Expecting the little 5-frame nuc I split off the big hive to be about ready for a regular 10-frame hive box, I put together some new frames and painted up a new deep (and a super too for good honey luck!). Unfortunately, when I finally opened the nuc, the lovely little eggs I had seen a couple of weeks before had all grown up to be drones (boys). This meant either I had a queen who mated with deficient drones or laying workers (when they are queenless long enough, some of the workers’ ovaries will develop just enough that they go around laying unfertilized eggs). I went through the nuc frames several times looking for a queen and didn’t find her so I believe I must have had laying workers, even though I had only seen one egg per cell when laying workers usually means several eggs per cell.

Anyhow, surrounded by taken-apart hives and bees getting antsy (ha) I made a quick decision to go ahead and install the nuc in my new deep and combine that with the Charlie Brown hive by putting a piece of newspaper between the two hives so they could get used to each other’s scents and not fight. A strong two-deep hive will bring more honey than two one-deep hives, so that’s my strategy and I’m sticking to it! The only danger is that if I did miss a queen from the nuc, she and Lucy (queen of the Charlie Brown hive) may fight to the death (one or both of theirs). Lucy lays a good pattern of brood so it would be a shame to lose her.

As usual now I’m just crossing my fingers that I did the right (or at least not the wrong) thing!

How to Get Some Honey

1. Remove super to be harvested from hive. Even though it wasn’t totally full I wanted some honey dammit so I took 8 frames which were around 50% full of capped honey (the rest of the cells empty). I did this with a bee brush, brushing as many bees as possible back into the hive, then left it out on the deck until dark. By then, they mostly all had gone back home and I just had to brush 5 or 6 off. (Tuesday, Sept 25)

2. If not harvesting immediately, put frames in the freezer to kill any small hive beetle eggs that are hiding in the comb. My freezer wasn’t big enough so I put them in the fridge since it would only be 4 days until I harvested (Saturday, Sept 29). If you’re making cut comb honey you really can’t skip that freezer part or you could end up with SHB larvae in your honey. Gross.

3. Take the frames out and warm them up to around 80 degrees F so the honey flows easily. I used a shop light since our house was around 65 at the time.

4. Cut the cappings off the all comb. / video

5. Place frames into extractor. I have a very special extractor – the Honey Badger – which was designed by my dear Dad and is powered by a high-voltage drill. Materials cost about 1/4 of the price of an entry-level extractor and it worked beautifully. Simple and effective.

6. Turn frames for about 10 minutes at a speed high enough that the honey flings out onto the inner walls of the extractor, but not so fast that the comb falls apart. / video 1 / video 2

7. Turn frames over, repeat until all sides of all frames are empty. Empty extractor into filtering & bottling tank (aka 5gal bucket with a paint strainer on top and honey gate in the bottom). / video / video 2

8. Set frames & equipment out for the bees to clean up. / video

9. For the next week or two wipe the sticky off the doorknobs around the house :)

10. Order some jars, make some labels (no small task for a graphic designer), fill your jars and voila!

I’ve been looking forward to designing honey labels the whole time I’ve been keeping bees but when it came down to it, I’m too cheap and too busy to lavish the time & money it really deserves. Maybe next year.

We only had 10.8lbs (about 126oz) so unfortunately won’t be selling any this year. I will say it was pretty satisfying to finally taste the honey my bees produced, and amazing to see the shiny golden stickiness flowing into the jars. A very, very cool process but still, I think I’m in this for the fascination of the bees more than anything.

Tuesday night, I robbed the bees for the first time. Took one super of honey right off. No fume board required – just shook as many off as possible, left it on the deck til it got below 60deg so stragglers would go home, and brought it in! Since I’m not extracting til Saturday, I stuck the frames in the fridge to keep any SHB eggs from hatching in the meantime.

By the way the frames aren’t full. Going to be a very small harvest this year. Most are like 40% capped, 60% empty. That means they’ve been uncapping & eating it since they were almost full last week.

I got a really special treat in the mail a few weeks ago (sorry, we’ve been on vacation). Grandpa (the same one who sketched the hive in the corner of this blog) has been scanning old slides in and came across some that include pictures from his hives. This one is the best. My little 6-year-old Dad is helping with the smoker. Look at his boots! So cute. Fast forward almost 50 years and he’s STILL helping with the bees but this time it’s a bit more skilled labor: he has built me a honey extractor which I will be picking up this weekend! More details on that to come.

And in case you were wondering the queen drama has been resolved. Wiser FL beekeeper Johnnie Beshearse says:

On your queen confusion. It is possible and likely that you missed seeing a supersedure cell. If your original queen (Tamar) was a poor layer they probably superseded her. Normally on supersedures, the new cell will hatch out BEFORE the old queen is deposed. Otherwise they run the risk of not being successful at raising a new queen (no second chance). Once the new queen emerges and mates, then she will kill the original queen.

What does this mean?  Your new queen was not an egg the first of August, but before then. You simply missed the supersedure cell (they are not like swarm cells and abundant, normally only one or two located in the center parts of the frames, not the bottoms.

Yeah. I didn’t know they let the old queen live while the new queen mates. That changes EVERYTHING. Guess I’m in the market for another new queen name.

Charlie Brown did get combined with the nuc. If you read the last post, you know Carly Rae went missing from the CB hive and on Wednesday I went to determine next steps. Well, she was nowhere to be found, so I had to combine the nuc with her old digs. But, it had to be ghetto because a nuc is 5 frames and the hive is 10 frames and you can’t just stick the 5-frame box on top of the 10-frame one. Then there would be a bunch of exposed frames. So, I stuck the 5 frames from the nuc into the empty NCSU hive body and put that on top of a piece of newspaper on top of the CB hive. I know I said I would never leave less than 10 frames in a hive body again but here I am with no other choice.

You know how when you go into someone’s house you kind of notice that it has a different smell than yours? Sometimes in a bad way but with most of my friends I either think their smell is good or at a minimum neutral. In particular Robyn’s house smells good to me. Anyways, see, each bee family has a different smell (at least to the bees – they all smell the same to me – kinda sweet but woody and a little insecty too). If two bees meet who smell different they will fight. Which means bee deaths and possibly one very important bee death (the queen). It’s a good thing we don’t have the instinctual urge to fight to the death with someone whose home smells different than ours! So with two honeybee colonies you have to force them to get used to each other’s smells by sticking some newspaper in between the two families. The smell goes through slowly so that they begin to all smell the same to each other, and they gradually start using their specially-designed mandibles to chew up and carry the newspaper out the front of the hive and can live happily ever after until the beekeeper screws something up again.

When I went to give them some syrup today, I took a peek at their progress (btw this is a very ghetto way to feed them while they are combined since I don’t have another super to use the top feeder with). It’s only been two days and there are some very decent-sized holes in the newspaper. And nice work on the crossword ladies! If you don’t know the answers, throw it away – that’s my motto too.

On Sunday I will remove the newspaper as well as the 5 least-useful frames of wax so they can all be in one deep with HRM Tamar at the head of the family, perfectly poised to bring in a whopping fall flow and make me lots more honey.

A: a live webcam on your bees which rotates 360° and has night vision. 

There is something very, very wonderful about being able to give the girls a glance from my mobile or while I’m at work. In the mornings you can sometimes see our chipmunks eating the dead bees off the ground from in front of the hive. And if you’re lucky on some weekends you might see me doing an inspection. A big thanks is due to my loving assistant beekeeper.

HOW TO VIEW:

Until I can figure out how to put the live feed directly in here, check it out at beecam.ahumblehum.com, put “operator” for the user and leave the password blank.

Hit “Sign In” according to which browser you’re using and then use the controls to see my girls live in action!

Nice little photographic story on German beek Erika Mayr. Looks like her Langstroth-style hive, though pretty similar to the ones we use in the States, has enough extra space that her bees are building comb between frames. I know from experience that makes a sticky mess on inspection days if they store honey in that comb!

Ey! Goddes mercy!” sayd our Hoste tho,
Now such a wyf I pray God keep me fro.
Lo, suche sleightes and subtilitees
In wommen be; for ay as busy as bees
Be thay us seely men for to desceyve,
And from a soth ever a lie thay weyve.
And by this Marchaundes tale it proveth wel.

– Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, 1386-1400

Well that’s not exactly the kind of busy I’ve been but you have to appreciate that since I’ve been “busy as a bee” I haven’t kept a good record of my bees. Here is what you’ve missed:

Saturday, April 21st it was pretty rainy, with a break just long enough for Jason & I to remove the newspaper from between the brood boxes and put in the couple of frames it was lacking from the package install (took them from the nuc). We only had time to peep a few frames since a storm was looming and the ladies were none too happy to have their roof removed. They were all staring at us. So we didn’t see any eggs but the queen cage was empty and there seemed to be a good population so I was happy enough with what I saw. We also pulled the little swarm nuc out of the yard since it had dwindled to only a handful of bees. I wonder where those little souls went in the hours after their home was stolen. We’ll never know! That left me with one frame of capped/uncapped honey to stick in the freezer in the house. Next to two half-gallons of Blue Bell.

Saturday, April 28th we cleaned out the garage and made a spot on top of the keg fridge for all the equipment that was SUPPOSED to be in the bee yard this season. What a sad reminder every time I pull into the garage! I can’t wait to see bees crawling all over the front of my chevron hive next year. If any swarm-minded bees are reading this: we have vacancy.

Sunday, April 29th we finally saw some glorious eggs in the hive! And bee babies (larva)! And a nice solid brood pattern! I say we’re back in the game now but still oh-so-behind. They had done almost nothing with the empty super on top which was disappointing (but eggs! at lease Gloria is doing her bit)! There wasn’t a whopping lot of bees in the bottom box but there were eggs both up and downstairs so we didn’t reverse the boxes. I guess I know better than to think the bees will build new comb when they have plenty of existing room – especially since I assumed the poplar flow was so grand that I didn’t need to stimulate them into wax production with 2:1 syrup. That was another dumb assumption. So later today I’m going to take a quick peek at that super which will likely show no progress and stick the feeder back on to see if that will get them to build it out. Next weekend we’ll do a more thorough inspection if we can steal an hour away from all the graduation festivities! My little sister is almost done with college. I can’t believe it.

[more hot bee swag! bee pendant from dear ol' Jen, I've worn it like 10 times already, and bee shorts from my Mom & Anthropologie. photos my own.]

4.29 INSPECTION AUDIO

So we threw together that little nuc hive and I didn’t have any hive staples so I duct-taped the bottom board to the body. By the time we put everything together it was pretty much dark so we brought the shop light out on the deck and started out with just the stepladder but then I realized the stepladder on the little deck outside Axel’s dog door wasn’t close enough to the swarm that I’d be able to hold the nuc in one hand and brush the bees in with the other. So poor Jason, I begged him to go get the Little Giant which is really heavy and he had to carry it through the house and then set it up directly under the swarm (which wouldn’t have been his choice with no bee suit). He’s so wonderful. I set the nuc on the top of the Little Giant and showtime! No smoke – I couldn’t get the dumb thing to light and it was too dark to see why and plus it might make them scatter too much. So I used a spray bottle of sugar water and gave them a good spritz. I used my handy dandy bee brush and brushed most of them into the hive. Repeat those two steps a few times; spray, brush brush brush. A bunch also fell on the ground too which I felt bad about but kept reminding myself it only matters that you get the queen in there! Everyone else would find her eventually.

By the end of this business there were bees all over that side of the house and crawlin all over me so I sat on the deck while Jason & Axel continued their experience from the screen porch. I left that nuc sitting up on the ladder so that lots of bees would find their way to it. About an hour after going inside it began to storm, so a lot of the ones that had fallen probably never made it into the nuc. I couldn’t fall asleep because I was thinking how I would get the nuc down and into the yard (Axel has to use that path during the day and I didn’t want him to knock the ladder over), and then what I would do next if they did establish themselves in there. I could either take the top hive body off the original hive and add a top & bottom to it, let them stay in the nuc and just add more boxes to it, or get another 10-frame hive and transfer them once they get those 5 frames filled up. Since the nuc isn’t painted I really don’t want to leave it out for too long.

The next morning there were still some bees hanging out at the original swarm location on the gutter – probably they still smelled some pheromone or something. But there was definitely some activity in the nuc. I climbed up the ladder and brought the nuc down, didn’t bother to close the entrance and found a spot for them about 15ft from the original hive. I took the feeder & super off the original hive (I’m going to have to come up with estate names for them) and pulled out one frame to switch with one of the nuc’s empty foundation frames. I was told by a wiser WCBA member that would help make them want to set up shop in the nuc. I guess it’s worked so far because yesterday afternoon there was plenty of activity, even foragers bringing back pollen. And thankfully, the original hive also appears quite busy.

I won’t even try to predict what’s next but it would be awful nice if this colony could build up strong as swarms are usually in the mood to do. Then I won’t feel so bad about missing the first swarm and having to say goodbye to Evangeline!

This weekend we’ll swap the solid bottom board for the screen one on the big’un and check to see if the new queen has mated yet or even exists. Before either swarm I had planned to do a MAQS application to knock down the booming mite population but I wonder if the break in brood rearing has been enough to get them down to a manageable level? Or if stressing them out with a treatment would be too much in combination with queen drama? If I’m gonna do it, I need to do it before it gets consistently over 75 degrees or so. I know I promised I would never use MAQS again but I think it was just too hot when I used it last time.

Hoo-wee that was a long one. You know, I could go on for hours…

(more pics / slight video )

Yesterday I had the absolute pleasure of cracking open the hive with my grandpa.

He kept bees well before I knew him, when my dad was really little and even before that when grandpa was a high schooler in Lafayette, LA. I think he had two hives most of the time. He built his hives by hand with wood salvaged from fruit crates! He also built an observation hive (similarity: just like he admits he was, I’m probably inclined to mess with the bees more often than I really should). While he was here, Grandpa (and Grandma & Dad!) also helped me put wax into a stack of super frames. He said the wax foundation is pretty much the same as what he used back then.

We didn’t go too far into the hive – it was only 56 degrees, so we checked the super I had put on last week (only a few wandering bees, no progress to speak of, and feeder still full of syrup) and pulled out one outer frame which held uncapped honey and a good volume of bees. Actually it was good to see that most of that top brood box seemed full. Looking down on it, there were bees stuffed between every frame. They were all staring at us like “shut the front door!”

Me and grandpa both think bees are fascinating creatures. It’s pretty neat to share that with him.

(Thanks for the photos Jason & Dad. More here.)