inspection

had my annual inspection last week. another friend, chris, who is interested in keeping bees, came over to observe. all is well. healthy bees, found a few mites, and agnes had beetles, too, but over all, everyone is healthy. the inspector went ahead and dusted with powdered sugar while he was in the hives. (this makes the bees groom themselves and knocks the mites off.) agnes is the only one without a screen bottom board and beetle trap. we'll work on improving her living quarters soon.

they all 3 had full supers ready to rob, but i think i will leave them on for now. if we have a super heavy fall flow and they manage to fill up another, then i may rob. otherwise i want to leave them with enough honey to make it through the winter without having to feed them.

much to my surprise, i found that agnes has been replaced, so now we have Queen Agnes II, Queen Polyxena Christina I, and NO QUEEN ESTHER! based on the number of bees he saw in the hive, the inspector said that esther had swarmed, but left about 40% of the colony behind. there were no new eggs, no larvae, no capped brood, but there were 2 "ripe" queen cells, ready to hatch.

so, from the date of inspection it should be about 3 weeks before i start seeing any new workers i think. i'll have to watch her and make sure she hatches and gets to work laying eggs. hopefully she will, and her colony will be strong enough to make it through the winter. if not, if the colony doesnt' re-build itself, i'll have to combine her girls with one of the other queens.

now agnes is a different matter. no swarm involved there, just the old moving over to make room for the young i think. a very healthy hive. that's the one i have always wondered about. it has always seemed to have fewer bees than the other 2.

and old polyxena christina is still alive and kicking! - something that i found very interesting...and i would not have understood this last year, but the bees really do get to know their keeper. i could tell a difference in the attitude of the bees when the inspector was working with them.

they were agitated, not aggressive, but definitely agitated. the inspector said it was him, that the bees knew me and how i handle them, and they were not pleased with the way he was handling them. i have to agree. after working with these colonies for the last six months i guess we have gotten to know each other. that can also work to my detriment! for example, it took agnes' girls a few weeks to get over being upset with me for botching the "robbing job" i did back in the early part of the summer. every time i got into the hives they would fuss at me and buzz around with attitudes - no kidding. lucky for me, bees don't have a real long life expectancy, and "collective memory" only goes so far.

swarm!

had another first - caught a swarm!

i heard through a series of emails that a friend of mine, rhonda, had a swarm of bees bearding in a tree in her back yard. i had never caught one before but was very excited at the opportunity! i wanted the experience of catching a swarm, and i liked the idea of adding some new bees to agnes' hive, the weaker of my 3.

rhonda had been out of town for a few days, so she didn't have any idea of how long the bees had been there. now, there's a lot about beekeeping that i don't know yet, but there's even more that i don't know about catching swarms. however, i do know that they can be a bit unpredictable. it might be that you gather equipment and support troops, then make the trek to the area where they were spotted -only to find that their scouts have already done their job well and the whole colony has taken off to live happily ever after in the wild blue yonder. add to that, these bees had just weathered a pretty severe storm the night before i arrived, so i thought that perhaps the bad weather might make them more likely to jump at the chance to leave...

lucky for me, this was not the case. catching this swarm took place over a couple of days. unfortunately, cliff and laney - the dynamic duo - couldn't join me, so i was afraid i was going to have to fly solo. turns out i was anxious over nothing. ( i can hear the "i told you so('s)" now) rhonda is such a bee enthusiast, she was right there with me through the whole thing and it was fun! and of course i didn't go into this without an extensive email exchange with laney asking for advice and how-to's.

i had no idea what the temperament of the bees would be, so we chose to err on the side of caution. the bees were only about 4 feet off the ground, bearding on an oak branch. we VERY CAREFULLY cut the branch off, then VERY SLOWLY trimmed it down and VERY GENTLY placed it in the brood box with 5 wet frames and put the lid on. (wet frames = frames that still had a little honey on them after extraction)

here's where i made a mistake...i didn't screen off the entrance. i left it open thinking that the bees that were out foraging would find their way into the hive by evening and i would come back after dark to bring them all home.

well, by the time i had my gear packed up and had chatted a few minutes with rhonda, we looked out at the trees and saw a suspiciously large, agitated cloud of bees flying around under the tree again.

that ungrateful queen had left her new luxury condo to rough - it in the tree again! (this time 8 feet up) this abandonment did let me get a good look at the branch we had cut off... found that they had already started building comb on it, so apparently they were pretty content to stay put.

day 2, bring in the reinforcements, namely - andy and a ladder.

this time we misted them with water so they would be less likely to fly away. it all went smoothly. same thing as day 1, just screened the entrance, loaded them into the back of the truck and took them home.

kept them locked in the brood box with their wet frames and in the shade all day. at times throughout the day i walked out on the deck to check the activity. my bees seemed to go through cycles of agitation and peace. one moment there would be hundreds of bees zipping through the air and trying to crawl through the entrance screen. the next moment they would all be gone!

the next day, i opened up the swarm box. (rhonda came over for this part, too!) this was the sad part. i had to find the queen and kill her. andy took care of it for me and did it in a humane way. he euthanized her in a mason jar with a rag soaked in gasoline. so now the boys have a beautiful queen bee on the nature table to look at anytime!

so after we found the queen i opened agnes' hive and spritzed her girls down with sugar water. i then spritzed the swarm and simply shook as many bees into their new home as i could. what few remained in the swarm box were also spritzed, and i set the box over in the sun with the other wet supers that the bees were cleaning up.

no scuffles at all. everybody seems to be getting along just fine, so... mission accomplished.

bee happy, bee robbed

cliff and laney came over about a week after the bee bunch extraction day and helped me get in the hives and just figure things out. i had a few supers ready to rob, so we took them off and stored them for extraction a couple of days later. here are a few pics of that day. they boys get to help more when andy is on hand to take care of stings and wounded egos. without him there, they just have to kind of stay out of the way and watch. they both really like puffing the bellows on the smoker!

"bee bunch" extraction day

it was an amazing day. exhausting for all, but very rewarding. i did not get to extract with the "bunch" because i felt like my supers were not quite capped off enough and i did not want to risk having that liquid gold go to waste and ferment on me! my bees needed about another week to 10 days to be ready for robbing.

*****

laney had his garage set up as a temporary "honey house". everyone brought over their full supers that morning or the night before and tried to "cleverly" hide them from laney's bees under a tarp on the driveway, but we were only fooling ourselves! those bees could smell that honey and were determined not to let anyone with less than 6 legs get at it before they did!

*****

inside the garage were several de-capping stations. these were basically portable utility sinks. each one had been retrofitted with a rack across the top to hold de-capped frames waiting for extraction.

*****

a note about "cappings"... the bees store nectar in the comb, and fan it with their wings to help evaporate the moisture. they know when the nectar reaches that magical conversion point...a moisture content of less than 18%. that's when nectar is no longer nectar, but honey! the next step for the bees is to "cap off" the cells with wax to store the honey for future use, kind of like we can green beans in the summer.

so, "de-capping" is the process of opening the cells by slicing off the wax caps so that the honey can then be extracted.

the cappings drop down into the utility sink and drain through a filter into a bucket waiting underneath the sink.

*****

the cappings are saved and used in a variety of ways... they can be rendered (that's a story for another day) and used to build up foundation on frames for use in the spring, made into soaps and lotions, they can even be melted and eaten on toast (Gary's favorite)!

lots of uses for beeswax, but i chose to borrow an idea from laney and gary... selling unfiltered honey w/ the cappings in the jar. lots of people ask for comb, and just as many are looking for local honey to help with allergies, so i borrowed their idea and combined my unfiltered honey (full of pollen and whatever else the bees brought into the hive) with the cappings and offered it for sale. great response. it's also a good way for me to easily distinguish between the spring flow honey and the summer flow.

they really had this whole day down to a system. everyone worked together, but on only one beekeeper's supers at a time. so after de-capping, the frames were loaded into one of two extractors. one was a three-frame extractor, manually operated, and secured to the stairway banister.

the other was a nine frame motorized rig mounted on a sturdy table and somehow chained to the floor. andy and cliff were both enamored with the motorized contraption...

each extractor worked by spinning the frames and slinging the honey out of the comb, which then drained out the bottom through a screen and into a 3 or 5 gallon bucket.

then came clean up! had to gather and store all the cappings in separate buckets, wash everything down, stack the supers and buckets, make room for the next beekeepers' bounty, and start all over again!

i think the final count was around 100 gallons at the end of the day. like i said, exhausting, but rewarding.