They Live! Early Spring...Bees Love it!

I must say that the bees have got to be just as excited as I am that spring came early this year. I cannot believe it: the last couple days have been approaching 80 degrees and it's mid-March in Cleveland. I just barely planted my seeds indoors and it appears that I could have planted them outdoors! I need to plant outdoors soon (spinach, lettuce, onions, etc.)

I did start feeding my bees in mid February. It had been a relatively warm winter and I was somewhat concerned that they would be running out (considering that I saw bees at the top of the hive). I'd say that I fed about 20 lbs. of sugar up until a week or so ago. There is now enough blooming that I feel the bees should be fine. I put two medium supers on top of my 2 deeps and 1 shallow that I kept on in the winter. Unfortunately, there are some eggs in that shallow (tempting me to buy a queen excluder to keep the queen from re-laying in my honey super. The bottom deep was basically empty. I didn't rotate the hive bodies then. I still haven't rotated the hive bodies. I'm not sure yet whether I will. The bees by the end of the winter were using the upper entrance, and after my inspection, I flipped over the inner cover and that upper entrance went away. The next day the bees were busy re-orienting to the bottom entrance. Bees were climbing down the face of the hive after they had tried flying in to the top entrance only to find that there was a bucket of syrup blocking the inner cover hole. Bees were lined up on the bottom of the entrance fanning and exposing their Nasonov glands to give off the hive scent. It probably took several hours to get all the foragers re-oriented to the bottom entrance, but now, they are all used to it like normal. My hope is that by just having to travel through that bottom deep that the bees and the queen will move down to inhabit and use that space. I'd be somewhat irked if the queen just keeps moving up and starts laying in my medium honey supers.

I must say that I am pleased that my bees made it through the winter. I didn't do a lot to baby them through the winter. I ended up draping a tarp over the hive just to keep the wind from attacking the hive too much and to slightly help the temperature stay warmer. I did put some insulation under the top cover (newspaper and insulation) in hopes to reduce condensation within the hive.

I had previously planned on using some Imrie shims this year. I haven't put them together yet, but we'll see if they end up helping. I'm excited to start working with the bees again this year. I plan on doing a split later in the spring once I get the Cordovan queen that I ordered. Then I'll start up hive number two. I'm excited for that as well. Oh, and I think I inspired a friend from my church to start keeping bees. Love it! Bees are incredibly awesome. Now if only I could find a place for some chickens. . . . :)

I must apologize, however, as I did not take any pictures of the hive throughout the winter. In hindsight, it would have been cool to share some seasonal progression on here. I'll have to remember that for next time. I did start a beekeeping project over the winter, though it didn't get finished or as far as I would have hoped. However, technically, I had thought that I would have a month or two of winter still. So, my observation hive is not yet complete. In fact, it's probably closer to just started than just finished. Though I am also excited about that. I can see my kids absolutely loving that! Happy early spring and best wishes to the bees and the blooms! Let's hope this weather holds and that a frost doesn't nip spring in the bud....

Liquid Gold: the sweetest thing!

On September 10th I harvested the first round of honey from my own backyard! I harvested one medium super. This was the medium super that had been filled with honey first and so was from mostly late spring/early summer honey. I extracted the honey with a cold uncapping knife and used a hand crank tangential extractor to spin out the honey from the frames. Nearly all the honey in this medium super was capped. Maybe one part of one frame was not capped, but the honey was cured. This means that the nectar did not drip out when turned upside down, so the risk of the honey fermenting is low. I do not yet have a refractometer to test the amount of water in my honey. Anything over 18% apparently can ferment and go bad. Generally the bees will cap the honey once it has reached below this magic number. Of course, I assume that if the cell isn't filled high enough, the cell won't be capped.

The setup.

A frame of capped honey. Isn't it beautiful?

Cutting off the cappings. 

So sweet, so good. Lick it up!

Liquid gold from the honey gate.

Honey with the cappings wax.

Even the kids enjoyed the extracting process. This is my daughter with some of her friends.

I extracted my honey in the basement and used a fume board to scare the bees down out of the super. I used Natural Honey Harvester spray and it worked great. I had maybe 10 bees in the basement. In extracting, I had to uncap both sides of the frame and then put up to 4 frames in my extractor and then spun out the honey on one side. I then switched the frames to the other side and spun out the honey on the other side. I then opened the honey gate at the bottom of the extractor and had the honey run through a coarse filter into a bucket with a honey gate on it so that I could bottle the honey. I had a space heater set up in the basement to keep things warm so that the honey flowed well. While extracting I listened to the Cleveland Indians, who unfortunately lost to the White Sox during that game.

So in all, I extracted 33 pounds of honey from that one super. I filled 24 of that in these cool looking queenline glass jars. I've given a bunch of them away. Unfortunately, haven't sold any. But I think, perhaps if I use the excess of my honey as a source of giving and service, the hive will be blessed and will do better than were I to use the honey for selfish means. Who knows. Of course, I can't rely on that belief and neglect my hive. Faith without works, you know. . . dead. Anyway, my wife and I gave two of them (the 1 lb. glass jars) away to our neighbors. I found a scripture in the Bible that says, "How sweet are thy words unto my taste! Yea, sweeter than HONEY to my mouth!" -Psalms 119:103. I tried to use the giving out of the honey as an opportunity to share what has been sweet to us: the gospel. The card is a mormon.org pass-along card with my profile, some fresh baked bread, and a Book of Mormon. The sweetest things!

Beekeeping with Dad

While on vacation this summer I had the opportunity to help my father inspect his bees. You see, it was originally my father who got me interested in beekeeping. He has a cousin in Utah that started up a neighborhood beekeeping business and so my dad was interested in getting a hive. When my dad got one, it basically made me realize that anyone can keep bees. I thought, wow, that is cool and I immediately started learning about it. From there, I was hooked. It's true in that beekeeping has this addictive nature to it. Probably because the little insects are so fascinating to watch and learn about. I used to grab a folding chair and sit off to the side of the hive entrances and just watch the bees fly in and away from the hive. It's fascinating as well as peaceful. Here are a some pictures of my dad's hives. The one on the right was always more active from the get-go. It must have had a better queen.

You can see the spikes of nails below the hive. These are placed there to keep skunks, raccoons, or other critters from trying to have meals consisting of insects with a sweet inside (i.e., eating bees).

The bees collecting water from the nearby lake.

My dad holding up a beautiful capped frame of honey.

My dad.

Frame rests are the best!

We brought out the umbrella so that we'd be inspecting in the shade. It helped a ton. We were sweating like crazy! That's me looking for eggs or the queen. We didn't find the queen, and I couldn't see any eggs. I only saw one egg in that entire hive and it was on the side of a cell. Most likely from a laying worker. We saw tons of drones though. Bad news. Both hives were queenless and so new replacement queens were ordered. Cost about $60. Queens aren't cheap, but they are most definitely necessary. And one could definitely argue that good queens are worth the money. I eventually would like to raise my own queens for my hives.

There's me still looking for the eggs.

Keeping bees is fun! It's even funner when you are doing it with someone. Thanks Dad for letting me help with your inspection and for getting me involved in beekeeping. You're the best.

White Queen & Impatiently Waiting for Honey

I've been pretty busy the past several weekends and haven't had the opportunity to inspect my bees. However, I've been prepping the "honey house" aka the unfinished basement. I know that I've got at least one full medium super of capped honey. This means that the bees have placed a layer or "capping" of wax over the honey to keep the honey from either absorbing more water or from evaporating down further. When honey is capped like this, then it is usually safe to extract. You see honey that is more than 18.6% water will ferment. The bottle of honey will go bad and the bottle can even burst. That would be a shame and a sticky mess. Bees must have a way of knowing when, generally, the honey is safe to cap and that it is sufficiently evaporated down. This fermentation risk, because honey is hygroscopic, meaning that it absorbs water from the air, is also a reason why it can be important to extract your honey quickly after removing supers and perhaps even having a de-humidifier running while extracting. Interestingly, because honey is hygroscopic, if you use honey as a substitute sweetener in baked goods, you can use less liquid in the batter and the outcome will be that the cookies or whatever you made will not dry out as fast as it would if honey was not used.

Anyway, this medium super of mine that has capped honey is likely to hold close to 30 lbs. of honey. When I last inspected I checked my second medium super and found that it too is full of honey and curing nectar. The second super's frames are capped at the top 1/3. The bottom 2/3rds is nectar that is still curing and being evaporated and is not yet capped. So, this means that the extracting weekend is being moved out to probably the second weekend in September. This is tentative and depends on the bees' progress on this super over the next week or so. I'm thinking that it should be ready by then, because when I was inspecting these frames the nectar didn't run out when the frame was upside down, and so the curing process is fairly advanced already.

I was pretty proud of myself during my last inspection, as I was able to find the queen fairly rapidly. The white marking (which stands for queens introduced in years ending in 1) was starting to come off, and so I brought along a white marking pen and a small push in queen marking cage. I didn't want to have to pick up the queen because I was wearing my beekeeping gloves and was afraid that I might squish her accidentally. I've had 3 stings on the hands this season and the swelling hurts. Perhaps this is because I didn't take any Benadryl or use any ice (which when I get stung again, I will definitely be using). So I was being somewhat cautious. Next time I will try inspecting again without the gloves. The queen kept moving throughout the marking cage and so it was still somewhat tricky to get a decent dab on her thorax; but I was able to. This should mean continued ease in finding the queen. It also meant that despite the queen cells I've found at the bottom of frames, the bees have never swarmed.

However, I have noticed that my bees crowd to one side of the hive. I don't know why the brood ended up concentrated on the side of the hive rather than in the middle. My next inspection will involve me manipulating brood frames to place the brood more centrally in the hive. I definitely don't want them hugging the side as they go in to winter.

Good luck with your bees! Here is my hive with 3 supers (2 mediums and 1 shallow) and 2 deeps below. The bees get everything in the deeps. I'll get everything in the supers. My goals was at least 30 lbs. of honey this year. Looks like my bees will be surpassing that goal!

Too Much Honey A Problem?!

You wouldn't think that you'd ever hear a beekeeper complain about his bees making too much honey. However, this happens. You see, beekeepers want to keep as many bees as they can so that they can get more honey from each hive. However, sometimes bees can bring in so much nectar that unless the beekeepers is able to keep up on providing more space for the bees to put that nectar/honey, the bees can make it so the queen has no more room to lay eggs. As soon as this happens, the hive is said to be "honey-bound". The bees will swarm from this hive because they've essentially outgrown it.

Perhaps because I was gone so long and unable to inspect and put on my second medium super, when I last inspected my bees a large portion of the second deep (normally for rearing brood) was full of nectar and capped honey. In my opinion my bees are pretty close to being honey bound. I did find swarm cells at the bottom of the frames and some did indeed have an egg in them. I destroyed quite a few of these cells. In the future, I may leave them. I think there is some risk in that if the bees do swarm, I want a new queen to be in the works and not have destroyed my bees' chance to save themselves from a queenless doom. When I returned from vacation, I immediately put on my second super. Just this last inspection I switched the positions of the supers so that the one that the bees have filled nearly entirely with capped honey is now on the very top and the super that still needs to have wax drawn out is now just on top of the second deep.

Now, it is the middle aged 10-20 days old, bees that are the comb building, wax drawing bees. These are also the bees that are mostly involved in the nectar processing within the hive. They are sometimes called the food-storer bees. Their job is to unload the bees that have been out foraging for nectar. A forager returns and seeks out a food storer bee to unload their nectar/pollen. If the bee is able to find a food storer bee within an average of 20 seconds, then that means that there are likely less foraging bees than food storing bees. So, if the foraging bee determines that her nectar source is energetically efficient (i.e., the sugar concentration of the nectar and the amount of available forage and distance from the hive will net more energy gained than lost) she  will likely perform a waggle dance. Waggle dances are only performed by bees when they deem their nectar source to be valuable enough to merit recruitment of other bees. Part of this feedback on whether the source is indeed valuable is given via the length of time required to find a food storer bee, the other part via the bee's innate judgement of the nectar source's value. If a specific nectar source is being advertised extensively via waggle dances (which will recruit unemployed foraging bees to find the source), then more bees will quickly find that nectar source and begin to forage and bring back nectar from it. This will have a cross-inhibition effect on nectar sources that are not as valuable. Because bees foraging at a less valuable nectar source will have to spend more time looking for a food-storer bee and hence will perform less waggle dances and there will be less recruitment to that nectar source and bees will be more likely to abandon forage at that source.

Interestingly, I learned while reading Thomas D. Seeley's book The Wisdom of the Hive, that when there are not enough foragers (say at the beginning of the day -- early morning), when a returning forager enters the hive, it may go up to an inactive bee and grab hold and shake it. This seemingly "awakens" the bee and makes it much more likely to go out and forage. This seems to be a signal to recruit more bees to forage.

Another signal that bees give is called the tremble dance. This dance is different than the waggle dance though it does involve shaking. However, instead of just the abdomen shaking, the entire body and legs shake back and forth. This dance is performed when there is a sudden influx of nectar and there aren't enough food storer bees to unload foragers from profitable nectar sources. This dance is performed further into the hive where nurse bees are caring for brood. It causes inactive or brood caring bees to become food storer bees.

I tell you what bees are truly amazing. I have to agree with Lorenzo Langstroth, the inventor of the movable frame hive and Father of Modern American Beekeeping, that honeybees are a witness of a divine creator!

So, it is my hope that my second, empty, undrawn medium super will be drawn out by hard-working middle aged bees so that the nectar in the brood areas can be moved up into that super so that the queen has more room to lay her eggs. The fact that wax is energetically more expensive to produce than honey may also help relieve the overflow of nectar in my bees' brood area. In fact, it takes 6 g of sugar/honey for every 1 gram of wax produced. The bees will naturally move this nectar and honey up as that is how they store their food. Honey on top, pollen just below that, then brood. Honey and pollen on the outsides of the hive. Brood in the middle. Laying eggs is important nearly year round with bees in order to replace the die off rate of foraging bees. During the summer bees (except for the queen) may live only 4 to 6 weeks, though they'll live longer in the winter when they are inactive.

Here are some interesting notes from The Wisdom of the Hive: Social Physiology of the Honeybee:


A patch of flowers 100 square meters about half the size of a tennis court, represents less than 1/125,000 of the area enclosed by a circle with a 2 km radius (and bees can fly up to 6 km radius from the hive) yet remarkably a honey bee colony has a probability of 0.5 or higher of discovering any such flower patch located within 2 km of its hive.

An average foraging trip for a bee results in either 15 mg of pollen or resin (propolis) or 30 mg of nectar or water. Many foraging trips are performed each day.

Yearly colony wide approximately 20 kg. of pollen, 120 kg. of nectar, 100 g of propolis, and 25 liters of water are collected. During the summer bees will consume 70 kg of nectar. This leaves 50 kg of food storage that the bees amass each summer. Much of this comes during what is termed "nectar flows" periods of intense flowering by certain sources that last perhaps only a week or so perhaps shorter due to inclement weather, etc.

Next time you see a honeybee, stop and take a look at it and marvel at the work it performs! I recently read a quote that I liked, "Only God can make blood and honey."

Beekeepers Do Crazy Things

I'm sure that mainstream society already thinks that beekeepers have got a screw lose. I mean, who in their right mind thinks that keeping nearly 30,000 stinging insects in their backyard is fun?! But just to make sure that there is no doubt in anyone's mind that some beekeepers are a bit more "unhinged" than others, one just needs to read the news. Check it out: http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2011/07/world/hires.bee.bearding/index.html?&hpt=hp_c2

Now this demonstration of bee bearding is a testament to several things 1) the insanity/bravery/guts of the guys in the picture and 2) the gentleness of bees when responding to queen mandibular pheromone. Either queen pheromone vials or queen bees themselves are used to attract the bees. I'm guessing that vials of pheromone were used here. The cloth in the picture may have been soaked or sprinkled in it as well. The bees aren't necessarily swarming the person as much as they are swarming where they can smell the presence of queen pheromone. So, if you took a bath in queen pheromone or hung  a vial of it about your neck like a pendant or talisman during late spring/ early summer and you may very well end up with a swarm of bees hanging from your neck. That would give a whole new meaning to the term: bee bearding.

On Vacation is the Place to Bee

Honeybee in Hawaii

My wife and I recently got back from a celebratory cruise throughout the Hawaiian islands for my parents'-in-law 40th wedding anniversary. We had a great time. This, though, was my first time in Hawaii as a beekeeper. I was much more cognizant of these amazing insects this time around. So, when I'd see one on a flower, I'd try to get a nice close up of it with my new camera. The picture of the bee and the purple flower is mine. However, this is a much closer/better picture of a bee in Hawaii going for a landing on a white tropical flower. Here's the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nayrsivart/4612613865/.

Funny, how once you appreciate something, you notice it much more often and take it for granted much less. In fact, I noticed a brochure at one of the ports that the cruise stopped (Kauai, I believe) where you could go visit a beekeeping facility and they'd open up their hives and you'd be able to check out their bees. Now, this may very well be something cool for someone who's never seen inside a hive before, but I'm fairly certain that my hives would look for all intents and purposes like hives in Hawaii. I'm not so sure that suiting up in a bee suit in Hawaii is my idea of a vacation. However, touring their beekeeping operation and talking to a Hawaiian beekeeper, would be an enjoyable way to pass the time (if you ever get sick of being on the beach and hiking to waterfalls :) ).

Unfortunately, bees in Hawaii have been having a tough time. This is because, until recently, they've been able to avoid acquiring the dreaded Varroa destructor mite and small-hive beetle. I've been reading in Bee Culture that both Varroa and especially the small-hive beetle have now gained access to paradise. Throughout the Big Island of Hawaii, apparently small-hive beetle has been causing the loss of many colonies. Small-hive beetle does better in warmer climates, and when they eat the honey and wax, their waste causes the honey to ferment and become slimey. The bees can't stand this, and so they abandon the hive. So, in some respects, having that dreaded winter season where it gets bitter cold also helps to eliminate and diminish the threat of some bee pests and diseases. So winter isn't all that bad.

Just this last weekend, I took the family to Palmyra, NY. We visited the Joseph Smith family farm there. It has been restored and is as close to what it would have looked like in the 1800s as it can be. As we were walking out of the restored threshing barn, I noticed replicas of what the Smith's honeybee hives would have looked like. Now, these certainly aren't as convenient--or bee friendly for that matter-- as the removable frame Langstroth hive; but I probably wouldn't have thought twice about this two years ago. Instead, it became a great picture spot. I'm sure that Joseph, Hyrum, and the rest loved their honey! I wonder whose job it mostly fell to when honey harvesting time came around?

Hives out of Tree Trunks

The Smiths had some pretty serious hive weights!

Since I've been gone, I haven't been able to inspect my hives for nearly a month. I did take a quick peak (i.e. without smoking the bees) and determined that I should put a 2nd medium super on. That's good news. Hopefully, the bees will have made enough honey by the end of the summer that I can take in close to 30 pounds. That would be what I'm shooting for. Any more than that, and I'll be pleasantly surprised!