Spring Shows

I've been talking about bees a lot lately, as there are very few shows in the spring to talk about.  But it turns out that we have two shows coming up in the next few weeks.

Saturday, May 12, Blue Sky is having their annual Reds, Whites, and Blues Festival.  Things start at 10:00a and run till 8:00p with the bands playing from 11:00a to 7:30p.  We've had a lot of fun at this event in the past, and are looking forward to it this year. 

The next weekend, Saturday, May 19, we will be at Walker's Bluff for their Art and Wine Festival.  This one runs 11:00a-5:00p on the beautiful grounds of Walker's Bluff.  We love shows such as this, as you get a chance to go around and sample wines from a number of wineries without having to travel, and it gives you a much better opportunity to compare and contrast the wines of the region.  We'll be there along with a number of other artists, so come on out and see our spring collection.

Defeated

I had hoped to report on how we rescued a colony of honey bees from under someone's concrete steps today, but the concrete got the better of us.  We thought the sides were made of cinder blocks, and the demo hammer we had would have gone through that pretty easily.  Turns out they were made of poured concrete.  We chipped away at the back edge, and got through the wall.  Behind it we found...another wall of poured concrete.  And we were still nowhere near the bees. 

The demo hammer we were using wasn't getting us through the concrete, and I think it had plenty of power.  So either we need a different tool, or we don't know the right technique for using this one.  Anyone out there have any expertise on breaking down a concrete wall?  OK, we thought of dynamite, but the homeowner vetoed that idea, no reason given.   (sigh).  We eventually had to admit that we weren't equal to the task (we are, after all, beekeepers, not demolition experts).  So we packed up the truck and went home to lick our wounds.  We'll keep working on it, though, as we really want to get these bees out of this person's home.  Further updates as they come.

Bee Cut-Out

We are having an adventure today.  We're off to do a cut-out, removing unwanted bees which have taken up residence in someone's house.  This particular colony is under a set of concrete steps, so we have to knock out the side of the steps before we can extract the colony.  We will remove each piece of comb from the cavity.  Brood comb, that is, comb with eggs and/or larva, will be placed in frames and secured with rubber bands.  Honey comb will be collected in a bucket to be extracted for our own use.  Any other comb will be collected to melt down.  Bees will be brushed off into a new hive filled with the frames of brood comb, or gently collected with a specially made bee vacuum. When we're done, the home owner will be rid of a nuisance and we will have a new hive in our apiary.  We'll try to get pictures, but the first priority is getting the bees.

Cherry

We had a great day yesterday.  One of the wonderful things about life is the way things pop up out of nowhere and take you places you never imagined.  We came across a post about some cherry lumber, so we went to a local sawmill yesterday to check it out.  Sure enough, the guy had a couple of bundles of beautiful cherry boards, and at a price too good to pass up.  We wound up with some 500 board feet of local cherry wood just waiting to be made into something for our loyal customers.  It took us two trips in the pickup truck to get it all.  Right now it's sitting on the floor in the wood shop while I try to figure out where the heck I'm going to store that much wood.  We're looking forward to seeing what other wood he has in the future.

In the meantime, I'm dreaming of all the things I can make with this stash of lumber.  Do you have something you've been dreaming of that you'd like to see made in cherry?   Give us a call or drop us a line.  We'd love to hear from you.

The Season's First Swarm

I was setting out this morning on my early morning walk which takes me past our apiary.  It was a little after 6:00a, there was light in the sky, but the sun had not yet come over the horizon.  Just past the hives there is a honeysuckle bush which I've been meaning to take out, as it is an invasive species.  But today I saw something in it, a decent-sized dark mass.  When I got close I could see that, yep, sure enough, it was a swarm.

Now this was a bit of a surprise, as we have been keeping an eye on our hives and they seemed to have plenty of room to grow.  Colonies typically swarm when they feel they are running out of room and have the resources to start a new colony.  But here was the proof that we were wrong in our assessment, hanging on a branch a little less than waist high.

My first thought was to grab a standard Langstroth hive and put them in there, as we have done with all our previous swarms.  But then I had another idea.  This swarm, compact and close to the ground, was about as easy a swarm to catch as I was likely to find.  And I had been trying to figure out a good way to populate my top-bar hives.

A top bar hive is different from what you probably think of when you hear the word "beehive."  Instead of a Langstroth hive, a rectangular box which can be added to vertically to increase the available space and in which the comb is built inside frames, a top-bar hive is usually horizontal, all on one level, and the bees build their comb which hangs down from a bar which runs the width of the hive.  It's neither better nor worse than a Langstroth, just different.

I went in the house and grabbed a cardboard box.  I shook the swarm off of the bush and into the box.  Then I carried the box over to the top-bar hive and dumped them into it.  Then the waiting and worry began.

It was about 6:30a when this was happening, and it was about 42 degrees outside, much colder than the bees find comfortable.  As long as they were clustered, they could maintain their temperature.  By shaking the swarm loose, I caused them to lose their thermal advantage, and they didn't like that.  I could have waited until the temperature rose to tend to them, but as I was pretty sure they had already been there overnight, I was afraid of losing them if the scout bees found another location.  So I took a chance.

Even at that there was, and still is, a chance that they might abscond, that is, leave the hive I had placed them in to try their luck with a different site.  Adding to my worry was double-handful of bees clinging to the original swarm site.  I tried several times to shake them into my cardboard box and add them to their sisters in the top-bar hive, but the only took to the air until they could re-settle on the branch.  If I had missed the queen, and she was still in this small cluster on the branch instead of inside the hive, then more likely than not, all the bees already hived would fly out and join her on the branch, leaving me back where I started.

I finally took my morning walk, and when I returned, things were about as I had left them.  Most of the bees were in the hive, a somewhat larger cluster was hanging on the branch.  I made coffee, had my breakfast, and went to run an errand which took me away for a couple of hours.  I fretted all the way home, sure that I would find an empty hive, a swarm back on the bush, or worse...nothing at all.  No bees in the hive, no bees on the bush, no sign of where they had gone.

Imagine my relief when I parked and saw bees hanging off the entrance of the hive, and no sign of a cluster in the bush.  They're still flying in and out, and I hope they are getting down to business and building comb in which the queen can lay eggs so this colony can grow.  They could still abscond, based on what I've read, but I'm hopeful they'll like their new home.

We'll see.

Never a Dull Moment

I've been keeping a close on the hives the last couple of weeks, looking for drones.  Drones are the only males in the hive, whose main purpose is to mate the queen.  The hives won't swarm until there are drones available for the queen, and since all the drones get kicked out of the hive to die before winter sets in, we need a new crop of drones to hatch in the spring.  I'm trying to anticipate when swarming will start, hence the close eye out for drones.

Imagine my excitement when I saw my first drone of the season on the porch of one of the hives!  OK, it was a dead bee, but still, the first drone is a sign of things to come.  Now imagine my feelings when I rolled the "drone" over, only to find that not only was it not a drone, it was actually a queen.

Yikes!

A colony has to have a queen to lay eggs and ensure the continuation of the hive.  A dead queen on the porch is not a good sign.  We were concerned.  But a dead queen is not, in and of itself, a calamity.  If the old queen dies, the colony can create a new queen out of an egg cell.   Sometimes they raise new queens in anticipation of needing a new one, as when the old queen is failing, or is perceived to be weak.  Colonies reproduce by swarming, and to do this they have to raise new queens. We weren't sure what was happening.

Fortunately, the weather moderated, the winds died down, and we had a window of opportunity to get in and look around the hive. 

We set the top box off to one side and went frame by frame through the bottom box, the brood box.  We started at one side and checked them carefully as we took them out.  We saw some drawn comb, then some nectar filled cells.  The brood that we saw were drone cells, so they're coming along.  Then we saw what seemed to be a queen cell which had already hatched.  Ruth wanted to stop at that point, but I wanted to check one more frame.  Pulled it out, it was covered with bees, and lo and behold, Ruth spotted the queen! 

Now how, I hear you asking, could she see a queen alive and kicking in the hive if there was a dead queen on the porch?  Apparently, the deceased queen was felled by the surviving queen.  Two (or more) queens hatched at the same time.  When that happens, they fight it out.  The winner takes over the hive.  The loser...well, we found her on the porch. 

So there you are.  A peek into the inner workings of one our bee hives.  Pretty cool, isn't it?

Giving the Solar Wax Melter a Workout

I said some time ago, all I need is a sunny day.  Today, we finally got one, and I put our solar wax melter to good use.

Here is what it looked like when I started around 10:30 AM.  This is the comb from the extraction we did last weekend after it has been crushed, strained, and cleaned up by the bees.  I put it out in the melter, aimed it towards the sun, put about three-quarters of an inch of water in the receiving pan, shut it up and let it do its thing.   I checked back every fifteen minutes to see how it was getting along.

Fifteen minutes later.  Not a lot of difference, but I could see some melting here and there; the whole mass was slumping a bit.

More noticeable now is the brown at the bottom of the pan.  This was left from the last batch.  I was pretty sure there was a bit of wax left to extract from it, and the older dark comb actually helps filter the newer wax as it runs through it.

After half an hour, there was definitely a difference.  See how it's pulled away from the top, and the whole thing has become more compact.  By this point, it resembled a tray of rice crispy treats.

Forty-five minutes in.  Now we're really getting somewhere.Not only is the melting obvious around the edges, but you can see the melted wax starting to pour out of the bottom of the tray.

One hour, nearly half the original volume is melted down, and an appreciable accumulation in the receiving pan.

One hour, fifteen minutes, and we're almost all the way through.

It's worth noting here that the melter remained in the same position through the entire process.  I never had to turn it to follow the sun.

Here we get a better look at the melted wax coming out of the upper tray.  It drips, pours, and plops down into the receiving pan below.  The water I put in at the beginning helps keep the wax from getting stuck in the pan, making it much easier to remove than it would be without the water.  Don't ask me how I know this....

About an hour-and-a-half after we started, and we're pretty much all done.  Everything has melted, and there's just a bit more to run down into the receiving pan. Pretty neat, huh?

I love that we are able to this without using any energy other than that provided by that enormous nuclear furnace some ninety-three million  miles away.  Even though I was constantly watching this, it would have gone just as quickly, and just as well, without me anywhere near.  Melting wax on a stove comes with all kinds of warnings, since boiling over can cause the wax to ignite.  In a solar melter...not so much.

And here's the final product, the pan of wax fresh out of the melter.  As you can see, part of it is still liquid in this picture, but it solidified fairly quickly once I brought it inside.  This block of wax weighed out out just over one pound.  It still needs further refining, as there is still a bit of residual honey and a few impurities in it.   But this wax is well on it's way to becoming a lip balm or lotion bar for one of you.

Giving Back to the Bees

After this weekend's harvest, there was still more to do.  The crushed wax with the honey was put in a nylon mesh bag and suspended over a bucket for two days to allow the honey to drain out.  Once this was finished, there was still a fair amount of honey within the crushed comb, not enough to make it worthwhile to go after, but more than I wanted to deal with when we went to refine the beeswax.  There are several ways to separate the residual honey from the comb.  Our preferred way?  Let the bees do it!

We set the comb out on trays on a table a ways from the hives.  The first few hours were too cool and cloudy for the bees to take any interest.  But once the sun came out, they went to work.  Bees will take out whatever honey is left in the comb and return it to the hive.  The comb gets cleaned out, and the bees get an easy feed.  We like it because it strengthens the colony, doesn't waste any of the precious honey the bees have already made, and cleans the residue out of the comb with minimal work on our part.  Win win!

Another day of good weather (that's two in a row -  a rarity this spring!) and the beeswax will be ready to go in the solar wax melter.  Thursday promises to be warm and sunny, so we will get a first true test of our new tool.  I'm looking forward to watching the wax melt.  Hey, that's what we do for fun here in East Pomona!

Honey Harvest

We did our first real honey harvest this morning.  We had a super (upper box in the hive) full of honey which we had left over the winter, but which the bees haven't eaten.  Since the flow is upon us (or would be if it would ever warm up!) and they still have plenty of honey in the hive, we took off the super to make room for more empty ones to catch the honey yet to come.

This was a box of foundationless frames, meaning that instead of  a piece of plastic with the honey comb shape molded on it upon which the bees draw comb, these were empty frames with just a strip of wood at the top to act as a comb guide.  The idea is that the bees will line up their comb with the strip of wood, building it all within the plane of the frame, at least that's what the books say.  Unfortunately, the bees never read the book.  The comb was wonky, a term beekeepers use for comb which is built across two or more frames, or for any comb which doesn't fit neatly into the space of the frame.  Some of this ran across five frames, making it a challenge to remove.

We knew this comb was wonky, as it had been there since last summer.  Normally, the plan is to catch wonky comb as it is being built, then straighten it out so it is all within the frame, resulting in ten frames of parallel comb.Unfortunately, by the time we caught it, the whole box was built out, and the comb was full of honey.  At the same time, we had to deal with some health issues, and wonky comb became a much lower priority.  So we decided to leave it for the bees and extract what they didn't eat whenever we could get to it.

Some of the comb went directly into storage containers as comb honey.  If you've never eaten honey straight from the comb, you've really missed out.  There is truly nothing like it in this world.  The rest of the comb was crushed to extract the honey.

This extraction is being done via the crush-and-strain method, whereby we crush the honey-filled comb and place it in a mesh bag to drain into a plastic bucket.  This draining will take a day or two.  Once it is complete, the bag will contain the remaining beeswax, still covered with a layer of honey.  We will put this out for the bees to clean up.  They do a very good job of taking the honey off of the wax and storing it in the hive.  This way, nothing goes to waste.

The wax will then go into our solar wax melter to be rendered and refined.  The result will be several jars of pure, fresh honey, and a good chunk of new beeswax.  We are already looking ahead to the products we can make with the beeswax from our hives. 

Honey Bee Swarms

Dear Friends of Ruth and John:

We could use your help.  As you probably know, we’ve taken up beekeeping, and we’re having a pretty good time of it so far.  In the next week or so, the bees will begin swarming, and that’s where you come in.

Bees form new colonies by swarming, whereby the old queen and about half the worker bees take off and look for a new home.  Rather than find a new home first and going directly to it, the swarm alights somewhere, usually a branch, but occasionally on another object.  This swarm, usually about the size of a football, forms a compact mass which will hang around for a few hours or up to a few days while the scout bees go out looking for a new place for the colony to build their new home.  We’d like to collect that swarm and give it a home in our apiary.

 

If you see a swarm, please let us know ASAP.  We will need:

-           The address

-           The placement of the swarm, i.e., in a tree, in a bush, on a fence, on a building, etc.

-             The height from the ground

-            Permission of the property owner

-            If possible, a picture

If we can, we’ll be right out to hive the swarm before it can fly away.  If we can’t, we’ll pass the word on to another beekeeper to come and collect it and give the bees their best chance at survival.

If you see a swarm, please call me at 618-713-4101.  We would be ever so grateful.