Honey happens

(co-authored and edited by S.D.)


This year we were prepared. We weren't going to live through weeks of sticky kitchen, like we had last time...and we were going to get honey! We didn't know how much, but the hive box was heavy so we knew we'd get something. To avoid the sticky mess, we had plastic layed out on the chairs and table. We had every possible utensil we'd need for honey extraction on the counter, and we had the counters clears of everything else. The coffee pot, the knife rack, the dish rack, the toaster, the big yellow fruit bowl were all moved into the living room. In hopes of a big harvest we had bought a bee extruder, honey extractor, sieves , a collector bucket, a capping knife (and we borrowed an electric capping knife) and 24 1/2 pound, and 24 pound honey containers.

wax cappings

To get started with the harvest, we placed the three foot high honey extractor on the plastic sheet by the sink, grabbed a dish towel, wet it and then rang it out. S.D. put on the bee suit. It was time to see just how much honey we would harvest after two years of bee keeping.

Getting the frames
We put the bee extruder on the hive between the honey super and the bees and left it for two days.  This allows the bees to go back down to the main body where the queen lives but not back into the honey super. Getting the honey super off the hive was relatively easy.  This way the bees didn't object when we removed the super and although it was heavy we only had to move it a few hundred feet to the back deck. There we removed two frames, shook off the ten or so persistent bees, covered the remaining frames with the damp towel to keep other bees from coming to the frames and brought the removed frames and one persistent bee into the house.

Uncapping

Loading the spinner

Once we had the frames, lovely smelling and heavy with combs full of honey, the next step is to remove the capings off the top of the comb so the honey can flow out. Removing just the cap, the very thin wax cover, of the comb, and not the comb itself is tricky business. We had borrowed an electric capping knife made just for this purpose. Once plugged in, the knife heats to the ideal temperature to simultaneously heat and slice through the wax. It worked okay. So long as we removed the building wax hunk off regularly and S.D. used a lot of pressure. The wax cappings went into a big metal bowl and the honey started dripping. Meanwhile, the bee who snuck in started buzzing angrily overhead and a few more showed up on the outsides of the window screen.   We ended up with a nice chunk of wax after it was filtered, enough to make a few candles.

Spinning Out the Honey
Once the cappings were off both sides of each frame we loaded the frames into the honey spinner. This was the three foot high bucket with a closable spout at the bottom, two racks on the inside, and a handle on the outside. Once loaded, we placed the lid on top. Grabbed the turning handle on the side and started cranking the handle, thereby spinning the frames inside the bucket and causing the honey to fly out of the combs hit the inside bucket walls and flow to the bottom.

Our Honey Flow

Honey!!!!

After repeating the process for 4 frames we noticed that the honey at the bottom of the bucket was starting to reach the spinners. It was time to open the spout and start filling the collector bucket running it through the sieves. The into the honey containers from there. And boy did the honey flow. By the time we'd finished all 12 frames, we'd filled all the bottles we'd prepared and even had to find a few jelly jars to fill too!   In the end we figure we got about 30 pounds of honey.  All of our friends, family and neighbors we gave a sample to, and the 15 pounds we sold to co-workers,  loved it and said how much better it was than store bought.  We figured out a quick estimate of how much each pound of honey cost us, it wasn't pretty, but then this is a hobby and not cost effective in any way.

Clean Up
Fortunately the plastic wasn't needed, it wasn't nearly as messy as we feared.  Clean up of all the gear was easy, we let the bees do it!  The frames went into the super and back on the hive to let the bees clean them up.  The extractor, sieves and bucket all went out to the back yard and every bee in the area helped clean them up.  In the end all we had to do was give them a quick wash and the clean up was done.

Graduation

Honey Harvest

After two years, 5 queens, 3 bee packages, 1 nuc, we had a kitchen full of lovely honey. Even more impressive, we'd finally gone through the full cycle of a bee keepers years - we were bee keepers!

The Queen is Dead. Long Live The Other Queen.

S.D. pulled the queen cage out from the second hive. "That's strange. She's still in there" he said.  It had only been a week and sometimes it does take longer for the queen to emerge, but we had just opened the other hive and found not only that the queen had been released but that she had already laid eggs.  "I think she's dead."

Damn.

The newspaper method

The chances of getting another queen at this point in the season were highly improbable. If  we left the hive queenless for too long the workers might start laying eggs and then they'd be totally useless. We both looked at the other hive and had the same thought. "Guess we're going to have to combine
them."

Combining hives was something we'd only heard about. When a colony is weak or queenless the best thing to do is combine them with another, stronger, queened hive. Basically we understood that the way to do that was to take the cover off the strong hive, put a piece of newspaper over it then put the weaker hive box (with the hive) on top. By the time the bees have eaten through the paper, they will have adjusted enough to each other's scent that they won't try and kill each other. That was the theory. We'd never actually seen it done.

S.D. wanted to do it right then and there and see what happened, I wanted to research the best way to do it first. (Can you tell who's the librarian and who's the scientist?).  After consulting the books and the web, hunting around for newspaper and settling for last weeks Stop and Shop sales flyer, we combined the hives - just as S.D. had originally proposed.

Can you see her now?

And all was quiet. The bees in the top hive didn't really appear to be doing much and the bees in the bottom hive appeared to be going about their normal business.  It was one of the many times a hive cam would be nice. As it was we could only imagine the action around the newspaper barrier as all the angry (?) bees gathered below and above it, buzzing loudly, fanning, and trying to chew through the paper with their tiny mandibles. Or maybe they were reading up on the weekly specials? Hard to know without the webcam.

As it was, we spent the week trying to decide if the pile of dead bees in front of the hive had risen dramatically, and looking for pieces of newspaper to be thrown out.

The next Sunday we opened the hive. There were plenty of bees in the top hive, and there was a very large hole in the newspaper. Success, the hives had combined! Down below we found capped brood, larvae and the Queen! She is a big brown one, and she is big. They'd told us she would be easy to spot and there she was.  It took two packages, but it looks like we had one big healthy hive. 

The 2014 Bee Saga

June finds us, once again, sitting on the back deck watching bees flying in and out of their hive.  We know we're a little bit ahead of where we last year, but we're not really sure how far, and we also know we're lucky just to have bees at all. 

Last winter was a tough one for all bees in New England. With a hive survival rate of only 30% we didn't feel so bad about loosing our hive. We certainly didn't tell everyone that we lost it even before the first snowfall but with overall survival rates so low, it really didn't matter.

We also started the spring feeling pretty smug as we had 2 packages on order.With everyone trying to start up 70% of the hives, demand was high.  If you hadn't already ordered your packages by February, they were going to be hard to find.

And so it was one fine morning in early May that we called to confirm our package pickup.  Ken, the bee keeper who had sold us the nuc, had included our order with his. His supplier lived in Vermont but met up with Ken in Springfield, Mass, during his return trip from Georgia. On the day Ken was supposed to meet with his supplier, and we subsequently would meet up with Ken, we called him.

"Umm, there's been a problem with the pickup you say?"
"Yes," Ken answered. "The guy's truck has broken down in New York so I didn't meet him. I'm not getting the bees this year"
"Umm. Can I go meet him in Vermont. We need the bees, and everyone else is already sold out"
"Sure," he replied, and gave me the number

I called the guy. Apparently the truck was dead, his wife was coming to get him in their car. The wife wouldn't allow bees in the car, and he sold the packages to a guy who ran a landscaping business in Connecticut.
"Umm, can I have the number for the landscaping guy?" I asked. I needed bees!!!

"Sure," he replied, and gave me the number.

I called the guy. The bees were sold.

Noooooooo.  I couldn't imagine how dull the backyard would be without the bees. How un-busy.

And then I recalled an email that had come through the Essex County Beekeepers Association list a few weeks ago. It was a vague email. Someone was compiling a list of people who needed bees because someone might have a line on some packages.  With nothing to loose, I contacted the someone who was making the list.

"Yes" they replied, "We're probably going to pick up a truckload in Georgia next week."

"Great. I'll take two packages!"  The price was double that of normal packages, but some of the money went to some group that was helping bees do something or other. Whatever. We wanted bees.  "Where will I need to go to pick these up?" I asked next. Having been  willing to go to Vermont, and Connecticut to get bees, I assumed this would require a similar trek.  The guy gave me a Boston address.


Monday afternoon I left work early, walked three blocks and met S.D. coming out of warehouse carrying two, very angerly buzzing packages of bees. Their anger all the more justified when you noticed that a good number of them lay at the bottom of the package, dead.

S.D. sprayed the packages with some sugar water, which quieted them, placed them in paper bags and seated belted them into the back. Sensing time was of the essence, we needed to get out of Boston before rush hour, and get the bees into a better environment as fast as possible, we hightailed it up to the North Shore.

A package for every hive

Once home, it only took about 10 minutes to suit up, set up the hives and begin installing the packages. With so many bees dead, I was anguesting over the fate of the queens.  As we had learned, hives without queens are really just an exercise in existentialism, and I wasn't up for another year of that.

S.D. carefully pulled the first queen cage out. We looked, and she moved! She was alive!! He shook the bees into the hive, where they gladly went, removed the plug from the queen cage and installed it in the middle frame.

He then installed the second package just the same.  We  closed up the hives, and installed the sugar water feeder.

From our observation posts on the deck we watched the orientation flights begin. It was good to have bees in the yard again, and there was a chance that they'd do okay.  We had two queens, and we had bees. A week later we'd check to see if the queen had been released and if she had begun laying eggs. The cycle had begun again. 

The Price of Honey

The Jar Of Honey

There are two ways to set the price of an item. One is based on supply and demand, the other is based on the cost to produce.

Honey, like other agricultural products is priced via supply and demand. As such it's priced relatively high, the supply being limited in regards to demand. If however you were to price honey, especially our little jar of honey, based on production cost, it would be worth more than it's weight in gold.

Yes we now have honey! No more bees, but one entire frame of honey.  During the recent January thaw we checked our bees only to discover that they had frozen to death. Most likely because there were not enough of them to maintain the 70 degrees necessary for survival. They did have plenty of stored honey so that wasn't the problem. They just couldn't stay warm enough to get to it.

The frame with honeycomb

And so as we were cleaning up the hive, shaking the dead bees and scraping the propolis  we decided to try our hand at harvesting a little honey.

Honey harvesting is described as a simple process of removing the wax cappings off the honey combs and extracting the honey using a centrifugal abstracter, basically a bucket onto which you load the frames and spin them around until the honey flows out the spout at he bottom. We didn't have an abstracter but we did have time and since we were only going to harvest one frame we figured we could tilt the frame up and let the honey drip down.

Cappings removed and
the drip begins

Two weeks later, it's still dripping, and S.D. has ordered an extractor.  So far we have one half a jar of the best honey ever!  I don't want to do the math but considering the cost of the hive, two packages of bees, an extra queen and all of the beekeeping stuff we needed, the cost of this little jar of honey is more than enough to make it one of the most expensive items, per pound, in our entire house.

We have not yet begun to beekeep

This morning, for the first morning in two months, our bees were up and out with the sunrise, the way bees should be. For the first time in recorded history they also have a productive and laying queen.

We did what we had to do to get a healthy hive. We got a new one. We posted a "hive or nuc wanted" message on the Essex County Beekeepers listserv and an awesome beekeeper from Billerica replied. Ken took us out to one of his beeyards (pictured left) where we sorted through a three box hive. He selected ten frames, one with honey and the rest with brood and honey, and gently placed them into our hive body. All of the frames were full of bees and although she was elusive, Ken located the queen and pointed her out to us. She's a big serious looking queen with a black abdomen and a long black body.

We strapped the hive tightly together, loaded it into the truck, drove our new hive home and settled it into the garden.

We will not give up the hive.

Just about everything that could, has

Yesterday we went into the hive and see if the new queen had been released. Hoping that she had, the hive had excepted her and she was busy laying eggs.

What we found was the queen and about 6 other bees all stuck in the queen box.  They had chewed through the candy plug and somehow released a flap that kept them trapped inside.

The rest of the hive looks much the same. Messy, and now dead drone brood but still with lots of bees.

We shook the queen and all her cell mates into the hive, and closed it up for another week.

Last Chance Bee Hive

The new queen arrived on Friday.

S.D. waited for a break in the rain, walked the hive over to the far corner of the yard and shook all the bees out.   The idea behind it being that all the non-working bees and the existing queen, if she existed, wouldn't be able to find their way back to the hive. Then he set up the empty hive back in it's old location, for the working bees to find.  The drone comb he put in the freezer to kill the larvae.

On Saturday, we waited for another break in the rain, a break that turned out to be the only one. S.D. installed the new queen, and returned the now-dead drone comb.

If the bees can clean out the drone comb, if they accept the queen, if the queen starts laying the minute she's out, and if the other bees live long enough the raise the new brood, then we just might have a bee hive.

Killin' Bees

Bee'maggedon has come and it is now time for the overlords to play their hand. While we were patient beekeepers for the last month our hive has not done well. Short of flying off, they've done about as bad as a hive can do.

When we checked in on them Sunday, all we found was 'drone comb'. Pictured here it's basically a messy laying pattern, which means our queen, didn't get mated and is only laying sterile/male/drone eggs. Drones take longer to grow, supply a perfect breeding ground for mites, and do nothing but hang around the hive and eat (and breed if there is a queen in need of services). All similarities to human males aside, it's not the makings for a productive hive.  In fact once they hatch and the nurse bees dies, the hive will die.

So we're going to do a little killing in preparation for a new queen.  S.D. ordered one yesterday and by the time she gets here we hope to have all those drones, and drone cells out of there.

Bringing Home the Pollen

All the bee people are telling us "The Nectar Flow is On".  Not exactly sure what that means but the pollen is certainly coming into the hive.  It only took a few minutes to snap this photo of two workers with loaded pollen sacks. A few days ago they were bringing in mostly green pollen but now its mostly yellow. The green was definitely from the maple trees. Not too sure about the yellow.

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Also, this is the 'beauty shot' of the hive location at the North end of the garden. You'd think with a set up like this, they'd be the happiest of bees.

Remedial reading. What's up with the hive?

It’s been 10 days since our last hive opening and time to take another look. During Bee School we'd attended a hive opening and watched a professional look at the individual frames and tell us how the hive was faring. It was like he was reading a book. For instance one of the frames had these giant cells hanging off the bottom. That meant the hive was raising drones, as he looked around the rest of the frames he was able to read other clues that explained why.

Now it was our turn to try and read hive. And it was going to be a remedial reading at best.

We already knew the workers had been busy. We'd seen some of them returning with full pollen sacks(yes I crouched at the side of the hive entrance waiting for that brief moment when they land but before they scuttle onto the hive. Just to catch a glimpse of tiny little insect legs bulging with brightly colored pollen, mostly green). Pollen gather can be read to mean that the bees are probably feeding eggs and pupae. But the real proof would come with the hive inspection.

For this, the second hive inspection, we understood that we were to try and find the queen (again), see if she was laying eggs, spot some cells with eggs, developing larvae and capped cells (to show that she’d been laying for at least 10 days) and check that the workers were attending to their various jobs. Ideally the queen lays her eggs in consecutive cells in the lower parts of the frames forming a neat half-circle pattern, and the workers would have drawn out more comb, been feeding the eggs and creating royal jelly for them to float in.

Those round semi-circles are the larvae. Not sure if the filled
cells are pollen, capped brood, or honey.

So what did we see? In the outer 3 or 4 frames, we saw bees. Still lots of bees. No more than last time, but really not many less either. We saw lots of eggs covered in royal jelly. We saw some round larvae and maybe some capped brood? We can’t say any of this was in too organized of a pattern. I think we even saw some pollen stores. Not enough to warrant all their gathering activity, but some. Aside from the fact that the eggs, pupae, etc were roughly grouped together, and there wasn’t any discernible overall pattern, it all looked okay, at least to us.

Then we got to the inner frame. Still lots of bees, but we also saw would looked like a cells with multiple eggs and one cell, wider and more drawn out than the others. A Supercedure Cell. Multiple eggs in cells is a sign that the workers have started laying eggs. Workers can only lay sterile eggs that result in drones, and they only do that on very rare occasions when they aren’t happy with their queen. A supercedure cell means the hive has decided to raise her replacement.

The Supercedure cell.
To the left are the cells with multiple eggs

Being new to hive reading, we weren’t sure how to interpret all this. After closing everything back up S.D. called our beekeeping mentor. A quick conversation confirmed our reading. The queen had been released on schedule and she had started laying eggs. The hive was doing a good job caring for and raising their new bees and they had also, for some reason, decided they needed a new queen. Due to the presence of newly laid eggs in the outer frames, it appeared that she was still in the hive (although we again failed to find her) but for some reason our bees felt she needed to go.

 It’s going to be another two weeks before we can peek inside the hive. During that time, if we read the situation right, our bees will continue feeding and caring for all the eggs, and brood. Some of the new bees will have emerged and started their lives as good worker bees. The bees will also continue building out that supercedure cell and raising the queen. Depending on when they started, we could even have a new queen by then.


--- Sorry about the long time between entries, it’s been a busy time of year. More entries on our trip to Death Valley are also in the works. Please feel free to leave comments, I do read them, even if I get too far behind.

Where's Waldo

For the first hive inspection you're supposed to make sure the queen has been released, and hopefully find her happily being attended by the bees. Oh, and you only want to have the hive open for a very short time. Figuring that it would be easy to check and remove the queen cage, but harder to spot the queen I was assigned the duty of hive photographer. S.D. pulled the frames, I clicked the pictures.

The opening went well. S.D. quickly found the empty queen cage, and pulled the frames so I could shot them.The bees were very calm. They really didn't pay us much attention at all, and continued drawing out comb while we were looking. At least 5 of the frames had some wax on them. All five had lots of very busy bees. Everything looked good and we had the hive closed back up in less than five minutes.

Then it was time to review the footage and find the queen. According to the books and the pros, she'll stand out because she is slightly longer than the worker bees with her abdomen extending beyond her wing tips, and she'll be surrounded by a group of attendant bees. And that's it. She doesn't even the have decency to wear a red and white hat. We've spent a good while pouring over the photos. We've seen lots of comb being drawn. Some of the cells look really deep. I think I've seen a few eggs. S.D. thinks I'm crazy. Neither of us, however, thinks we've found the queen. She could be anywhere, she could even be  underneath that mass of insect bodies.

This is the queen cage still attached.

The white stuff, in the hexagon pattern - that's wax they've added.

If you can find her - let us know!

Now we'll wait another two week before going back in to see if there are brood cells. (Baby bees).

The Bee Whisperer

 Hive body and package

Finally, after eight weeks of Bee School, and much anticipation, the Bees are here! We picked them up at 4:00, drove them home and 'installed the package' into the hive body. Yup - not only do we have bees, but we can now talk the talk.

A 'bee package' is a small box of plywood and screening that contains 3 pounds, approx. 3000, bees and an even  smaller box containing the queen. The queen box has a candy plug in one end.  The idea being that she and the worker bees will take 2 or 3 days to eat through the candy and release the queen.  During that time they'll all get to know each other better, or at least well enough that the worker bees don't kill the queen.

Prior to the package arrival we'd spent a few nights and a day or two building and painting the hive, which consists of two hive bodies', a honey super (these are the boxes that contain 'frames' with 'foundation'), a screened base board, a slated spacer above that, a inner and outer cover. That was fun, a lot like I'd imagine shop class would have been in high school.

Once you have the hive box finished, painted and filled with foundation frames, it's ready for the package. First you place the queen-in-a-box in the hive body, and then dump the rest of the package in with her. The bees were buzzing. Literally, the sound was a loud, awesome buzz and while I was apprehensive about opening the package, S.D. just popped the top, turned the box over,  dumped, and then banged them out of the box. Most went into the hive but that still left a hundred or so buzzing around, crawling and  pooping on S.D. Bee poop is  one thing you never really think about, but they do poop, a lot, especially after being on a box for a day or two. They even pooped on the camera while I was filming the event. And they pooped all over S.D. But, angry and disoriented as they were, they didn't sting him. After a little while, they all actually went into the hive just as he told them to. Then S.D. closed it up and that was that.

The package is installed. Now we wait to see if they like their queen, and their new home.

A Warm Bee is Better Than a Wet Bee

Bees don't like bananas, getting wet, perfume, and stressed out people. They do like early mornings, warm days and living in hives of 60,000. If all goes well we'll have one of those in our backyard by June.

This is SD's adventure more than mine. As long as I've known him he's been wanting a hive. So when the Essex County Bee Association advertised their Bee School he signed us up.  For the next eight Tuesdays we'll be learning the art and skill of the beekeeper, and once the class is done we'll be installing our own "package", watching the bees "drawing out" the comb, and harvesting over 8 gallons of honey.

Prior to our first class last night I didn't know much about bees.  I'd gotten pretty good at spotting bee hives, and using honey in just about everything, but that's about it. I've read A Country Year: Living the Questions, and while it's a good overview I'm no where near ready to put on a bee suit and open a hive. But after our first class, I'm beginning to think this may be doable.