well life has been hectic lately, and i've been praying that God would look out for my girls until i could be a more responsible beekeeper. it seems that every time i had a small window of opportunity to work them, some crisis would arise and all spare time instantly evaporated.
however, it seems God took pity on me, and with good advice, healthy bees and good weather, everything worked out just fine, in spite of my hectic schedule and my many mistakes.
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i've noticed the bees "bearding" a lot lately. wasn't sure if it was due to hot weather or overcrowding.
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i had some work to do before i actually got in the hives and worked the bees. each hive would need a new super, and each super would need new foundation in each of the 10 frames it would hold. wax tends to get dark, even black, after the bees have used it for a while.
this is definitely not my favorite part of beekeeping. i'm not real good with a hammer and a nail. but, after a few mistakes i finally got it down to a system.
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i was completely caught by surprise when i did finally get in the hives. i expected to check them all and add a super to each. but each hive was completely "honey-bound" - no room for the bees to do anything because each frame was full of honey and capped off as well. i had to rob immediately to avoid swarming.
unfortunately, i hadn't discussed this with laney ahead of time because i certainly hadn't expected to find what i did. so i went with what i had been told to do last year and i made some big mistakes!
i started with polyxena christina's hive. the bees had run out of room and were building comb in between the supers. ( i later found out that this is called "bridge comb".) they were stuck together and heavy. i made a big mess trying to break them apart. then i totally stressed the bees out by taking the whole super off and working it from there. apparently, the smell of the honey from the comb i ripped open to remove the super added to the alarm. kevin and andy both got stung even though they were standing a ways off in the driveway (i didn't miss this opportunity to point out to andy that perhaps they liked me better than him). i emptied 2 supers and put the new super with the fresh foundation on then left them alone.
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got into agnes' hive next. this time i tried removing one frame at a time while leaving the super on. this worked much better. not near as much stress for the bees. emptied 3 supers except for a few frames and added the new super with the fresh foundation.
same with esther's hive. i left a few frames of honey in both agnes' and eshter's hive. left a whole super in polyxena christina's. set the empty supers back on top of the hives, put the lids on and left them alone for the evening.
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next morning at 7am, kevin, michaelann and kate showed up to help with extraction. now this is only the third time we have done this, and we definitely have not refined the process to an art yet, but we're getting better. this was the first time to try out a new-to-me 2 frame extractor. i bought it already rigged to a milk crate, but one crate wasn't high enough to let the honey drain into a 5 gallon bucket, so we quickly improvised and were pretty successful with our attempt.
it's a fairly simple, but labor-intensive process. as the hives are robbed, i put the full frames in totes with lids to keep the bees away. extracting HAS to be done inside. the frames are de-capped, either with an electric de-capping knife (which i believe i will invest in sometime in the future!) or with a capping scratcher, which is what i have. then the frames are put - 2 at a time - into the extractor. a manual crank on top spins the honey out of the frames. then we let it spin to a stop, reverse the frames so that the spun side is now facing the center of the extractor, and spin again to extract the outer side. the honey drains out the bottom into a filtering screen set on top of a 5 gallon bucket.
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three and a half hours and about 18 gallons of honey later, we were kind of wrapping it up so i headed back out to the hives with all those wet frames. i wanted to get them back on asap. i knew the bees would be foraging again as soon as the sun came up and would need the frames back quickly.
sure enough, in just 18 hours they had already started to build comb on the side walls of the empty supers. they had also pulled out a fair amount of comb on the new foundation and didn't seem to want to be bothered. i could tell it was going to take some convincing to get them off of that new comb. decided it might not be a wise battle to fight. my original plan was to get in the hives, REMOVE the new foundation (after emailing laney i realized that with brand new foundation in there, the bees would have to spent their time and energy pulling out foundation and building cells and i'd rather have them making honey) REPLACE it with a super full of wet comb and leave them be(e).
well, there were SO many bees that i just didnt think one shallow super would give them enough room. they were bearding all over the outside and inside of each hive. so, even though i like the idea of only adding one super at a time and having them fill it to half full before adding another, i decided the best thing to do would be to add the wet super on top of the super with the new foundation, giving them 2 to work in.
i filled the rest of the empty supers with the wet frames and set them out on tables near the hives for the bees to clean up. apparently they will not store in them if they are off the hive.
i'll let the bees clean them up for a couple of days, then smoke them off and store the supers with moth crystals until i am ready to use them again.
polyxena christina's hive remembered me and by all signs had not forgiven me yet. they were irritated as soon as i got in there, and that is unusual for them. they are basically VEY mild mannered most of the time. i had better luck with agnes and esther...
next step is to gather more information at the next "bee bunch" meeting...
