Cedar Pillow?

I've been worrying about the bees ever since I checked on them last over a month ago. Are they ok? Are they cold? Are they staying dry? It's going to be a long winter! I've been researching hive winterization and it seems like a very controversial topic. Every beekeeper has an opinion and no one seems to agree with anyone else. I did decide to try adding insulation and moisture absorption on the top of the hive: I stapled window screen on the bottom of an empty super and then filled it with cedar shavings. The theory is that this allows moisture to rise up and escape from the hive as it's absorbed by the shavings. The cedar may also repel mites (wishful thinking?). It seemed like a fairly simple and easy technique to try so we'll see how it goes.

Caramel Recipe

Here's my recipe for honey caramels that won a blue ribbon at the fair!  It can be doubled if you want.  It takes time to bring them up to the right temp; you need a candy thermometer.  If you don't get to at least 260 degrees, they will be too soft and gooey.  If you go above 265 degrees they will be very chewy so watch that thermometer closely.  I pour the mixture into a pan and let it set up overnight and then cut it up the next day.  I cut the pieces into squares but they slowly morph into blobs unless you eat them right away.

Queen Bee Caramels

Ingredients

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

½ cup honey

½ cup sugar

¼ cup cream

¼ teaspoon vanilla

¼ teaspoon dark rum

Sea salt or kosher salt

Directions

1)      Meltbutter in small saucepan on medium heat.

2)      Addhoney, sugar, cream and stir until melted.

3)      Bringup to 260F using a candy thermometer (hard ball), stirring occasionally.

4)      Removefrom heat and add vanilla and rum, stir carefully (mixture will bubble).

5)      Pourinto a pie pan or 8” x 8” pan that is lined with buttered parchment paper.

6)      Sprinklewith sea salt after  the mixture hasfirmed up slightly.

7)      Cutinto squares after cooled completely (overnight ideally).

8)      Enjoy!

 

 

 

Submitted by SarahKirkpatrick for the 2012 Spokane County Interstate Fair

Getting Ready for Fall

Our first frosts came this week. The bees are busy for a few hours in the mid-afternoon when the hives are in the sun but when it cools off they're staying inside where it's warm. The foragers that do make it out are bringing in lots of bright gold pollen. I wonder where it's coming from.
Both hives are heavy and full of honey so I hope they're ready for winter. I checked on the girls last week and Cam's hive is looking really good: the top box is full of honey and the bottom is packed with pollen and brood in the middle with frames of honey on the sides. Beautiful! Toby's hive is looking better: the new queen is getting up to speed and laying more eggs. There's a lot more brood than the week before which is encouraging. They have lots of honey too. It's getting too cold to do much more in the way of inspections so I think it's going to be up to the girls now. Yikes! I'll worry about them all winter until I check on them in early spring (March) to see if they survived the winter. I plan to sign up for the second-year beekeeping class next year so I can learn about the management of over-wintered colonies. Worst case scenario is both hives dying out during the winter. Best case is they both survive with a big population and are ready to rock and roll once the flowers start blooming. That might mean splitting a hive into two. Or seeing a swarm. Only time will tell. For now, I just have to get stuff stored away for winter. And eat honey!

Where Are the Bees?

I can't seem to go anywhere without stopping to say hi to bees. Toby and I were at Manito Park this week admiring the annuals and I saw a lot of happy bees on the salvia. I should plant more of that next year. I've also been surprised to see them working the lobelia in my containers at home. It hasn't rained in two months so anything that hasn't been watered had totally dried up.

Selling Honey

My honey has real labels now! They're colorful and have a picture of the hives from back in August when all the supers were on. I'm amazed at how many people want to buy some honey at work. If this keeps up, it'll be gone after the garden club meeting in a couple of weeks.

Getting Ready for Market

Now that the honey is all bottled, I have to get it labeled and ready to sell. I'm getting labels made by a local company; they should be ready by the end of the week. I'm putting polka dot ribbons on the jars too to dress them up a little. The TIEG meeting in October is coming up and I have a table reserved at the 'marketplace.' I have no idea what the demand is but it should be fun to find out. If I have time, I'll make some 'award winning' caramels too for people to sample and purchase. I can use the fair ribbons to decorate the table.
How are the bees doing? They still have lots of honey in their hives even after the big harvest. Toby's hive has a new queen who's only a couple of weeks old. She was starting to lay eggs last week which is good news but I plan to check on her again this week and make sure I see good brood production. Still need to keep my fingers crossed! I talked to a fellow beekeeper this week whose hive also went queenless this week. She had to get a new queen from Tate's. It's not a good time of year to re-queen but what can you do?
It's time to get ready for colder weather: night time temps were in the upper 30s last week but now it's warmer and will be close to 90 by Friday! Not sure how that affects the bees. I do know that we haven't had rain for a month and a half so it's really dry which decreases the available forage for the bees. At least we live on the South Hill where much of the yards and parks are watered which helps.

Extraction Day!!

And the grand total is.... 200lbs!! That's a lot of honey. I spent saturday afternoon at Sweet and Simple Apiaries for the extraction and got five five-gallon buckets of honey. Now I'm in the process of getting it filtered and bottled.

This is the uncapping machine: it's kind of like a giant electric bread knife that slices the wax caps off the surface of the honeycomb so it can go into the extractor.

Here's the extractor filled with frames of uncapped honeycomb.  I think this one held around 30 frames.

The honey pours out of the extractor into these plastic bins that have a filter on top to catch chunks of wax and debris.  I think I filled three or four of these.

                             The proof: my receipt for the day's work.  The guys were having fun joking around that I'd produced almost double my weight in honey!

My haul: the buckets were so heavy that I had to use the wheelbarrow to move them around.

After I lugged the buckets home, I started filtering the honey in this bucket which then can be used to fill other buckets and jars.

All done bottling!

It took several days the yield was:
Six cases of pint jars.
Three of half pints.
Two cases of quarts.
One case of little 1/4 pint jars.
And a gazillion rags, paper towels and woman hours! Next is getting them labeled and decorated and we'll be ready to sell.

Blue Ribbon!

In other exciting news, I got a blue ribbon at the Spokane Fair! I entered some salted honey caramels in the 'food made with honey' category since my extracted honey wasn't ready in time. I guess the judges liked it! I

Queenless!!

It's been a bit of a roller coaster on the beekeeping front lately. The bad news in that Toby's hive is queenless! There were eggs in the drone comb when I rotated those frames a couple of weeks ago when we pulled the honey supers so I thought everything was good. Unfortunately I didn't do a full inspection at the time and didn't realize I had a problem until last week when I opened up the hive and saw lots of queen cells. I'm waiting to see if the hive was able to create a new queen. I checked it this week and no eggs yet. The queen cells are all gone. Either I have a queen that has yet to mate and start laying or no queen at all. If that's the case, I'll need to buy one. Hopefully I'll know within the next week...
Luckily, Cam's hive is happy and healthy and has lots of honey so I'm thankful for that!

Bee School Grad

It's official! I am a bee school graduate. I got the certificates at the bee club meeting last Friday. I should frame them and hang them up in the shed. We had a really good meeting that focused on what we need to do to get our hives ready for fall and winter.

Pulling Honey Supers

Well, we got the honey supers off! Jon helped me get that done a couple of weeks ago. I used bee escapes to get the bees out and they worked pretty well after being on for 48 hours. There were still a handful of bees left but it was pretty easy to brush them out. We stored them in the new shed in plastic bins to keep bees and wasps out. The hives are so much shorter now! No stepstool needed anymore which is nice.

Coming Down the Home Stretch

I am now a bee school graduate! We had our last class last weekend. I missed the graduation picnic though. I'll have to pick up my certificate at the meeting later this month.
Now what? I have an appointment to harvest honey but not until September 8 which is a bummer. We're supposed to do it by mid-August so that the bees can start getting ready for winter by topping off their honey stores in the lower two boxes. I can take off the honey supers now (sounds like lots of fun when it's almost 100 degrees!) but then I have to deal with storing 8 or 9 supers and keeping them away from critters that want the honey. Where? How? I have no idea. The shed isn't airtight enough to use. Stay tuned to hear what happens!
In the meantime, I got the crazy idea of entering the state fair in the bees and honey category. My honey won't be ready in time so I'm going to try making honey caramels. The family is having fun trying the experimental recipes.

The Bees Went Shopping?

Who would've known beekeeping was such a spendy hobby? They didn't mention that in bee school. In addition to frequent trips to the bee store, we decided that there was too much bee gear (and stray bees) in the garage so now we have a new shed! It was pre-built and delivered on a truck. Pretty exciting. Plus, it just made the back 40 a lot more scenic! We'll also use it to store things like the snowblower, law mower, sleds and the like so the garage will be less crowded. Right?

More Supers

The supers I added last week aren't full yet, but we're going on vacation (yahoo!) so I put one more on each hive do they won't run out of room before we get back. 9 total! That should be enough, right?? The clover is petering out but the bees are loving my oregano right now. The knapweed is starting to bloom too. After that my cimicifuga and eupatorium will blooming and I always see bees on those...

Unbeelievable!

I checked Cam's hive today and all three supers were totally full, most were capped. I added a fourth super (probably could have done that last week!) and pulled another frame of honey for the honey bank. I could have pulled two but I'm not sure if I'll need it. The stack is so tall now that I had to have Jon help me! Those supers are so heavy; I think they're about 40lbs each. I can't imagine how heavy they'd be if I had 10-frame hives. I rotated out the drone frames but didn't see any mites. Overall the bees seemed very vigorous and healthy; no need to rearrange any frames. I didn't see the queen but eggs were there which was nice to see.

Got Honey?

It's been about a week and a half since I checked on the hives since it's been so hot (90s+!) and holy cow, the hives are exploding with bees, honey, brood, everything! I added a third super on Toby's hive and Cam's hive is ready for a fourth. That meant another trip to Tate's for more supers. I got three this time, wonder if it'll be enough? I pulled a frame of capped drone comb for the second time from Toby's hive and stuck it in the freezer.
Next on my to-do list is inspection of Cam's hive and addition of another super but it'll be too tall to reach! That means Jon needs to give me a hand. I need to figure out how I'm goingto harvest this honey: when? Where? How?
Stay tuned!

Milk and Honey?

Holy cow, we're up to three supers on Cam's hive and two on Toby's. I was able to pull a full frame of honey from Cam's hive to put in the 'honey bank' for later in the fall or winter if they get hungry. I think there's a lot of flowers here on the south hill for them to forage. The weather finally got really hot this past weekend so the honey production may slow down. I'll see the next time I check them but I'm dreading suiting up in the 90+ degree temps! Plus, it's getting harder and harder to work the hives as they get heavier and taller. I guess that's a good problem to have though! I'll have to recruit Jon to give me a hand.

Super!

I checked on the hives again yesterday and today. Lately it's been so hot that I'm doing them just one at a time. Even if it's only in the 70s, I'm dripping sweat after a half an hour! Between the jeans tucked in and taped to my rainboots and the bee suit/hood/gloves, I overheat in the blink of an eye. And you can't wipe the sweat out of your eyes when you have the hood on. Yikes! It's like being in a sauna.
Anyways, the bees seem to be pretty happy. The garden is in full swing with all kinds of plants coming into bloom. I can see the worker bees coming into the hives with tons of pollen on their legs.
Hive #1 seems to outpacing #2 at this point but I have no idea why. We have honey supers on both hives that are filling up fast. I added a second one to hive #1 today. I pulled the frames of drone comb from both hives and replaced them with new ones. Those will go into the freezer to kill the mites that prefer the drone brood. Sorry boys! I'll keep rotating them as they fill up to keep pulling mites out of the hive. In theory this will decrease the mite load on the worker bees. That sounds better to me than using poisonous miticides! Stay tuned to hear how well this works... I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the hives stay healthy and that I can harvest a little honey this summer. I'm just dying to taste it!

Almost Summer

The hives are two months old now! I have no idea how many bees we have now but it's a lot more than when we started. Both deeps are full and they're drawing out the honeycomb in the supers. They're about halfway done with that job already! I finally got some pictures of the hives opened up do you can see the bees on the frames. Aren't they cute?? Most of the bees that came in April are gone now (they only live a couple of months) so all the ones you see have been born in our backyard. Everyone except for the two queens of course.
You can see them zooming around in the air from the kitchen windows. They're collecting pollen and nectar like crazy. The locust trees are just about done blooming but the mock orange is just starting up and I hear that it's one of their favorites.