Bees: Saturday, June 25, 2011

Weather: 80's, Partly Sunny/Cloudy, Quick Shower later in the day, Rainbow Appeared

Capped Honey on the Frame

Jim and I decided that this weekend was going to be a honey harvest weekend. We were up at the house 2 weeks ago and we saw that the Alpha Hive was ready to give up some of its golden delicious. We made our first stop there. I tried getting the smoker going but had difficulties. As we pulled off the covers, I realized that the bees were very calm and we didn't need to smoke them. We purchased several clear storage totes earlier in the week to store some stuff in the barn. I realized one of them would come in handy to store the capped honey frames as we pulled them out. The upper honey super was still being worked on so Jim removed it from the hive and left it on the side. The next honey super was loaded!!! We pulled out the first one and not only did it have every cell filled with honey but it also had over 200 bees on it. I followed the instructions and slammed a corner of the frame on the floor and sure enough...all of the bees fell off in a clump.

We continued to do this on each of the fully capped frames we found. At the end of it, we had 5 fully capped frames to harvest which wasn't a bad harvest. The 5 frames weighted about 25-30 pounds. The sun at this point was blaring and we were sweating up a storm. We decided to move quickly on the other hives by giving them a quick run through to see if we saw any brood or eggs being laid. Unfortunately, with a quick check like we did, we didn't find anything. This coming weekend we'll spend a bit more time on them and fingers crossed everything will be fine. Here's a video of Hive C:

Earlier this year I purchased everything I thought we needed for honey harvesting except the proper honey containers! We set our honey collection area in the kitchen. We cut a 3X3 piece of cheesecloth and placed it over a micro-strainer which straddled the 5 gallon pail we had with a gate at the bottom which controlled how much honey of the filtered honey we wanted to release.

Jim sat on a chair and held the honey frame over the cheesecloth which was over the strainer and pail. I used a regular kitchen plastic spatula that we use to flip pancakes and scraped off the combed honey from the frame and into the cheesecloth. Jim had the difficult job of hold the frame which weighted quite a bit. Once all of the waxed comb was removed from the frame, Jim and I squeezed the cheesecloth with both hands to release the partially filtered honey into the micro-strainer. On and on we did this and realized we had an easy 2.5 gallons of honey!

It's impossible to do this alone and thankfully Jim enjoys doing this as much as I do. We used up a case of jelly mason jars and then moved onto another case of smaller jelly jars only to find out we had much more to do.

Here are the jelly jars we used this first go around:

Honey in Jelly Jars

We decided to hold off doing anymore until we ordered the right kinds of honey containers...which I did today. Hopefully they'll arrive before we head up to the house again.

Here are some more pictures of the honey:

Scraping off the waxed comb and honey into the cheesecloth

More deliciousness being removed

Garden: June 25, 2011

And two weeks later...

Bees: Sunday, June 12th, 2011

Weather: cloudy, low 60's, very mild wind, sporadic short showers

You wanted to see us in our HazMat suits, right?

Yesterday was raining all day and we decided not taking any chances on opening the hive and disrupting them. However we did go take a look to see what they were up to from outside of their hive. There wasn't much activity with a few bees near each opening drinking water to bring back to the colony. The nuc that was set up last week was surprising with bees going in and out. Seeing the activity outside the nuc made me happy because I thought the queen hatched from her cell and was commanding her worker bees to build a colony....WRONG!

At the first available moment on today, Jim and I suited up and decided to open the nuc first. Upon opening it we noticed a large number of drone bees. When we pulled out what was a full frame of capped honey, we noticed it was completely drained of any honey. All that was left was empty comb. The next frame was the brood frame and unfortunately even these were destroyed by marauding bees during the robbing. The queen had emerged but was quickly killed by the robbing bees. I was very disappointed but learned a lesson which was to never mix bees from two colonies in one hive. I believe they fought to the death immediately and when they were dead, the bees from the other hives had an opportunity to rob.

This is what a Nuc looks like

The next hive we opened was the Alpha Hive. The first thing we noticed after opening the telescoping cover was that ants had made a home in the cover. Last week we had put the legs of the hive stand in cups full of water to fend off any ants looking for a free meal. What we didn't count on was a very long blade of grass touching the hive which created a bridge for the ants. Crafty fuckers. After killing them one by one, we went through the lengthy process of pulling off the honey supers and were glad to see this hive was doing an incredible job at making honey. Hopefully the next time we're up at the house we'll be able to remove a whole box of frames and bottle some honey. Jim pulled off each box carefully until he was down to the lower brood super. We found the queen's cage we put in last week and the queen emerged successfully. We then began pulling out each frame looking for the queen herself or even a sign that she exists such as newly laid eggs....no luck. We then pulled out frames from the 2nd brood super and Jim did it again...he found the queen immediately and pointed her out to me. Last week when we installed her, she was on the smaller side and this week she was plump full of eggs. She was making her rounds laying her eggs in empty comb cells and the worker bees were tending to her. We were satisfied, loaded up the remaining honey supers and closed her up.

Empty Brood Cells on frame from Alpha Hive. It's amazing how uniform they create these cells.

The next hive was Hive C. The hive was calm even though when we removed the cover, a few brood cells were killed. We found the empty queen cage and again the queen successfully emerged. Overall the colony was functioning but we believe something is wrong because there were 3 supercedure cells that we killed off. Jim found the queen again quickly and she looked healthy and accepted by the colony. We closed her up and moved onto the Nasty Hive.

The Nasty Hive kept to its name and were dive bombing my face netting as we got closer. They're very protective and Jim believes they're Africanized. We opened it quickly, looked around, didn't find the queen but knew she was there because the brood looked great. We shut her up and called it a day.

Next week we're staying local but the following week we're hoping to begin collecting the honey...FINALLY! We'll post pictures ;)

One more HazMat suit pic of me that Jim took!

Garden: June 12, 2011

We managed to finish all our summer planting despite the rain, adding a couple new vegetables along the way.



Harvested the strawberries and honeyberries; blueberries are just about ready.

Bees: Saturday, June 4th, 2011

Weather: Beautiful 75 degrees, sunny, mildly windy

Jim and I were excited to see whether the newly emerged queen from 2 weeks ago in the Alpha hive was busy laying eggs. As we approached the hive, they were behaving normal so we expected all to be well. We removed the top cover and the guard bees looked at us as they always do with the "not again" look. We removed 2 of the honey supers, the queen excluder and as we inspected the first brood super we noticed it was full of honey. We removed a frame in the middle of the super and lo and behold Jim spotted the Queen Bee Marie Antoinette immediately...he's got a great eye at finding her.

We held that frame with Marie Antoinette and pulled frame after frame trying to spot eggs...but there weren't any. What we had read about in the books about consecutive rainy days combined with a newly emerged queen was a recipe for disaster and it happened to us. Because of the consecutive rainy days the queen doesn't leave the hive to mate and after a few days of this, the queen gives up and ends up laying unfertilized eggs (drones) and eventually the entire hive dies.

Keeping with tradition of any queen named Marie Antoinette, I was forced to chop off her head. Here's a picture of Marie Antoinette before she went to the guillotine.

Can you spot the Queen Bee?

We moved onto Hive C which seemed very sluggish. Bees were coming and going but nothing compared to the busy Alpha Hive. Last week when we checked Hive C, it had a supercedure cell and we were hoping we'd see that a new queen emerged. The frames weren't organized well with comb scattered about in different sizes and shapes...clear sign that a queen didn't exist. We sealed up the hive and took off for Greenwich New York...home to a large beekeeping facility named BetterBees.

We arrived after a tranquil drive through several small towns with beautiful old homes. When reached BetterBees, there were many cars there picking up everything from packaged bees to honey extracting equipment. While waiting on line to pick up 2 new queen bees, a neurotic, loud woman and her husband decided to chat up me and Jim. They started beekeeping last summer but have no idea what to do with a hive. She said that the whole family is afraid of the bees and they go running into the house screaming when the bees come near them. I thought that was an odd comment for someone interested in raising bees. When I asked her if she suits up she said that she never bothered to buy one and uses an old $5 wedding dress & veil and rubber dishwashing gloves when she adds more boxes to the hive. At that point Jim and I looked at each other and realized she and her husband (who kept his distance from her) were loons.

We picked up the 2 queen bees, said goodbye to the loons and drove back home excited that we had 2 eager queen bees ready to lay thousands of eggs in the waiting comb. One of the caged queen bees began piping loudly and when we researched it online, the article said they do that when they're virgin queens ready to battle another queen OR they make that sound soon after mating. We're hoping that she's a mated queen but time will tell.

At BetterBee we also purchased a 5 frame nuc. I wanted to try an experiment to see if it worked. The experiment was to remove the frame from Hive C with the supercedure cell (and messed up comb) and put it in the nuc with a few bees AND taking a frame of honeycomb from Alpha Hive along with bees and putting it in the nuc as well. Originally I didn't want to take any bees from Hive C since their numbers were dwindling but about 30 of them wouldn't leave so into the nuc they went too. I sealed the nuc up and checked it the next day. There weren't as many bees as we'd like but we're hoping they'll do what they need to do and keep the nuc going. We have fingers crossed that they'll make it but I don't believe there were enough bees to manage the colony until the queen emerges and starts laying eggs. They need at least 1000 bees at a minimum to build the comb quickly and keep out any unwanted pests such as moths from invading their space.

Installing the queen bees into Hive C and Alpha hive was successful and we'll check next weekend to make sure all went well.

Also worth noting is that we noticed the new queen bees were thinner than Marie Antoinette. It could be that they're Carniolan bees and Marie Antoinette was an Italian Honeybee or it's possible that Marie Antoinette mated later and it took a few days longer to produce fertilzed eggs....swelling her abdomen.

If you had a difficult time spotting Marie Antoinette, here she is circled:

Great Barrington Saturday Evening

After a busy day driving 4 hours for our bees, Jim and I had a nice dinner at a great woodfired, organic,sourdough pizza restaurant called Baba Louie's in Great Barrington.