey at the right moisture level for the bees and preserve it so that it's fresh when they're looking for a snack. They just chew through the white cappings and belly up to the comb.  When extracting, I'll scape all of the white wax off exposing the honey and then put it into what is essentially a centrifuge to empty out the frames.
     I'll go into more detail once I do the actual extracting, but what we use is a machine that looks like this:

    
The frames of honey are placed into the barrel and then spun (via the hand crank) and the honey flies out, flows to the bottom of the barrel through a gate into sieves and then a 5 gallon bucket.
       As I said, I was unprepared to be harvesting so soon but not to panic-our club has about 10 extractors that members can borrow.  I emailed the resource person and he forwarded my email to a member in the next town. I'll sync up with her for the hand-off on the extractor.  Unfortunately, not only was I unready, the weather is the absolute worst it could be right now.
      Before you can pull the honey supers off the hive, you need to get all the bees out of them.  There are a couple of methods but the one recommended by our instructors is to use a piece of equipment called a frame escape screen. I'll sandwich the screen pictured below between the hive body (the hive section with eggs and stored honey for the bees) and the honey super (the hive section with stored honey for harvest). This way, the bees can travel from the super back down into the hive (which they tend to do periodically) but will be unable to get back up. It's hard to see on the picture but there's a screen "maze" that hopefully will stump them all and I'll be able to extract clear, bee-less honey.

     Back to my weather woes, we're having torrential rain today and scattered rain tomorrow and we all know how much the bees hate hive visitors when they've been cooped up for awhile.  I need to get this escape frame on about 2 days before I plan to extract to give them all time to make their way out of the supers. Complicate this with the fact that once you are able to get the club extractor, they ask you not to keep it more than three days so that it's available to others and you'll see my logistical issues. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the rain will clear tonight and by the time I get home from work tomorrow, the girls will have had almost 24 hours of flying time. That way, I can get into the hive, put the escape frame on and get out before anyone gets too hysterical.
     Then if everything else works in my favor, I can get the extractor by Wednesday or Thursday and extract, clean up the machine and be ready to pass it on by Saturday.
     Stay tuned-I expect it to be a nerve wracking week!

To paraphrase Bob Seger, "I wish I DID know now what I didn't know then"

     Luckily for "the girls", I've been a more faithful beekeeper than a blogger. In the month since I've posted here, I've checked the bees about once a week and am pleased and confused, in keeping with my previous comments about the vast differences in the two hives.
       The over achiever hive continues to be just that-the honey super that I'll harvest weighs about 50 pounds and the second super is on for their amusement. My more learned colleagues were correct about the lack of activity in July-despite clear and hot weather (which they supposedly prefer) there has been almost no build out in the second super. My guess is that they've just been adding to their winter stores in the bottom two brood chambers a.k.a. hive bodies.
     The party girl hive on the other hand, continues to baffle me. I had my mentor join me in a hive examination about three weeks ago and he was amazing. We spent an hour going through the hive-literally frame by frame and he explained a lot of what I was seeing.  He felt that the new queen was laying but was pretty weak and the hive was trying to replace her. There's a process (complicated to me) that the hive will undergo when they feel that they need a stronger queen to keep them alive and suffice it to say, there was evidence that my hive was doing just that. There were "supersedure cells"-the large conical cell in this picture-that are essentially new bees that the hive are over feeding to produce a queen.

Instead of being fed 400 times a day, they are fed twice that amount (I could be off a little on the numbers but not much-honest) and are fed "royal jelly", something the bees produce in a fashion that I don't understand at all. At any rate, the bees realize that the reigning queen isn't laying eggs in a strong enough fashion for the colony to survive so there is a coup d'etat and they replace her.
     Ok, so anyway, my mentor and I saw signs that this was occuring and he said not to worry, that the hive would take care of itself. I've continued to check them once a week and despite the fact that they were drinking gallons of sugar syrup each week, there still was no sign of any eggs or baby bees in the top brood box.  I went in Sunday and was so discouraged when I saw that everything was the same that I came into the house and emailed my mentor to see if I could still re-re-queen the hive or was it too late in the season? I realized after I wrote him,  that I had checked the upper brood chamber but not the lower and he'd want to know what was going on there.  So despite the fact that they hate being messed with two days in a row, I threw caution to the wind and went in again. And let me tell you, they were REALLY not happy with me. One particular lady on guard duty was especially furious. She was buzzing as loudly as I've ever heard a single bee buzz and kept flinging herself at my face veil letting me know in no uncertain terms that I should get the hell out of her space. I backed away from the hive for a few seconds to let her calm down and then finished looking at things (luckily she'd gotten distracted by something shiny and left me alone).
      The bottom brood box looked basically the same as it had when my mentor and I were there. There were a lot of bees so clearly some egg laying had occurred but it was pretty spotty. Just when I was closing up in frustration I decided to check one more frame in the top brood box and VOILA-larvae!!
      So to end my dissertation where I began, I really don't know what I do or don't know! It seems that the colony is still limping along-there are far too many bees in it for it to be dying (I'm afraid to say that aloud and curse myself) and they are storing a lot of honey in the brood boxes so...............I've decided to stop worrying and let nature take it's course. I'm going to treat it like it's doing well-continue to feed them and cross my fingers that they'll make it through the winter.
      Ok, this is now the length of a novella but only one more paragraph, I promise. I want to give a shout out to my husband for helping me this weekend with a job I was dreading. My mentor told me that I needed to raise my hives so that there was space underneath for debris to fall and that they needed to be turned 90 degrees so that one was not facing the other one (see original picture on first blog). Now, imagine the idea of moving two hives weighing between 75-100 pounds, each with 5 to 7 parts and you can imagine my distress. I had visions of trying to dismantle them and stack them safely so that the queens weren't disturbed etc. Instead my husband (the owner of every tool known to man) brought his hydraulic lifter thing-see below-to the hive platform.













We pried the hives loose from the planks, pushed them easily onto the lift, it raised and rotated them and then we pushed them back out onto the bricks. And believe it or not-they didn't seem the least bit fazed by all the movement.  Ok, it took them about 2 hours to figure out where the opening had gone but all in all, a great success.

Thank you.............honey!