Link to Heights Honey Facebook Page

If you'd like to buy some of 2014's crop of honey. You can contact me via the Heights Honey Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/heightshoneybees.

Thanks!

Justin

Two Queens in the Big Daddy, Hives Everywhere!

When I first started reading about beekeeping, I kept reading about how CCD and all these bee diseases are killing off bees. The statistics were something like 30% of the hives in the US would die off each year. Well, it doesn't take a lot of smarts to realize that too many years of that and pretty soon there's no bees left. I've come face to face with how beekeepers have been "mostly" able to deal with this. You see, I started last year with one hive. As of right now, I have three hives and I did not buy more bees. If we're getting technical there are 4 hives in my backyard, but one of them is my friends and he's keeping it in my backyard just for this season (while he builds a fence on his property to hide the bees from renters). The key is that beekeepers make more hives each year by splitting hives or catching swarms. Now, I already mentioned that my Big Daddy hive swarmed earlier this year (even though I had tried to split it). So I had split the one hive and that gave me hive #2. Well, for a while there after the split and the swarm, I noticed that the Big Daddy hive was queenless. So I bought a queen from a local beekeeper. I put the queen in and then I put on a queen excluder. Now, previously I wasn't a big fan of queen excluders. They make it harder for the bees to get up into the supers in order to lay down the nectar and make honey. However, I was getting the queen up in the supers laying eggs. Now, I'd like to keep my supers just for honey and have the deeps be for the eggs and brood.  This is where the queen excluder came in. I figured if I could keep the queen out of the supers for long enough, the bees would be able to lay down nectar and the brood in the supers would hatch out and then things would end up being fine. Queen excluder goes in: fwoosh, chunk. Supers placed back on top. Then a week later, I'm inspecting again, and what do you know, I'm still seeing eggs in my supers! So now, I've got a queen below the excluder and a queen above the excluder! My bees were making me angry. Well, at the time, we had thought that my friend's hive was queenless. So we were able to catch the queen above the excluder (marked) her and placed her in a queen cage. However, upon moving her over to check out his hive and introduce the queen cage. I saw eggs! We then found his queen, and so we marked her.

Instead of killing the queen above the excluder (now in the queen cage). We took the brood in the supers, the queen, and a small number of bees and placed them in a nuc. Thus was born hive #3. This nuc will remain a nuc and will be an insurance policy (queen replacement) for hive #1 and #2 if necessary. So, this splitting of the current hive of bees and providing or allowing the bees to raise a queen is how the US bee population has been able to survive so many years of 20-30% losses.

My Self-Designed Honey Label

So, I sat down to update this blog and add some pictures of what I've done with the bees so far this spring, and I got sidetracked by designing a label for my honey. I must say, I feel that it turned out very well. I didn't really find anything to inspire me. I started with a close up picture that I'd taken of a worker bee on the stones on the ground by my beehives. I then used Adobe Photoshop Elements to design the label. I cropped the picture, applied the Ink Outlines Filter and adjusted the levels. I then chose a font, and filled the font with a matched color from the bee. I used a hexagon clipping mask to further clip the picture to the shape of a honeycomb. I then looked up the requirements for honey labels from the National Honey Board (www.honey.com). The rest was adding text drop shadows and stroke outlines.

Let me know what you think!

Cleveland Swarm Removal: How to Remove a Bee Swarm

Remember honeybees are at their most gentle when they are in a swarm. They are only there temporarily until they are able to find a new home. If you live in the Cleveland area, give me a call and I can come collect the honeybee swarm. When you call please give me the following information:

-How long has the swarm been there?
-How large is the swarm? Basketball size? Softball size?
-Are they honeybees?
-Have they been sprayed with an insecticide? (bad)
-Where is the swarm (address--in a tree, side of a house, etc.) and how high?

Thanks

Justin
801.783.9256

Summer means Swarms!

So my bees swarmed on May 15th this year. Even though I split the hive, I didn't have enough drawn out deep frames so, the frames that I put back in were just foundation. This didn't help with the space issue and so my bees swarmed. I got a call around lunch time from my wife asking me if I had time to come home because the bees were buzzing around like crazy and were really loud. I knew right then and there that they were swarming. So, I told her to try to watch to see where they would land. Unfortunately, the buggers landed super high up in a tree in my yard. I'm talking 60-100 feet up. There was no way that I would be able to reach those bees.  So I've decided that I've got to set up a bait hive a bit lower in the trees in order to help catch future swarms. I think there was a large swarm and a small after swarm. They swarmed on a Tuesday. I kept checking to see how long it would take the swarm to move on. They were still there Wednesday and that Wednesday night it got pretty cold. I thought for sure that I'd find dead bees below where the swarm had been hanging out, but nope. They were fine. However, they didn't take off for wherever it was that they found for their new home until sometime late Saturday or early Sunday morning. This either means that 1) it was hard to find a decent place near where I live or 2) there were multiple competing options that may have interested the swarm and so it took a bit longer to reach a consensus on which spot to ultimately choose. I'm reading Honeybee Democracy and so it was cool to have a swarm to be able to reference to. 

I've also been receiving some calls for collecting swarms. So if you live in Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights, University Heights, Beachwood, or the surrounding area and you see a swarm of bees and would like someone to remove it for you without killing the bees give me a call: Justin: 801.783.9256 honeybee swarm removal. I even built a swarm bucket with a 10 ft pole to help with reaching high swarms. It still wouldn't have reached my super high one, but with a ladder and the swarm bucket I could get some high ones. I bet I'll eventually build a bee-vac but that's for another year. Unfortunately, every time I've gone out the swarm has already left or the swarm has left before I've been able to get home from work. None of them waited it out as long as mine did, perhaps because mine was so high up in the trees, they felt like they could take their time. The good thing is that I still have plenty of bees in my main hive. However, the swarm left that main colony queenless. When I inspected the bees following the swarm, the hive was incredibly nervous and quick to fly and angry (many stingers in the gloves). So I had my wife pick up an Italian queen from a beekeeper in a nearby city. I got a decent price: $20. I haven't checked since I requeened, but just from the entrance behavior of the bees, I'm fairly confident that she took. I've got a queen excluder on right now with an Imrie shim above it. The Imrie shim is supposed to give the bees an upper entrance to the honey supers. I'm thinking of adding another one as well. I'm excited to see how the honey is going. I'm anticipating that the three supers that I have on now should be moving along fairly well with the capping of the honey.

I've been feeding the hive that I split. The cool thing was that when I had gone through after the split and sought to remove swarm cells in the large hive, I kept killing the swarm cells. Well, one of the last ones I opened just to see how far along the queen was and the queen literally crawled out of the cell. She started racing along my glove and so I quickly moved her over to the split that I had made the day before and placed her in there. When I later inspected, I saw a beautiful queen laying. She must have taken! Gone out and mated with nearby drones and come back to start hive number 2. I later moved them from the nuc and they are now in a 10 frame Langstroth in a single deep. My plan is to keep 2 hives and a nuc as an emergency queen raising machine. I'm hoping to catch a swarm for the nuc sometime this summer. Hopefully someone calls again.

Spring Hive

Cool weather spring. You can tell that I rotated my deep hive bodies as the 2nd deep is slightly darker than the first.

Safe when you see the Lion's Tooth

Ever wonder why the small yellow "weeds", actually a wildflower, are called dandelions? Apparently the word is French, dent-de-lion meaning lion's tooth. This doesn't refer to the flower, but rather to the leaves. If you look at the leaves of the dandelion one can see the saber tooth shape of a lion's tooth. So, I've heard that beekeepers need no longer worry about their bees starving once they see dandelion's blooming. Dandelions have been blooming for a couple weeks here now, thanks to the uncharacteristically warm weeks in March (in the 80s). Things have cooled down quite a bit, recently though. Apparently dandelions are source of both nectar and pollen for bees. You won't ever see dandelion honey though, because mostly this nectar/pollen goes toward rearing of young bees and because it's one of the first spring flowers that bees are able to collect (temperatures have warmed enough), there isn't a lot of extra to go around (for the beekeeper to steal). With the cooler weather, I have worried some that it has been too cold for the bees to fly and I hope that the trees that are blooming are still providing enough nectar, and there are enough days with flyable weather (at least in the 50s).

Dandelion at base of my hive. You can see the hive stand above the bricks.

Funny story, last fall I took some pictures and video (will need to post here) of my daughter (5 yrs old) playing with a drone. When the hive kicked out the drones, I grabbed one and took it inside to let my kids play with it. For some reason it didn't fly around much, must have been nearing it's end, but that was best. This enabled my kids to be able to play with it as it crawled around, quickly buzzed off somewhere nearby and landed, only to be picked up again. My daughter thought it was great. I let her know that boy bees can't sting. Well, the other day my wife called me and told me that my daughter had been stung. Initially, I was somewhat concerned (first time any of my kids had been stung). When I got home, I asked my daughter what had happened. Evidently, she was outside and had found a bee. She tried to pick it up and it stung her. When I asked her how she had been stung, she said, "I found a bee and tried to pick it up, but it was a girl." Yup, I let her know that there are a lot more girl bees than boy bees, and it's best for her to just assume they are all girls and let Dad find the boy bees. I also let her know that the girl bee stung her because it was scared of being picked up, and if she lets the bees mind their own business, the bees will do the same with their stingers. I think my daughter handled it pretty well though, she knew exactly why she had been stung--she'd tried to pick up a GIRL bee, if only it had been a BOY. :)