A New Beekeeper’s Journal
By Michael Steinkampf
Beekeeping update
7-28-10 – Summer Splits (part 2)
The queens arrive glued to
the bottom of a cardboard box. My office staff has gotten used to unusual
deliveries, but the mailman is not amused. I got an extra queen just in case.
The queen is marked blue for the year 2010. All the queens look frisky and well-developed.
The queen cages are ready for
installation via the bottom entrance of the nucs,
which were maintained queenless overnight to make
them receptive to the new queens. I christened this technique “front-door queen
introduction”. It works quite well - kudos to my mentor for teaching me this
trick.
I blocked the entrances
overnight after introducing the queens in the late afternoon. The nuc on the right is blocked with screen because it has a
solid bottom board.
My new “nuc table”, made from scrap lumber. I put the legs in coffee cans because ants are a
problem in my bee yard whenever hives are fed. Plain water in the cans allowed
the ants to swim across the surface, and used frying oil attracted too many
bees (whose bodies acted like bridges for the ants). The best barrier turned
out to be water topped off with a little motor oil.
Beekeeping
update 7-26-10 – Summer Splits (part 1).
After harvesting the honey, I returned to empty supers to the hives, placing them above the inner covers, to allow the bees to move any remaining honey back into their colonies. Two weeks later, I removed the now dry supers and stored them in the basement. I put some Para-Moth crystals on top of the stack of boxes to prevent infestation by wax moths. The boxes will remain there until Spring, when they will be aired out and returned to the hives to begin the honey collection process again.
August is the time to check for varroa mites, and September the time to consider feeding hives that don’t have enough honey to make it through the winter, but there isn’t much for beekeepers to do in late July after the supers have been stored. Since several of the hives have a lot of bees, I thought I might try splitting some of the colonies. This is more often done in Spring, but it is reasonable to do it in Summer after the honey is harvested. My mentor didn’t have much experience with this, so I was on my own.
Lots of bees in these hives –
maybe they could be put to use to make some new colonies.
My equipment for this project
– three small hive boxes (nucs), frames, feeders, and
a Fry-Daddy containing used vegetable oil to pour in cans to keep the ants out.
From what I have read, making nucs is fairly straightforward. From an established hive, take two frames with larvae/capped brood (and the adherent bees) and one frame with honey/pollen. Put these along with two empty frames in a five-frame nuc. One can either wait for the bees to make a new queen (the so-called “walkaway nuc”), or install a new queen. Given that this is late in the season for making a new hive, I chose to order new queens for these hives.
Frame with larvae and capped
brood from one of the strongest hives.
Capped
honey. A frame with both honey and
pollen might be a better choice, but there is still a fair amount of pollen
available in the neighborhood in July.
Although this frame doesn’t
have as much brood as the one shown above, I used it anyway, since it has some
pollen, too.
Installing
the frames into the nuc. Empty frames went into the established hives to
replace the frames removed.
The most straightforward way to make these nucs would be to simply install the frames with the adherent bees into the new hive boxes and close them up for a day to get them ready for a new queen. However, this approach requires finding the queens in the established hives to ensure that they are not transferred along with the frames, and this is too daunting of a task for me. I chose to shake off the adherent bees and install the nucs over queen excluders to allow the workers to repopulate the frames before removing the nucs.
Installation of the nuc above the established hive from which the frames have
been removed. Note the queen excluder between the boxes.
Bees were flying all over the
yard during this process.
Done for the
day. I will remove the nucs tomorrow.
Beekeeping update 7-7-10 – Checking out Martha.
It’s been 12 days since we captured the feral hive (nicknamed “Martha” after the landowner on whose property the hive was discovered.) If things are going well, the queen should be laying, and we might even see some capped brood - time for an inspection.
The hive inspection begins.
The frames of the hive are an
odd combination of plastic and wooden frames, comb from the original hive
mounted in split frames, and a honey-filled drone frame taken from another
colony.
Comb from the original hive.
The bees have joined the pieces into a single unit. Kind of interesting, but
the frame takes up a lot of space, and I’m going to swap it out.
Lots of
pollen and capped honey in this frame.
Developing larvae were
apparent. The milky substance in the larval cells is royal jelly.
Dr. Hurst finds the queen. He
seems to have a talent for this that I have not yet acquired. Note the capped
brood in the background. This hive is officially declared as established!
Beekeeping update 7-4-10 – Honey!
The process of honey extraction is straightforward. Remove or disrupt the wax capping on the honey comb, centrifuge out the honey, filter and collect it, and package it as desired. Of course, there are variations of this, as one can simply crush and drain the combs, or cut up the combs and package them, but most beekeepers want to preserve their wax foundation for use next year (and plastic foundation as I use cannot be crushed or cut up).
Uncapping
the frames. A heated knife makes
the job easier.
The wax cappings
are drained of residual honey and the fresh beeswax kept for later use.
Loading the
uncapped frames into the centrifuge.
It only takes a few minutes to spin out the honey.
Draining and filtering the
honey. Dr. Hurst uses cheesecloth as shown here, but I had purchased some
reusable plastic filters that he seemed to like.
Buckets of
honey being weighed. I got about
187 pounds of honey.
The
finished product. Labels courtesy of daughter Lisa.
The empty frames were
reinstalled on the hives, and the honey buckets were left in the back yard as
shown, to allow the bees to clean them up. Exposing bees to this much honey is
reminiscent of drunken sailors on shore leave.
My mentor presents me with a
certificate – it’s official, I’m a “Hurst Beekeeper”!
Beekeeping update
7-3-10 - Robbing the bees
In
Some beekeepers extract honey a few frames at a time throughout the season, some harvest in May and again in July or August, while others harvest once a year. My mentor’s strategy is straightforward – honey is harvested on 4th of July weekend. He thinks setting up for honey extraction is enough of a hassle that it should only be done once a year.
I’m going to help Dr. Hurst
harvest his honey, then do my own. Note the shallow supers on the hive – this is
an unusual size. Mine are “mediums”, about an inch taller. Professional honey
producers often use “deeps” for both brood boxes and honey supers.
There are different ways to remove the bees from the honey supers: drive them out with smoke or bee repellent, install a one-way gate (a “bee escape”) that allows them to leave but not reenter, or blow them out with a leaf blower. We are going to try several techniques. Dr. Hurst usually just smokes and blows them out, but we are to try the bee repellent today.
The bee repellent we used was “Bee-Quick,” a liquid with a pleasant odor reminiscent of almond and cherry (its chief ingredient is benzaldehyde, the primary component of bitter almond oil). Another bee repellent, “Bee-Go,” is supposedly more effective, but it has a foul odor. Bee-Quick is sprayed onto a fume board, which is then mounted above the top super. After the bees are driven down into the super below (this takes a few minutes), the top box is removed and the fume board reinstalled.
Installing
a fume board treated with Bee-Quick.
Fume board in place.
A little smoke also helps
calm (and confuse) the bees.
Here Dr. Hurst is using his
leaf blower to clear out bees remaining after using the Bee-Quick.
Application
of kerosene around the cracks of the hive to limit robbing of hives by other
bees. (This clearly dispersed the bees, but I
didn’t bother with it for my hives.)
We stored the honey supers
overnight in a barn to give the bees a chance to disperse and return to their
hives.
I harvested from my own hives the next day. The combination of Bee-Quick and a leaf blower worked well, and I didn’t bother with a smoker. I had started the year with two hives, one of which swarmed, giving me three. I wound up with a total of six honey supers to remove.
Leaf blower, Bee-Quick, and honey super ready for use.
My honey supers ready for transport.
Honey supers stored
overnight. I will extract them tomorrow. Prolonged storage will allow
overgrowth of small hive beetles, ruining the crop.
Beekeeping
update 7-1-10. Open-air cut out.
A colleague of ours who lives near the
Our 40 mile trip included
four miles on a dirt road and a five minute ride in an ATV. Note the gas
generator in the back – we would need it to power my bee vac.
Our host was correct – it is
a honey bee hive, hanging from a branch about 10 feet off the ground.
When bees swarm, they are supposed to locate a suitable cavity in which to establish a new hive, but sometimes they just make one out in open. In its exposed location, this hive would never survive the winter. The term “cut out” means the removal of a bee hive from an unwanted location, generally the wall or attic of a house. Since there was no siding or roofing material to remove, this should be the easiest sort of cut out to perform.
Although the bees don’t seem
particularly aggressive, Dr. Hurst tries out the smoker on them.
The smoked bees run up to the
top of the hive, revealing the beautiful new combs they have constructed.
We carefully vacuum the bees
off the hives, removing the combs one at a time for later use. Note my
home-made bee vac at the lower left.
We continued to remove the
combs one by one while looking for the queen, but we never found her.
After returning home, I inserted the combs that had capped brood into empty frames. These went into a brood box, which I slid on top of the bee vac. I wasn’t sure how much ventilation the bees would need, so I installed an inner cover that had the vent hole covered with hardware cloth on top of the brood box. To keep out any rain, I put a screened bottom board and an outer cover on top and called it a night. Here is how it looked the next morning:
Bee vac under brood box. Yes, I know it’s a weird configuration.
Wayward bees were trying to
get in the bee vac. I took this as a good sign.
My hope was that the bees would move up into the frames overnight, allowing me to remove the bee vac and install a proper bottom board.
There were only a few dead bees in the bottom of the bee vac the morning after the cut out – a victory for my latest contraption.
A peek at
the brood box the morning after the cut out. The bees had indeed moved up into the frames.
New hive after the base of
the bee vac was removed.
I came back the next day, removed the remaining bee vac box, and installed frames containing eggs and larvae, capped brood, and honey from my established hives. I figured that if there was no queen in the captured colony, the workers could use the eggs and larvae to make a new one.
Bees at the new hive entrance
five days after the cut out.
Today there is good traffic at the entrance, with some occasional pollen being brought in, and the bees have consumed almost a pint of syrup from the feeder in the past 24 hours. I’ll pop the top of the hive next week to see how things look.
