Sunday, August 7, 2011

Honey!!! And an eye toward the future.

So two weekends ago, July 23rd to be exact, we harvested our first batch of honey.  Two medium supers came from N's hive and one from L's hive.  N's hive had one more super which was mostly capped, but we didn't want to risk it contaminating our batch so we left it on.  After all, we can get it in the fall right!  Only two supers, one from each hive, were 'extractable'.  The other was cut comb, which is really only for cut comb honey.

All things told we got about 70 lbs. or so of total honey. We just about filled a 5 gallon bucket with extracted honey.

The extraction went well, hopefully I'll put up a dedicated post for that process.

The bees should be able to start collecting more nectar and pollen in the middle of August.  July and the first bit of August are sort of a dry period for them.  Not much out to collect!

We plan on using honey proceeds to put back into bee equipment ... after all they do most of the work!

Sunday, July 17, 2011

A quick update

We had some great inspections yesterday (July 16th).  We had guests for the inspection of L's hive.  She thrives on talking about the bees and the bees seemed to be pretty relaxed as well (which hasn't been the case the past few weeks).  She requeened (twice) and it seemes to have worked now.  Guess we'll see in another week or two how she's really doing.  Maybe I'll convince her to write a seperate post about her requeening.

My inspection went well too, which was a surprise since the bees haven't been in the best mood the past couple weeks.  In fact I got stung on Friday just doing some yard work.  We didn't use a lot of smoke which maybe helped.

We have about 4 boxes of honey which we hope to process next week.  We'll certainly post about our extraction experience when it's all said and done.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Inspection Updates

Here's a quick rundown of all of our inspections so far:

April 23rd - This was just a standard inspection.  A couple of pictures are below.

Both of our hives are still just one level at this point.  We still dutifully fill the feeders as needed.

April 30th - L put on the 2nd super (box) for her hive.  Mine were a little behind so they stayed with one super.  A few pictures are below.




May 7th - N's mom and dad were visiting.  Other than that it was a standard inspection.  It was fun to show off the ladies.  No pictures from this inspection (which will likely be a continuing trend).  After a few inspections the pictures start to look the same :)

May 14th - L's cousin and his girlfriend were visiting for this inspection.  L did the only inspection, I wanted my bees to try to catch up so I left them alone for a week.  Common wisdom says the bees lose some work time (~ a day potentially) with each inspection.

May 21st - A couple of friends from church were over.  As you can tell we are in full 'display' mode getting everyone possible to see the ladies.  We added a third super (all mediums) to both of our hives.

May 28th - L's mom, dad, aunt, and g-ma were visiting.  We split the inspections between morning and afternoon.  N's in the morning (with no one watching), and L's in the afternoon (with everyone watching).  N added a fourth super and took the feeder off.  They're on their own for food now.

May 30th - L added her fourth super today, they just weren't quite ready a couple days ago.  She is now feeder free too.

May 31st - Beekeeper meetup at a local pub.  Nothing like beer and bees, after all they are only 1/4 different.  We got some advice and got to say how well we thought our bees were doing.  Got some advice on using pine bedding (like for a gerbil) in the smoker.

June 4th - An inspection by ourselves ... what a novel idea.  Only N's hive though.  We checked the first (bottom) super fully and then spot checked the other three.  The bees seem happy with no swarm cells at all.  The pine bedding idea from the meet-up was the best!  The smoker stayed lit with cool white smoke the whole time.

Monday, May 16, 2011

More busy bees

So this still isn't the "full" post I've been promising about our inspections, but I had to put up some videos (with sound!) and pictures from Thursday (5-12-11).  The bees were really enjoying the nice hot day, it was about 83F I think.

Here's a picture:


And another picture:

Here's the first video:

And the second video:

That's the most action we've seen so far.  I'm sure later into summer we'll see more of that ... especially since we'll have more bees in total!


Tuesday, May 10, 2011

As busy as ... well ... you know

So this is a bit of a cop out, but I'm a bit tired for a full post.  Here's a couple videos from a nice warm afternoon (5-6-11).

Look how busy they are.




More on our inspections soon!

Monday, May 2, 2011

First Inspection Picture

I just realized we only have 1 picture from our first inspection.  I think this is because the inspection for L didn't go well, and my inspection was relatively brief.  Don't worry, tons of pictures for our next couple inspections.  Until then ... here's a happy L.

First Inspection (Part 2)

First Inspection, alright! Before our inspection I had a bit of bee die off due to a problem with my feeder, not alright. I estimate losses at maybe 500-800 bees. Thankfully we should have started out with about 10,000. I’m (mostly) confident my bees will still be good. So L’s inspection didn’t go that well as you heard. Well it was good in the fact we saw brood and eggs and saw that her bees were generally working hard. Not good in the fact that she had to take out a while frames worth of comb and the bees got kind of pissed about it. My inspection had an auspicious start. After L’s ended it rained for a bit, maybe 15 minutes. I wouldn’t start while it was raining. Thankfully it was a passing shower so I could go ahead after it cleared out. I smoked the bees as I should have, both at the hive entrance and at the hive top when I was taking the cover off. I gave them a minute or two after smoking to let it work. When I took the feeder off (which is the ‘top’ for now) the bees were just going about their business. I smoked them a bit more and they went lower into their hive just how they should. Hooray bees!!! I took the frames out one by one checking their progress. They had comb drawn on maybe 4 to 5 frames and I could see lots of eggs. There was very little burr comb, even around the empty queen cage. I scraped it off pretty easily. They had a good amount of ‘honey’ stored on a couple frames, I had to scrape some burr comb off one frame and some honey came with it … it was delicious (although sill clear as it is really only the 1:1 sugar syrup we gave them, not much pollen for color). During my frame by frame inspection I even saw her highness the queen. Slightly bigger than the rest, but with a large white spot on her back (we have ‘marked’ queens). I think it’d be hard to spot her without a mark … I’m glad that’s standard practice these days. After finishing my relatively brief inspection I closed them up and that was it. See, anyone can be a beekeeper!! Even if you’re still afraid of bees … because the veil helps a lot! During inspections we always have our veils on and an epi-pen with us just in case.

First Inspection (Part 1)

It was a dark and stormy morning. At some point after lunch on Saturday, April 16th, I realized it was perfect weather to fool around working in the private drive. When it rains, the waters’ course is most visible, and it is most easy to divert it; the gravel and mud in the road is softened, and the water itself will help you carve out a new path if you give it minimal direction. It’s really quite fun to just watch it. My weapons of choice, as usual, were a pick, a shovel, and a garden rake. Working in the rain keeps one at a reasonable temperature, so I was quite comfortable despite being soaking wet. I managed to move some gravel and debris out of a section of the gutter, so that water was running in it again, and not in the road; then at some point N came down to see my progress, and said the weather was supposed to break in the late afternoon, which was good news. As we had been watching the weather for the weekend, we knew that it was supposed to rain all day on Saturday and be cold and windy on Sunday, and we knew we had to check our hives. So, I went back up to the house for a shower, because you shouldn’t show up to a beehive covered in mud and filth and sweat. Unfortunately, bees don’t like you to smell too good either, so my scented shampoo, soap, and lotion probably didn’t help all that much in the end, but it made me feel much better about myself.

So here’s the fun part. We put the bees in a week and a half ago, right? So this is the inspection where we’re supposed to open them up, make sure they’ve released the queen, look for eggs and larvae, remove the queen cage and burr comb, that kinda stuff. Well, were we in for a surprise. We managed to get the smoker lit, and set out with our equipment to the hives. “Whose do you want to check first?” I asked N. “Let’s check yours first,” he said, with a smirk. I would say it was a smile, but deep down I knew it was a smirk. I blew a few puffs of smoke at the entrance with the smoker and waited a few moments. Then I positioned myself behind the hive and took the outer cover off, which was a little sticky because the painted parts like to stick together for some reason, which I find extremely irritating. I’m supposed to be battling propolis, not sticky paint. I blew a few more puffs of smoke in and carefully removed the super that was around the hive-top feeder. Then I shimmied the hive top feeder across the bottom box towards me about a centimeter and got my fingertips under it, preparing to slide it off or lift it up, whichever ended up working out. I lifted, and it was heavy. Very heavy. I realize it was full of sugar syrup, but this just seemed odd to me. It was like something was stuck to it. Did the bees put propolis under it? Is it stuck to a frame with burr comb?

At this point of course, there were tons of bees just milling about, being loud and irritated because I was disturbing them and the weather was just barely nice enough for me to be doing so. We had, after all, gone out to check them umbrella in hand, just in case the break in the weather turned out not to be as clear as it was on the radar screen. There were still droplets coming down here and there. I think at this point, one of them stung my finger, and I quickly scraped the stinger off. Then I made N go get me a bag of ice, which he did graciously. What a nice guy. I proceeded to lift up the edge of the feeder, but it still seemed really heavy. “Hey, could you get down there and tell me what’s stuck in there?” I asked N. He knelt down, and I lifted the feeder again. “Oh...omg”, (or some paraphrase thereof) he said with alarm. I set the feeder back down. The agitated bees continued hovering and crawling and flying in small circles in the general area of my personal space. I gave them a little more smoke, which had no noticeable effect. “You have a huge piece of burr comb stuck to the bottom of your feeder.”

So that’s also a paraphrase, but you get the idea. So this is what happened. Normally, when you install bees, you are supposed to fit the queen cage inbetween two frames with minimal space left. Then the bees start to draw comb on the foundation in the frames, with some aberrant “burr comb” built around the contour of the queen cage pressed up against the foundation of the two middle frames. This comb then needs to be removed during your first installation, along with the queen cage, so that the bees can finish drawing out uniform comb on these frames.

In the chaos of our bee installation (which wasn’t really that bad, it was just new and clumsy) I didn’t get the queen cage positioned exactly right between the two middle frames. And, well...the bees noticed. Apparently I had left about enough width of empty space to fit almost a whole frame in there, and in fact what the bees had done was to fill the entire space with a frame’s worth of burr comb.

N and I looked at each other. “You just gotta do it, man,” he said. We took a minute to collect ourselves, and then I had him hold the feeder up a few inches (which I’m sure he was less than thrilled about) while I slowly slid my hive tool between the top of the comb and the bottom of the feeder. It came off and dropped gently back into the box. so I finally had the feeder out, at this point, and we set it down and covered it, to discourage feeding while it was open.

You might think this is the end of the story, but it’s not. I still had a frame of comb that I had to remove, plus some lumpy comb on the bordering frames, plus some extra burr comb in the general area, just for fun. And the bees were less than thrilled with me, probably because this was taking so long and the weather had them in a bad mood. “Could you please get me two pairs of tongs from the kitchen?” I asked N. He acquiesced, and I slowly opened and slid them down around the comb and pulled it up. As you might imagine, the bees were thick all over it, going about their business of tending to eggs and larvae with lovely arcs of sugar syrup and pollen packed into the top cells. All this stuff, including the bees that were clinging to it, is what had made the feeder so heavy. It was really a shame. I managed to brush some of the bees off into the hive, but many i had to brush into the grass in front of the hive, and nudge some of them toward the front opening.

I don’t remember much after that. I tried to slide the rest of the frames together as much as I could, but the irregular combs in the middle made me nervous. What if i pushed them too tightly together and my queen was trapped? What if a lot of bees were stuck and couldn’t keep the brood warm in the time it took them to free themselves? Alas, I would have to wait an entire week to see how things turned out. I put the feeder back on and closed her up. I could finally take a breath; after all, my turn was over. I may or may not have smiled—ok, smirked—at N. He caught my glance and smiled back. “Yeah, because that makes me want to do nothing more than check my bees right now,” he said, and chuckled to himself.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Installation (Part 2)

With L's bees safely inside their new house it was time to give my bees the homecoming they undoubtedly wanted.  Same procedure: take off the wood panel on top then jar package violently while taking out can and keeping hold of queen cage tab.  Simple right?  Well this time I was in charge of the can and L was in charge of the queen.  Lo and behold she drops the queen.  Thankfully the tab was still attached for mine.  However, it was L to reach into the bee package and not me (scared of bees remember?).  Thankfully my fearless wife got the queen and very few bees got out of the package .. really only the ones clustered on the cage.  I failed to mention that earlier.  Tons of bees are clustered on the queen cage, so putting it in the hive without getting stung or squashing any is delicate business.  I brushed a good portion of the bees off the cage with our bee moving feather stick (that's a technical term) and got the cage all hung up.  I did have to remove the tab and stick it on the other way (L had to reattach hers anyway so she attached it the 'correct' way).  We wanted our queen to be released up and it was attached originally so she would be released down.  That way if her attandants die (a few bees in the cage with her) they won't block the exit!  After hanging up the cage I poured some bees onto the queen as instructed by our literature and dumped the rest in the space where we took a few frames out.  Here's a picture:
I had enough time to hang my queen (without half the bees being in the hive like they were for L) that I could get it so all ten frames fit back into the hive.  Yes!  I put the feeder on, filled it and we were finished.
That's actually L's hive with the feeder on, but I think you get the picture.  We actually took our bee packages apart some to get all the bees out (the packages aren't designed well for bee egress).  We left the vestiges of the packaging in front of the hive in case the couple bees left in them had a desire to come out and join their sisters.  We left the initial wood cover for the packages as a ramp for a few bees still on the ground.  It got pretty cold that night so any bees that didn't make it in were probably SOL.
As we were cleaning up and getting ready to go in we were brushing the last few bees hanging on our clothes off and as L moved one onto her finger to release her, she got stung.  Final installation sting total L:2, N:1.  After going inside we were looking each other over and realized we had lots of bee excrement on our clothes.  Gross, but understandable after being in a cage for almost a week.  They don't go to the bathroom in the hive, so they wait until they can take a 'cleansing flight'.  We took some pictures showing our slightly stained clothes, but it's so small you can't really see it in this tiny picture format.  Trust me though, the 'yellow rain' was there.  Anyway, our hives were now complete with bees (hopefully) releasing our queen inside.  Although more likely they were just trying to stay warm since it got down to about 40F that night.  Here's pictures of our completed hives:
L's is green, mine is a light purple.  Both are exquisite places to live if you're a bee.   That's it for now.  See you next post. 

The Installation (Part 1)

So it was the big day, April 6th.  It was perfect ... nothing good on TV ... no after work social sports team activity (see flightoftheconchords.co.nz).  As an aside to my aside I saw them (FOTC) with my brother in concert at Kent State University.  It was awesome.  Moving on, so really it was about 60F which was warm enough to put the bees in.  I took a half-day at work to prepare myself mentally (I am really scared of bees).  Everything was ready for when L got home.  All she had to do was move her actual hive parts outside.  So we go down to the basement where the bees were still quite happy (we fed them twice a day with 1:1 sugar syrup).  We each claim a package and bring them to our hive site.  Our hive site had been prepared earlier and consists of two cinder blocks in a small gravel pit.  The hives will sit on the cinder blocks.  Anyway we decide L will hive her bees first.  We're in our veils with long sleeves and long pants.  I have latex gloves on, L goes barehanded ... crazy.  I also put my socks above my pants, last thing I want is some bees crawling up my pants!  It was pretty sylish as you can imagine.  Laura is definately ready as seen in the picture below:

Not many dead bees in the packages, hooray!  Anyway the first thing you do is take the piece if wood off the top which is covering a can filled with sugar syrup which the bees eat.  We fed them more just to be nice (and cause the books said to).  Also sticking out is the tag attached to the queen cage.  Below is a picture of the queen cage after our first inspection ... it helps the installation story to make sense.
Anyway, you're supposed to start prying out the can, while holding onto the tag attached to the queen cage.  Then you slam the bees to the ground so they fall away from the top of the package.  It wouldn't make you happy either.  Anyway we got all that.  I think L was in charge of the can and I had to get the queen.  She gets the can wedged out and I pull on the queen tag to get the full cage.  Disaster!!!!  The tag (the white plastic stuff in the picture) came off completely and L's queen cage fell into the unhappy pile of bees in the package.  It turns out none of the books cover what to do in this instance.  We (eventually) decided to dump some of the bees into the hive (Where we had removed four frames as seen in the pic below).  This picture is actually of my installation, but it helps give an idea of what it looked like for L too.

So the queen cage falls into the hive space during her pour (violent shake) of about half the bees.  So she reaches into this buzzing, unhappy mess barehanded to retrieve her queen.  Sounds like a Chaucer tale!  We had a few pushpins outside because you need to tack the queen cage into the hive.  So we used some of these to attach the plastic strap back to the queen cage.  All the while there are some unhappy bees starting to fly around.  L got stung on the leg during this process and I was stung on the shoulder.  We soldier on however.  Finally L manages to get the queen cage strung up in the hive with the 'exit door' unblocked.  This is important because the workers have to release the queen by chewing through a taffy like substance which blocks this 'exit door' (basically just a hole, but that seems like undervaluing it).  Anyway she dumps the rest of the now restless bees into the hive and puts three of the four frames back in, but she can't fit the tenth frame.  This shouldn't be a problem though because some of our books say to only have 9 frames in there after installation.  She puts the feeder on top, fills it with sugar syrup and we're finished ... well actually half-way finished, I still had to install my bees.  I  think that'll be the next post.  I need a breather after reliving that.

Monday, April 25, 2011

More 'Free Bees' Than I Expected

I'm Nathaniel.  N for short.  Hi!  We'll start at the beginning.  You can't hear it, but there's 'Thunderstruck' by AC/DC playing in the background while you read this.  It makes it more epic ... trust me.  I went to pick the bees up in the afternoon on April 4th.  They'd been delayed a week, but it had been cold anyway so maybe it was better this way.  Took maybe 40 minutes to drive to the designated pick up spot (some guy's house).  As I got close I'm thinking "I'll have to look closely at the mailboxes so I can spot the address".  Thankfully I could concentrate because I had turned the radio off.  As an aside ... why do we do that.  I listen to music at work 90% of the time, but I have to turn it off to look at mailboxes?  Maybe they'll do a RadioLab episode on it (http://www.radiolab.org/).  Anyway, as I turn a corner there is a huge box truck in a driveway with bees flying in and out.  I mean a LOT of bees.  Unfortunately these bees don't have anywhere to go because they aren't 'with a hive'.  I had a veil and my epi-pen in the car just in case.  But I decide I don't want to be 'that guy' so I leave the veil in the car and go to ask for my two boxes of bees.  It took a couple minutes as there were a few other people picking up their bees.  I stood perfectly still and tried to plaster a smile to my face.  Eventually it's my turn so I ask for my two boxes of bees and the kindly older fellow goes into the truck to get them.  He comes back with two good looking boxes of bees.  The bees seem happily clustered in the top 2/3 of the box.  There are a lot of bees on the outside of the package though.  Not what I was expecting.  I think ideally I would have had a kindly older fellow (this is where the similarities end) in a white tuxedo hand me two boxes of bees which greet me in a gentle buzz (basically professing their love for me already) with NO BEES ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE BOX.  Back to reality, the fellow asks if I want to see the queen.  'Sure' I say.  He then slams one of the boxes as hard as he can on the floor of the box truck.  The bees are not happy.  They buzz ... a lot.  It sounds uncannily like 'buzzzz we will remember this forever buzzzzz'.  But with a lot of pissed off bees in the bottom of the package I can see the queen in her cage.  He then shows me the other queen.  Super.  I gingerly ... trying very hard to avoid the 'free bees' still on the outside of the package ... pick up two boxes of bees to carry them to the car.  I set them down to call my wife (Laura [L for short {at least in this blog}]) to tell her that I have the ladies and will be departing shortly.  She tells me to make sure I text her when I get home so she knows something bad didn't happen.  That definately kept my confidence high.  Anyway I put the packages in a shallow plastic storage bin so they don't slide around and close the trunk.  Unfortunately when I say trunk I mean 'back of the SUV', so there is nothing but space between me and the ladies.  I roll the windows down partway in the back and set off for home.  Thankfully it's still warm 75F, so the windows down is okay.  I can see maybe 20 bees just sitting on the back window.  About halfway through the trip they sort of cluster towards the bottom of the back window.  One bee makes it up to the second row of seats, thankfully she stopped there.  After a very tense 45 minute ride home (I drove a bit slower with 20,000 bees in the car), I made it home.  I wonder what the people driving behind me thought?  Here's a picture of the ladies in their packaging box soon after I got home.


Here's a close up.



See the 'free bees' still hanging on?  It's crazy right?

Anyway, after I got them home I sprayed them with the 1:1 sugar to water mixture we had made the day before.  This was after I had opened the trunk and let the bess disperse who had decided to let go of the packaging.  Mind you no bees got out of the package, just some bees were on the outside of the packaging and they decided to investigate the back window as I said earlier.  So they're fed now, so I moved them into the nice cool (53F) garage when it decides to rain outside.  After L gets home we go down to the garage to look and they actually seem calm.  Not much buzzing, just a faint 'buzzz it's chilly in here buzzzz'.  We decide the garage is a bit too cold so we put them in the actual basement (at a balmy 58F).  There are still about a dozen or so 'free bees' on each package.  I assume they can't (hopefully won't) find their way upstairs.  Another aside here - so I call the bees 'the ladies' because they're mostly female.  Maybe I'll put some bee biology in another post since I just wet your whistle.  That's it for pickup day (Success!!) I think I'll put the actual installation in the next post.