Bee Mama Missive: Honey!

Posted on July 13, 2014 by Tina

My bees make incredible honey. It’s just amazing stuff.

Because our bees were overcrowded in their hives, we recently removed one bar with drawn comb from each box and those bars were full of capped honey. The other frames had some brood or were empty, so we didn’t remove those. Removing the bars with honey lessens the amount of stored honey for the bees during winter, but we have a long growing season here in Austin and there is still time for the bees to replenish their supply, assuming the hive survives. Bees are excellent little foragers and they’ll rapidly make up the loss of honey.

We were totally unprepared for the extraction of honey from our hives. As we pulled out our chosen combs of honey, I bagged them in airtight plastic gallon bags and placed them into the freezer until I had time to remove the honey from the comb.

I’m not sure there’s a need for expensive equipment to extract honey from a home bee hive. It’s probably nice to have a professional extractor and if I’m ever serious about honey production, I’d consider investing in one. But for this relatively small and unplanned job, we kept things low-tech.

I emptied comb with honey into an old metal colander placed in a bowl.

Do you see how the colander is propped up? Yeah, that’s right–with tea boxes strategically placed on the edges of the bowl, flanked by jars buttressing each side. Didn’t I say it was a low-tech operation?

I crushed the comb with a heavy, large spoon and let the honey drip slowly into the bowl. Bees make beautiful comb. Perfect hexagons, with firm but malleable texture, honeycomb is a truly remarkable product. I hated to crush the comb, but it there’s no way around squishing it up to get to the honey.

I didn’t toss out the crushed comb, but stored in the freezer. Sometime in the future, I’ll melt it down when (if?) I add other boxes to our hives. We use top bars for the bees to comb-build on and if there is a strip of wax on the bar, like this,

the bees use it as a guide for their comb-building.

Once most of the honey was out of the comb and into the bowl, Bee Daddy poured the honey into a jar through a tea strainer. The tea strainer caught any extraneous materials (primarily wax) left in the honey from the first round with the colander.

It’s a messy job. Sticky honey dripped onto the counters, floors, table–everywhere! I never quite realized how water-soluble honey is though–it cleans up immediately. So, while messy, this neat freak (yeah, I am, sorta) didn’t fret too much over the mess.

I washed each jar as we finished.

We bottled almost 7 cups of honey! Wow! Sweet, locally produced honey. Our bees fly within a 3 mile radius of our home, so it doesn’t get more local than that. We’ve shared honey and will keep some for future use. Several people who’ve tasted our bees’ honey think it tastes like peaches. Interesting. There are peach trees around, but peach pollen/nectar wouldn’t comprise but a very small percentage of the honey. Our bees produce honey that tastes better than any store bought honey that I’ve ever tried–that stuff is just not in the same category at all.

With the deaths of our queens, our bees are struggling a bit. I appreciate their hard work and am awed by their amazing abilities. I hope this isn’t our last honey harvest, though I imagine we won’t get honey again for quite a long time.

Thanks bees! You’re the best!

Bee Mama Missive: Oops!

Posted on July 11, 2014 by Tina

Adventures with bees!

Or, crisis in Bee-ville.

As of this writing, I’m not sure which of those I’m experiencing. What I’m understanding about beekeeping is that there’s much to learn. And like gardening, one learns more from mistakes than from successes.

I’m also beginning to trust my instincts.

When we open the hives, there’s so much to keep track of. We look for eggs, brood, number of drone cells, queen, capped and uncapped honey. We’re doing all of this as quickly and efficiently as possible, while recording our observations. We smoke the bees continually to keep them calm–the little buggers sting! There are an array of tools (brush, hive tools, saw) to keep track of, all while perspiring profusely in a hot, hot, hot bee suit.

Sometimes, this beekeeper’s head wants to explode!

In early June, we performed a routine check of our hives. We were leaving town for two weeks and regular hive checks are mandatory in beekeeping.

As we removed bars with comb, we noticed that instead of the comb having a full, normal shape,

several of the combs in both hives were indented at the bottom,

or skewed to the side.

We realized that the bees had built cross comb in both hives. Cross comb is comb built perpendicular to the main direction of comb in the hive.

Turns out, bees have a thing about gravity and if the hive is tilted back ever so slightly and is not level, bees are more likely to build cross comb. Sure enough, our hives weren’t quite level. So I placed a bit more mulch underneath the feet of the hives to level the hives,

and that problem was resolved.

Because it’s best (for the beekeeper, anyway) to encourage the bees to build comb in an organized manner, we were told to cut out the cross comb–which we did.

As good beekeepers, we followed beekeeping protocol. Honestly though, given our problems now, I regret that decision.

I felt badly about removing the cross comb. There were lots of capped and uncapped white larvae in that comb which we removed and therefore destroyed.

Capped and uncapped larvae denote developmental stages. The eggs are laid in the cells of comb, larvae develop and grow, then at a certain point the cell is capped. The bees develop on a specific timetable into either workers, drones, or queens and eventually the adult bee emerges from the cell.

For the next few days after the hive check and before I left for my trip, I noticed that the bees were different–more aggressive and not the same sweet little girls I was accustomed to. I was stung multiple times and they were not keen on tolerating me anywhere near the hives, which was unusual. Bees are driven by pheromones. Their development, job in the hive and hive identification are all pheromone-based and the queen is the epicenter of that pheromone universe. I’ve learned that when a queen dies and the pheromone levels are dropping, the hive can become cantankerous.

Menopausal bees, if you will.

I understand that.

Fast-forward three weeks later and another hive check. Before I continue, I should explain that we’ve named our hives: Scar (for obvious reasons), on the right and Mufasa, on the left.

That will make telling the story slightly easier.

And confirm to you that I’m completely wackadoo.

We opened both hives and noticed several oddities. There was no brood in Scar and only a little capped brood in Mufasa. No fresh eggs or larvae in either hive.

There was lots of plain comb,

comb loaded with honey,

and comb with budding queen cells.

That’s concerning because it means the bees are attempting to create their own queen. That’s not necessarily bad, but given the other evidence of no queen activity, that could spell doom for the hives. By now I was convinced that we had no queen, definitely in Scar, possibly in Mufasa.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I sent queries to an Austin Beekeeping Association and to BeeWeaver about what we observed in the hives and the possible injury to or death of our queen(s). Additionally, our hives were a bit overcrowded with nine frames, rather than the normal eight, so moving drawn comb in and out of tight quarters increased the likelihood of injuring bees, including the queens. Bees are killed every time we hive check and it is possible that we killed the queen(s), either by removing a bar with comb, or setting it back in the hive or when we cut out the cross comb.

All advice to us was to wait a week or so and check again. A week later, I checked and still there was no new brood. I sent photos to BeeWeaver and they agreed that it was time to get a new queen for Scar–which fortunately I was able to do immediately since BeeWeaver’s home office is about 10 minutes from where I live. I brought home Scar’s new queen (marked with a green dot) and her attendants,

and re-queened Scar on July 1.

I’ve checked both hives since and Scar’s queen is out of her queen cage and I think there’s some new brood, though I’ll know for certain next week. But there’s no brood at all in Mufasa and for bureaucratic reasons, I can’t get a queen for Mufasa until next week. Last week, my gut told me to get a new queen for both hives, but I deferred to those with more experience and only re-queened one hive.

I now regret that decision.

I knew something was amiss after the early June hive check and I felt that both of my hives needed new queens last week, even though others recommended re-queening only one of the hives. I don’t generally operate on woo-woo, emotional factors. I’m an adherent to science, fact and reason. But I dearly wish I’d followed my instincts with this glitch in my beekeeping.

Time will tell whether my hives survive.

The mistakes we’ve made are the mistakes of novice beekeepers: building hives that are out of the ordinary, overcrowding the boxes with the placement of one-too-many bars in each, (perhaps) removing the drawn comb too quickly when checking the hives, not acting immediately when we suspected that there was something wrong with our queens.

The biggest mistake though, was not trusting ourselves.

The one positive from this experience, hard lessons aside, is that we extracted honey! I hadn’t planned to retrieve honey from my hives this year, but we decided to remove one bar from each box to alleviate crowding and the bars we removed were those full of honey!

More about that next time.

Busy Bees

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Tina

Posted on May 30, 2014

We hived our honeybees just over two weeks ago and other than checking to assure that the queens left their cages, we haven’t opened our hives. We’ve fed the bees sugar-water, watched them cruise in and out of the hives and observed them at blooms and bird baths. Neighbors inform us that they’ve seen a definite increase in honeybees in their gardens, so we knew something was happening in our hives. Last Sunday, with excitement and trepidation, we opened our hives to check on our honeybees. We took the top off,

and heard the incessant bzzzzzz of activity. I pulled up the back frame of hive #1 and was stunned!

There was fully formed comb in that bar and the next 4 bars!

In the first combs there is capped honey (the lighter yellow, toward the top left) and capped brood–larva (the darker yellow in the middle of the frames). We also observed uncapped larva, eggs and pollen stores (the dark amber on the upper right side). After only two weeks!!! We were absolutely giddy! We couldn’t believe the bees had accomplished so much in such a short time.

Busy, busy bees!

We closed the first hive,

and added some more syrup for their dining pleasure.

Look at these little girls and their pantaloons.

Pollen pantaloons: that’s what I call them. That’s not the technical term, but I like it.

We opened hive #2,

and observed the same conditions as in hive #1: larva, eggs, capped brood, capped honey, pollen stores and happy, productive bees. In both hives, not all the bars have fully drawn comb, but all the bars have some comb.

Beautiful.

Perfect comb.

We were gobsmacked at what the bees accomplished in two weeks, that we forgot the look for the queens. Considering the built comb and amount of brood, honey and activity, we assume the queens are ruling their roosts and doing their queen things. So amazing are these bees.

The Oxford Dictionary defines the word awesome as: Extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear.

Except for the “fear” aspect, I think honeybees qualify as awesome.

The bees in hive #2 became a little annoyed at our amateur antics, so we closed the hive,

and logged our observations like good little beekeepers.

Meanwhile back at the bar,

…the honeybees regularly visit my bird baths, especially my blue bird bath. No matter what time of the day, there are always some gals having a drink and socializing. Sometimes, they’re drowning or drowned. I rescue those I can, but there’s not much I can do about the others. Sniff.

They wiggle their butts when they drink.

We’re thrilled that our hives appear healthy and progressing normally.

Awesome is such an overused word,