Participation Ribbon?

This year we're trying something we haven't done before, we are entering some of our honey in the Nebraska State Fair. We had grand plans to enter in multiple categories: Extracted Honey, Comb Honey, Beeswax, Photography. When the deadline came (today) all we have ready is 4 lbs of honey. Since we haven't done this before we're not sure if it should be categorized as "Light" or "Extra Light". A little searching on the web brought up this wonderful image which clearly indicates we have "Extra Light" honey in this particular batch.

People are sometimes surprised to hear that honey has different colors and tastes that depend primarily on what flower the honey came from. The honey most people buy in the supermarket is blended from many individual colors and flavors, they do their best to keep any variety out of the honey so the consumer knows they are buying the same honey every time.

If you haven't tried varietal honey yet head out to your local farmer's market and see what you can find, there is probably someone there who will has free samples of at least three different varieties. They can give away tastes like this because once people realize what they are missing they are sure to make a purchase!

The National Honey Board has a great pdf available that describes 21 of the most popular honey varietals in the United States:
http://www.honey.com/downloads/varietalguide.pdf

Plants put sugars in other places too.

I got some interesting news from a friend who has a couple of my hives on her land. The mid-summer dearth has arrived and the bees are finding other sources of sugar for their hive as the flowers become fewer and farther away.

There are many grapes planted a short distance from the hives and the bees have been spotted collecting grape juice and taking it back to their hive! Birds peck holes in the grapes and this gives the bees access to the juice inside. I know that bees will collect most anything sweet when flowers aren't available but this will be the first honey I've dealt with that is from a fruit and not a flower.

If I'm lucky the honey will be a very odd color, in some areas bees will produce blue honey from local berries.

8,000,000 flowers

I've run out of boxes.

With quadruple the number of hives this year and a lot of healthy bees I'm finding that I always need more wood then I have. As the bees fill the boxes with honey I have to keep adding more to the stack. This means the hive grows taller and taller as the girls collect honey.

I'm trying something new this year, a friend of mine has a very nice honey extractor that I can use. We've come to an agreement and I'll be picking it up in the next week. Until now I've only done the "crush and strain" method for getting honey out of the hive which basically consists of using a knife to cut the honeycomb out of the frames and then forcing the honey through a filter which separates the wax from the honey, or I leave the honey in the wax as comb honey.

An extractor spins the frames to pull the honey out of the comb without destroying the comb (when done correctly). It takes four times the energy and resources of 1lb of honey to make 1 lb of beeswax so keeping the wax intact lets the hive produce more honey. More importantly though having drawn comb ready to put in the hive lets me manage the bees better, I can use it to better convince the bees to do things that I want them to do. I try asking nicely but that doesn't always work!

Laying Workers

My friend's hive is indeed doomed. I conferred with a couple other beekeepers and learned that in a queenless hive the workers will make queen cells with drones in them. Since they haven't had any new workers in the last month the hive will continue to decrease in population until the bees can't keep pests out like wax moths. At that point they plan to harvest any honey in the hive and keep the equipment in good shape for next year. In the Spring they'll be getting another package of bees with a new queen and some experience under their belts.

Workers, Drones, and the Queen

The honeybees I keep are Apis mellifera, also known as the European honey bee. They come in three types: a worker, a queen, and a drone. Most of the bees are workers, like their name says they do the work in a hive. The hive also has some drones, in the Spring and the Summer there are enough that you can find one without too much searching but in the Fall and Winter it can be hard to find a drone. The hive also has one queen.

When the queen lays an egg she decides if the egg will be fertilized or not. If she lays a fertilized egg it develops into a female, so it will be a worker or a queen. If the egg isn't fertilized it will be a male, this is a drone.

If the hive decides it needs a new queen the workers will tend to an egg in a special way and ensure that it turns into a queen. They do this by putting the egg into a larger cell (if the queen didn't lay it there already) and feeding the young bee a lot of extra food with special qualities. This food is called royal jelly.

Fuzzy or Shiny?

Some friends of mine started their first hive this spring. They've had a few challenges so far this year including losing their queen a couple months ago. They weren't sure if the queen was replaced or if the hive swarmed but they knew that they ended up with a new queen. It's been about a month since that happened and there haven't been any new workers, only drones. This means one of two things, either the queen couldn't mate in their area and is only laying drones or the hive has laying workers. Either way without new workers being produced the hive is doomed.

Some good news came along though, not far from their hive someone found a new bee hive between some hay bales. This is great news because they could get their old queen back and the hive would be saved! They asked for my help in recovering the swarm and I gladly accepted. When we got to the farm where they keep their hive the owner was happy to see us and we went over to see the bees. While we were walking over there I was telling them about getting calls about bee swarms and how the first question you should always ask is "Are they fuzzy or shiny?". I then realized I should have asked that question long ago because they told me that these bees were shiny.

This meant that the "bees" were actually wasps. Bees are fuzzy, wasps are shiny. We walked down to make sure and indeed these were yellow jackets. This meant that their hive was still doomed, without a mated queen the workers would die off and without young workers to replace them the hive will become weaker and weaker until there are too few bees to keep the hive working.

An early harvest

A hive that was started from a package this spring was getting too tall to work alone so I decided an early harvest was in order. Normally I would wait until September to harvest honey. There are two popular methods for getting honey out of a bee hive, one is to put a chemical into the hive that drives the bees down and away from the smell. Another method is to use a blower to blow the bees out of the boxes you want to take. I used a leaf blower to do this in the past and it does work but I wasn't happy with the results, the bees were upset.

My method for getting the honey out of the hive is to remove it one frame at a time. I then shake the frame about three times over the entrance of the hive which removes about 95% of the bees when done correctly. It also doesn't seem to upset them at all! I then use a brush to quickly brush off the few remaining bees. This also doesn't upset them when done correctly. At first I used the brush to slowly push the bees off of the honey, this got them quite upset. A quick flick with the brush though and they don't seem to mind.

I removed nine frames this way, leaving the tenth frame because the honey wasn't completely capped. Bees know to cap the honey cell when the honey has less than 15%-20% water in it, depending mainly on humidity. The reason they cap the cell with wax is to keep the honey dry, the bees remove so much water from the nectar when turning it into honey that it will actually draw moisture out of the air! A capped honey cell is airtight so the honey stays dry enough that no bacteria or fungus can grow in it. That is the reason why honey will keep forever, as long as it is kept in a sealed container.

In a commercial honey operation they will harvest any honey/nectar, even when the nectar isn't cured into honey yet. They put the honey into a "hot house" to evaporate off the water until it is under 20% moisture content and then they extract and bottle it. Smaller honey producers will instead choose not to harvest a frame of honey until it is at least 70% capped. Since I plan to enter this honey in the state fair I decided to only harvest fully capped honey to keep the moisture low. I also plan to avoid heating the honey because that also degrades the quality of the honey.

These nine frames are now sitting on a counter, if I wasn't going to harvest the honey from them yet I would put them in a freezer to make sure any wax moth eggs that are hiding on the wood frames didn't have a chance to hatch. Once I separate the honey from the wax I should end up with 40-50 lbs of honey.

A new queen in a new castle

This evening I opened up a swarm that I hived on June 18th. I put them in two boxes, a deep box and a medium box, both ten frame. Their frames were completely empty, only wood surrounding where I wanted them to build their comb. Given that all beeswax foundation is full of nasty chemicals and I'm not able to make my own foundation I've been using a trick where I use a wedge top bar but no foundation, I just turn the wedge on its side (after cleaning up the messy wood bits) and nail it in place. I last looked at them on July 19th and found that most of their comb was being drawn as I wanted and I removed a few pieces that weren't.

I'm proud to report that after that small correction that the bees completely drew out the medium box, nearly perfectly! The hive was packed full of bees and looked very healthy and their mood was very mild, which was a pleasant surprise given that we are entering the time of year when the nectar flow slows to a stop and the bees get a little grumpy. I know that this queen's grandmother was a NWC, New World Carniolan. Despite having opened the hive twice now I have yet to see the queen, she's doing a good enough job that I don't need to inspect her and I can forgive her odd brood pattern given that she's short on space with only 10 frames of comb. I was surprised to see that the other box was not yet drawn out at all. That explains why those 10 frames were packed so tightly with bees.

Given their reluctance to draw out the bottom box I added another medium with ten frames (also no foundation). I removed five drawn frames and alternated every-other frame with drawn and empty, now the top two boxes each have five drawn frames and five empty frames. This will be a bit of a mess because the corners of the drawn frames that have uncapped honey will get drawn out even deeper but I can take care of that later, I don't want to lose their comb drawing instinct. New swarms are great at making comb.

This hive came from a split I made this spring. I'll have to tell tell that story later, it is a good one. I ended up with one of the three hives having too many workers and too much brood and when the queens emerged it swarmed, ending up in this hive.

250,001 pets

I have four pets.

One of them is a Canis lupus familiaris, also known as Man's Best Friend. Her name is Osa and she loves to eat loaves of bread off of our counter.

The other three pets are something a bit more exciting. I have three bee hives in my back yard. It is true that I have about 250,000 bees in my yard but each individual isn't much of a pet. They only live for a few weeks and their individual lives aren't that exciting. Work, work, work. The hive as a whole though, it can live forever. It can be upset, happy, sick, or tired. Each hive has its own personality that I have to learn and work with. As far as pets go, they are very cool.

1 lb. of Honey

A worker bee will live for one month.
During that month she will fly for ten days.
In those ten days she will visit 2,600 flowers.
In her lifetime she will produce 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey.

750 bees work their entire lives to produce 1 lb. of honey.
2,000,000 flowers are visited to produce 1 lb. of honey.
55,000 miles are flown to produce 1 lb. of honey.
A farmer's market asks $6 for 1 lb of honey.