Spring HAS sprung!

     April is coming to a close but the short, mild winter has caused our region's hives to appear as if it's a month ahead of what the calendar is saying.
     I did the first "real" inspection almost a month ago and my hive's personalities have completely reversed from a year ago. The "party girls" are quickly filling their frames with honey and their queen is laying eggs at a rapid rate. I noticed that the upper box was full of bees, eggs and honey and the lower box's frames were mostly empty. That indicates that the bees ate all the stored honey from the lower box and then moved up into the upper box to work and eat. I reversed the two boxes so that they'll live on the first floor (so to speak) and lay eggs and store honey in the now empty second floor. This is good for them and good for me as the queen will increase their number by utilizing the empty frames to lay more eggs.  They were extremely aggressive-to the point of following me into the garage and even coming over and dive bombing me an hour later! I checked them again about two weeks ago and both boxes are crowded with bees so I put on a honey super to give them room to grow-and hopefully have an early harvest. Bees will swarm if they feel too crowded so an empty honey super (see below)

gives them work and space. They'll take empty wax frames, build comb on it and then fill the comb with honey.
   The "over achievers" hive has actually lagged behind. I believe that I mentioned being worried about them in the last post, and when I did the March inspection, I found them to have almost no stored honey and the laying pattern was weaker than the other hive. I put a feeder on this hive and within two weeks (and about 6 gallons of syrup) they'd caught up. I think (as I feared) that there were so many bees in this hive that they had consumed all their honey stores and were on the brink of starvation-they actually went through a gallon of syrup the first day! PHEW, caught that in time.
   And last weekend, my third hive was set up and the bees arrived on Saturday-a beautiful 60+ day, perfect for installation. Well, should have been perfect however..........I got the bees home and they were very active in the box with few dead ones at the bottom etc. The deal is that one takes the queen cage out of the package first (it's suspended in the package by a cord)  and she is installed in the empty hive before liberating the rest of the 3 pounds of insects). I unstapled the cord holding the cage, took off the lid of the package only to find that the queen cage wasn't at the other end of the cord but had fallen into the general population. Great, so now I need to first figure out where she was (all the bees cluster around her so you can't see her or the cage) and then reach into the package of bees to get her out.

Doesn't that look like fun? Luckily, one good rap of the package on the ground and the majority fell to the bottom and the cage was easy to see and relatively easy to get out. Needless to say, some of the other bees were freed at the same time and they weren't terribly excited with me, especially after the rapping, but it was all good.
     Now, a little side bar and a beekeeping "dirty secret". I HATE getting stung and will do just about anything to prevent it. There, I've said it. I go to our bee club meetings and people talk about going into the hives bare handed, or without a helmet/veil or in a tank top and short sleeves and I think that they clearly don't have the same aversion as me to the stings! Last year, I was stung a couple of times and it made me uneasy when working with the hives 'cause I was afraid of the next event. So this spring, I splurged on a wonderful one piece, thick mesh, suit that is impossible for the girls to get through.

(Yes, I look like an alien but hey, it works!)

And with my new suit, I've noticed a huge difference in the way I work at the hive and also the bees level of aggression while I'm in there. Our instructors told us that bees will pick up on your mood and clearly they have. Now that I'm calmer, they're calmer as well.

     O.k., back to my installation. So once I got the queen in the new hive, I poured all the bees into the hive and turned to put my brand new feeder on top. I had already filled it with syrup and some medicine for the new hive, but when I put it on I realized that I'd ordered the wrong size and this one was too small. It left an inch gap on either side of the hive and would be disastrous to leave on as water and predators could get into the hive. I had to run into the house (in my full regalia) and grab an old feeder out of the basement, put it on the hive and pour the syrup from one to the other. I closed up the hive only to notice that I'd set the hive up backward so the bees were in a modified Hotel California kind of situation: they could check in any time they liked but they could never leave. So once more, I lifted the new hive up, turned it around and called it a day.

Then

Now

    It's now a waiting game to see what the weather does as that will influence nectar flow and honey production. The honey super on the party girls hive was being built out very slowly but I've read on our club's Facebook page that the experts say to expect that in the drought we've been having. No rain means no plants growing thus no nectar. It's raining today and is supposed to rain most of the week so that will be a boon to the bees and will lessen the worry of brush fires that our region has already had.





Down Time

Winter in New England is usually a down time for beekeepers.  The bees are holed up during the frigid weather and our instructors told us that these cold months are the time to catch up on reading our bee journals and getting our equipment ready for the spring.

 Unfortunately, we seem to have decided to skip winter this year and have had unseasonably warm weather-I would imagine our average temperature has been in the 30-40 degree range.  Last year our area had so much snow that roofs were collapsing and this year we've had exactly one "storm" and it left less than 6 inches of the white stuff.
Because of this and the surprisingly great number of days in the high 40s and lower 50s, we've seen a lot more activity at the hive entrances than we should.  The problem with that is that if the girls are out flying around, they're going through their stored honey faster than they would normally and run the risk of starving in the months of February and March, when there is still little pollen and/or nectar available. Our bee association Facebook page has been abuzz (sorry) with talk of feeding pollen patties or not and trading recipes for fondant versus sugar bricks.  Sugar bricks are made with a lot of sugar and a very little bit of water and fondant is made with sugar, water, and corn syrup:

I've been adding one or two of these plates of fondant to the hives each month since the middle of December and they are being devoured. The bees are none to happy that I'm opening their roofs and letting the cold air in but they cover my gloves, and the fondant as soon as I start to lay it in the hive.
When you put the fondant in the hive, you break each circle up into   6-8 pieces so that there is a greater surface area for the bees to utilize.
My overachievers hive is the one that I'm now more worried about because there are markedly more bees in the top of that hive than in the top of the party girls hive. The theory is that the bees start in the lower hive body and then eat their way up to the top hive body and by the time they've exhausted their stored honey then it should be spring and time for them to forage in the wild. By December, I was already seeing bees in the top hive body at the over achiever hive and now there are a vast number in that area. Maybe the large number is there because I'm feeding them and they're waiting there for the fondant but only time will tell. The party girl hive has some bees at the very top but not a huge number. Hopefully this means that the rest are doing what they're supposed to be doing and hanging out below and doesn't mean that many of them have just died off and that's the reason for the lower numbers that I'm seeing.
Ah, being a beekeeper is full of uncertainty!!! I'll have to wait until April to really be able to get into the hives, look around and access how each colony made it through the winter.
In the meantime, I'm keeping an eye on the hives to see how much sun they're getting now that so many trees have been taken down around them and readying my new hive.  I may have mentioned that our club holds raffles at their meetings and at one this summer I won a new hive set up! I'm quite excited and have ordered another box of bees so that I can expand my apiary from two to three hives.  I was tempted to go ahead and use some of my extra equipment and make it an even four but since checking on the hives in full gear in July and August is hot and uncomfortable........I think three sounds just right.

November Preparation

The last post discussed the damage done by Hurricane Irene. Just as we were finished cleaning up after that storm, we were visited by an impressive Nor'easter at the end of October that brought down even more trees. Long story short, our hives are now in a new clearing so instead of 3 or 4 hours of sun, they'll have about double that time. I expect that there will be some hive residents who are thinking, "is it suddenly warm in here or is it me?"

We've had a few warm days but the cold nights are here so it was time to put the final touches on the hives.  This needed to be done when daytime temperatures were still tolerable for exposing the inside of the hives and as last weekend was in the high 60s-it was perfect. The feeders have been off for a couple of weeks, as I discussed in the September blog and now was the time to add the homasote.  This is a compressed cardboard square that will absorb excess moisture and actually acts as a sponge. By the Spring, there will be water stains on it as it soaks up the dangerous humidity.

The homasote square has push pins on the bottom to raise it above the inner cover and the space that you see, will allow for air flow.  Also the space allows the girls to walk around under there and get outside if the weather permits (the outer cover has a gap that they'll use as an escape hatch).

I've discussed earlier that bees are an amazingly resilient insect and that their focus is always the survival of the colony. In the fall, this is manifested by their culling their numbers in preparation for the winter and restricted food source. The drones are useless in the winter-they don't keep the hive clean, maintain the temperature of the colony, or forage on warmer days. Because of that, they are, shall we say "voted off the island". Actually, they're executed

and the hive entrance is littered with their bodies.

It's kind of a bizarre thing to see the first time but it's nature's way of survival.

There's nothing left to do now but to check back in January and see if the bees have enough stored honey left to eat or if they need it supplemented. Some people wrap their hives in December to prevent winter winds from threatening the inner temperatures and some beekeepers strongly advise against it. I was given a hive wrap and may decide to wrap the one most exposed to the elements and not the other but will wait and see how severe the winter seems.

Preparing for the winter

When last I posted, I was worried about hurricane Irene that was bearing down on the East Coast. We were luckier than many in Vermont and other areas but still did lose a few trees and our electricity for 5 days. However, a portable generator kept our well, sump pump, refrigerators and living room lights on so again, we were luckier than many others.

The trees that we lost all landed in the driveway and out of harm’s way and I thought the hives were unscathed until I noticed this during this past weekend.

Again, we were very lucky that the heaviest part of the bough landed on another tree as that kept everything from landing on the hives (circled in red). We’ve contacted a “tree guy” and hopefully he’ll be able to come in soon and get it out of the way before rain or wind drops it on the girls! My husband and I keep reassuring each other (as we drag, chop, split and stack yet more felled wood) that we are thankful not to have to pay for fuel for our wood stove. 

Guess we’ll be singing that song with the product of this tree as well.

At any rate, it’s now time to prepare the hives for the winter.  I took the honey super off to extract from the over achiever hive and am now feeding both hives sugar syrup. The goal is to feed them a thicker syrup-2 parts sugar to one part water rather than 1:1-so that they don’t have to work as hard to dehydrate and store it. I’ll feed them until about the middle of October because not only do I now want to open the hive when the ambient air is cold but I also don’t want to introduce moisture into the hive during the cold weather.  From a great article entitled The Winter Cluster, “Bees consume honey to generate heat. Carbon dioxide gas and water vapor result from metabolizing honey. The warm moist air rises from the cluster hitting the cold inner cover causing condensation. This condensation drips down upon the bees as ice-cold water. The dripping water can have a negative effect upon the delicate exchange of food and warmth.” So not only do I not want to introduce any more moisture into the hive, I want to manage the natural moisture produced from metabolism. The hives are both tilted ever so slightly so that moisture will roll out the entrance, the covers are raised with glued pennies to create another area of ventilation and the brood boxes are separated by a crack large enough to allow air to circulate but too small to allow rain and snow to enter.

My party girl hive seems to have figured out its queen situation better than I was doing and is ridiculously heavy with stored honey. I never have visualized either queen-not sure I could recognize her if she was on my nose-but the amount of bees in each hive tells me that someone is laying eggs and producing strong workers. As a matter of fact, the last few times that I’ve been in the hives refilling the syrup, the guard girls have been extremely aggressive-to the point of following me back to the garage and loudly voicing their displeasure with my presence. I tried to explain that I’m only there to feed them but apparently need to brush up on my language skills as I don’t seem to be speaking “bee” clearly enough.

Oh, and one final note-sugar is ridiculously expensive when you’re going through 40 or fifty pounds every two weeks. Our club has a Facebook page and we’re tracking the prices that people are paying but it averages between $5.50-6.00/10 pounds per bag. With two hives taking in 6 gallons of syrup every 10 days-the syrup made with 40 pounds of sugar………….well, you do the math. It certainly does put into perspective paying $6 for a 12 ounce “bear” of honey.

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!