I checked on the ladies today, and our new hive was humming along quite well. I’m still not sold on the BeeMax hives, as this hive seems to have a boat load of burr comb on top of the frames – typically loaded with nectar. This might be good for the bees if I didn’t open the hive, as I have to clean it up, which gets my hive tools messy, and wastes the effort that the bees made in collecting the nectar and creating the comb.
The plastic vs. wax foundation debate is still open – I haven’t seen any evidence that the bees are preferentially drawing comb on the wax foundation frames, though I do think that the Pierco frames are slightly thinner than the wood, and thus leave more room for the frames to move around in the hive body. However, perhaps this is a good thing, as the addition of propolis build-up on my wooden frames makes them a very tight fit in the wood hive boxes.
The ladies have done well, and I added a 2nd brood chamber to the hive today.
As for the existing hive – that continues to outperform – I added a honey super 2 weeks ago, and it’s already full, and about 1/3 capped! And the super I added had 5 drawn and 5 undrawn frames, so they’re doing great. I did add a 2nd honey super with 5 drawn and 5 undrawn frames – just hope I don’t have any swarming issues – however, to that end, I did pick up a 5 frame nuc in case I needed to split the hive or capture a swarm.
Next weekend I’ll do a full hive inspection and check for swarm cells, which I haven’t seen to date in the hive.
Alexa and I picked up two packages of bees from Ludlow this morning. They had been driven up from Georgia by a local beekeeper who makes the pilgrimage with his truck and trailer each spring. He brought up about 200 four pound packages of bees. That’s a lot of bees -- probably about 3,000,000 honey bees!
While we ordered 2 packages in case we lost our hive over the winter, we only ended up needing one, so we offered our 2nd package up to a friend of ours. The cost of the bees was $90 including the queen -- that works out to about .6 cents per bee.
Alexa decided that she was going to take a much more active role in installing the bees this year. She donned an extremely over-sized tyvek jump suit, a veil and gloves for the job. It was so much more fun with her helping out, and enjoying the process of working with the bees.
Alexa getting ready for the installation
Typically, before you install a package of bees, you spray down the outside of the package with sugar syrup which not only inhibits the bees from flying as much, but also keeps them busy licking the syrup off each other off.
Alexa took care of that part of the install. The bees are clustered at the top of the packages, as that’s where the queen can be found. In addition, there’s a large can of sugar syrup that the bees can feed on at the top of the box. Here she’s pictured with the two packages:
Alexa with the packages of bees
We took a video of the installation, which in reality only takes a few minutes. We removed the queen cage from the box ‘o bees, and then placed the queen/cage into the hive. After that, you simply take out the can of syrup, and pour the bees into the hive. Cover them up, and it’s done! We’ll go back into the hive in a few days, and verify that the queen has been released from her cage. Then she can get busy laying eggs in the new comb the bees should have drawn for her.
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After and during the installation Alexa spent a lot of time checking out the bees from all angles. Here she’s checking out the bees that are congregating on the syrup container. Soon she’ll be brave enough to try and feed them by dipping some sugar syrup on her finger!
The hive in the background is our first, and it has 2 brood chambers, and the wooden super is hiding two mason jars of syrup, which are largely unnecessary after seeing how much honey the bees had left from the fall.
Alexa checks out the sugar syrup container that's covered with bees
The bees took to the new hive pretty quickly, and who wouldn’t with grasshopper green digs? Even mom got into the act coming out to take a couple of pictures for us!
Alexa and Dad
Watching the bees never ceases to amaze me. The minute you dump them into their new home, they immediately go to work. How they decide what to do is beyond me, but they all seem to immediately determine how they can best ensure the overall success of the hive. One of the more interesting jobs is that of the bees who are tasked with leading ‘lost’ or disoriented workers to the hive or swarm. They do this by using their Nasonov’s gland which is located at the end of their abdomen -- so in essence, they’re sticking their rear ends into the air, and doing their best Steve Martin/Lucky Day impression yelling “Look up here! Look up here!”
That’s not a full moon, that’s their Nasonov’s gland!
After the installation, despite the utter failure I had with my last attempt at using a hive top feeder, Alexa and I added some syrup to the hive top feeder and placed it on the hive along with a pollen patty that should help spur brood rearing as soon as the queen is released from her cage.
To satisfy my own curiosity, the lower hive body that we installed the bees in has 5 pierco waxed plastic frames and 4 standard wooden wax foundation frames. This way we can see first hand the difference in acceptance rate of the two types of frames. I’ll add 10th (wooden wax foundation) frame when I remove the queen cage in a few days.
Even though it was only in the high 50′s today, I wanted to open up the hive to do the first thorough inspection of the hive. In addition, with new bees coming in next weekend, I wanted to dismantle the hive so I could move it about a foot to make room for the 2nd hive.
If it wasn’t obvious when I took the inside cover off last time I opened the hive back on March 6, it was today – the hive is doing quite well for themselves. There was a fair amount of activity on the top of the upper brood chamber, despite the cool weather and the puff or two of smoke they received.
Not very interested in my sugar patty
The bees weren’t very interested in my sugar patty, and admittedly, unless they’re really in dire straits, they probably wouldn’t be, but looking down into the hive, there were plenty of bees, and things were humming right along. It was a bear, though, working to free the frames from all the propolis they had managed to brew up since last fall!
Inside the hive, there were several frames full or nearly full of honey:
Lots of honey leftover from fall
As has been their MO from the start, the bees have favored the west side of the hive, and there were several frames of capped brood, as well as lots of uncapped larvae to be found. I didn’t want to leave the frames out in the cool air too long, so I didn’t search for eggs, knowing at least a few days ago I had a good queen in the house.
Pretty decent brood pattern coming out of winter!
So I finished up the hive inspection, scraped 50 or so dead bees off the screened bottom board, and then moved the hive over to make room for next week’s arrival of 12,000 or so new ladies ready for action in Palmer.
Finally a nice day on the heels of the several inches of snow we got on Thursday night. After attending MapleFest 2011 and a tennis match, I headed out to check out the ladies and how they were doing.
Bringing in the pollen!
I had put some sugar syrup on the hive earlier in the week just in case the bees were in need of a little help, as they’ve been cooped up the last week with cold temperatures. The bees were flying in and out like crazy, and bringing in copious amounts of yellow pollen.
I love the dusty yellow rear end of the bees!
Pussy willows, crocus and maples all yield yellow pollen, and I know that the Maple season is pretty much over this weekend here locally due to the trees starting to bud. Will be looking for the greenish pollen from the skunk cabbage certain to start coming in soon.
Delivery!
Must be some good pollen sources out there, as the bees are filling their pollen sacs and getting their rear-ends painted yellow as well!
Supposedly, the delivery of bees from Georgia will be the 2nd week in April – if that holds, we’ll be almost 3 weeks ahead of last year with the new hive.
Last weekend I put the BeeMax hive that we purchased from BetterBee together. The assembly took about an hour for the entire hive, versus several hours for the woodenware hive that’s in service now.
One thing that I’ve seen asked about the BeeMax hive is how to install the frame rests properly. The frame rest is a plastic L-shaped rail that supports the plastic frames above the hive body so that the bees can’t propolize the frames to the polystyrene hive body. To install the rest properly, insert the shorter end of the L into the groove in the polystyrene as shown below:
This weekend, Will and I put the finishing touch on the hive, painting it Grasshopper Green which Alexa had picked out as the color for our new hive. The painting took several hours, and Will was a trooper for the first 15 minutes! The polystyrene takes longer to paint than the woodenware as you need to use a brush for many areas – especially the areas that are stamped with recycling logos.
Alexa and I went to Bee School last night, and heard a talk on the challenges of beekeeping by Ken Warchol, who is the Worcester County Apiary Inspector. The talk was all about everything that can go bad during the year from varroa mites to chalkbrood and other calamities like having your hives destroyed by bears.
One interesting thing of note was his talk on using plastic frames vs. using traditional wood frames. The typical knock against plastic frames is that the bees are slower to ‘accept’ them, and thus tend to take their time drawing out the frames which in turn delays or inhibits brood rearing and thus colony strength.
He stated that he was working with UMass and the USDA both with many hives, and that UMass used wooden frames/wax foundation and that the USDA had decided on using plastic frames/foundation. It turned out that the UMass frames were pretty much completely drawn by the end of May, and at the end of August, the USDA hives were still not fully drawn out. That’s a pretty stark contrast between the two, and admittedly there can be other factors involved, but it doesn’t bode well for my upcoming experimentation with plastic frames in the new hive!
After chatting with my beekeeping friends, I was told that if I was going into the hive to add some sugar candy, that I would be wise to smoke the bees first.
So, I was warned. Much of the time during the summer, I work the bees in shorts and a sweatshirt and veil. Today I wore jeans & gloves as well. The temperature was 58 degrees and overcast – the bees were flying around a bit, and I took the outer cover off the hive.
The bees were fairly active around the opening in the inner cover, but as soon as the cover was off, they were coming after me. Not crazily, but still several bouncing off my veil. Then I cracked the inner cover, and they were really getting irritated – I actually left the bee yard twice, much to Alexa’s delight, as she was watching from her window.
So, indeed, it was time to get the smoker going – once I did that, and smoked the bees they were happy to let me do my job – I placed the sugar patty on top of the hive, and buttoned it up before the rain started.
Now we just have to keep an eye on the sugar patty, and keep feeding as they deem necessary.
Alexa and I decided to attend Bee School again in 2011. Due to our schedule we can’t attend every class on Thursdays, but we’ll take in what we can.
Things sound pretty good in the hive – there’s lots of evidence that the bees are alive and well, from the handful of dead bees on the snow, to being able to hear them buzzing when I put my ear up to the hive.
So, at bee school, we’d like to reinforce our knowledge of spring management of the hive, as they’re going to be really hungry right now as the queen starts laying again, and the bees start to ramp up their activity and use of honey stores. Many hives are lost in late winter/early spring due to starvation – and if our bees made it through the worst of winter, it’d be sad to lose them now!
At bee school I got a recipe for sugar candy that seems like a lot less work than the usual ‘hard candy’ recipe that people use. The recipe I received was:
3 cups sugar
1/3 cup water
2 T crisco
Mix the sugar and water together, then mix in the crisco. Press into wax paper lined pie plate. No boiling, no boiling over, and no mess to clean up!
I mixed the sugar candy, and got it ready to go on to the hive.
Today I ordered a second hive. I figured why go through all the trouble of putting on a bee suit and lighting a smoker only to inspect one hive when I could inspect two?
However, because I’m an engineer, I had to get a BeeMax hive – which is a polystyrene hive – kind of looks like a styrofoam cooler with bees in it. I had contemplated a BeeMax hive the first time around, but decided I’d rather have the traditional woodenware hive to start out.
But I was interested in seeing whether a polystyrene hive with the additional insulating properties would fare better in over-wintering or not, and how well the bees would take to the plastic frames that come with the hive versus the traditional wax foundation frames that came with my original hive.
So, shortly we’ll have another hive to put together!
Finally, a year and a half from when we started bee keeping, the day has arrived to finally reap what we (or rather the girls) had sown! The extraction process was advertised as being a big, sticky, oh-so-fun mess of a project, and it lived up to the hype.
Setting up the extractor
I’m fortunate enough to have some geocaching/beekeeping friends that have an extractor, and they joined us for the honey harvest. The extractor is the stainless steel tank which holds a hand-cranked centrifuge that spins the honey out of the frame. On the top is the extractor, and the bottom portion is a holding tank with a screen in the middle – the screen filters out the pieces of wax, etc. so that the honey is clear when bottled.
When the bees determine that the moisture content of the nectar has dropped to a sufficient level (from about 80% to about 18%) to change the nectar to honey, they cap the honey for future use. To bottle the honey and sell it (or in our case, give it to friends!) the honey should be capped, otherwise, the moisture content could be too high, and at some point the honey/nectar mixture could ferment (which shouldn’t happen with capped honey).
So the first step in harvesting the honey was to use an un-capping knife to remove the wax cappings from the frame. Alexa and I tackled that task, and we passed the frames to be loaded into the extractor.
Alexa cleaning up the wax after uncapping
Uncapping the first frame
Half and half
The uncapping tank
In the end, we extracted 16 pounds of capped honey. We let that settle overnight, and Alexa and I bottled that honey to give to friends and family. In addition, we decided to extract the rest of the uncapped honey for our personal use, as we knew that we would use it up before it ever had a chance to ferment – though if we were really worried about that, we could have used a refractometer to measure the moisture content. We ended up with 6 pounds of uncapped honey, and boy was it good!
Bottled, labeled and ready for Christmas!
After the extraction was complete, there was sticky honey everywhere – the entire extractor, knife, uncapping tank, etc. all completely sticky. Who’s gonna clean up this mess?? No one seemed to want to do the cleanup work, so what to do? We let the same people that shopped and cooked do the cleaning! That’s right – we took the extractor and all the other stuff out to the bee yard, and let the ladies have at it.
The next morning, I went out to check on the equipment, and there wasn’t a spot of honey left – everything was clean as a whistle! What other hobby can you have where others do all the real work for you?!? I took the equipment back to the house, tossed it in the shower to wash it up, and it’s ready to go for the next harvest!
