A Humble Hum

Two major triumphs during last Tuesday’s inspection. I can’t even decide which to be more excited about:

1. Meet our new queen of the Charlie Brown hive, Lucy (of course)!

2. I kept the smoker going the whole time – that’s throughout inspection of three hives. I’m kind of a big deal.

Okay really the new queen is more exciting (isn’t she gorgeous in the video) but um mastering the art of the smoker is really hard. I probably won’t be able to do it next time but yay.

Three weeks ago I did the first inspection of the year, and split a small nucleus hive off the bigger (green/blue) hive to help discourage swarming. I didn’t purchase a queen to give the nuc, so they are raising their own queen. Last Tuesday, I checked the nuc first and it had a nice number of bees and… eggs! That means one of the frames I gave them must have already had a queen cell in progress, and she emerged and mated successfully, OR that I have laying workers and the nuc is doomed. When a hive goes too long with no queen, some of the workers’ ovaries will develop just enough and they will start laying eggs. But, having never mated (and not having that ability), they will lay only haploid eggs which only have one chromosome and thus all turn out male. All drones = failure. Since drones do just about nothing.

The Charlie Brown hive was looking really nice with bees covering up the frames, and as I pulled out one of the middle frames I saw the queen before I even got a good hold of it. As you can see in the photo and video, she looks a lot like her mother & aunt with a caramel-colored body (“Sunkist Cordovan” I believe the apiary called the line I bought her mother from), and she’s nice and plump. Hopefully she will be a good queen. She has just started laying so I won’t know how solid of a brood pattern she lays until the larvae mature a little.

The bigger hive was busting with bees. MAQs didn’t slow them down a bit. There were even some queen cups and I tore down a single capped queen cell so there might be some swarm instinct going on. Since then, I’ve gone back and added a brood box and checkerboarded the existing frames with wax foundation ones. That should make them feel like they have more room and hopefully I can avoid a swarm this year. Swarms are heartbreaking.

I hope it warms up soon. The bigger hive has two partially-full supers on it already so if they can get to work soon we should be in the honey this year! Even the Charlie Brown hive is starting to use its super.

Oh and here is my assistant cleaning out the syrup bucket.

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.

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