Here Comes the Cold

We had our first snow a couple of weeks ago. 

I hope the girls are staying warm! I added an empty super on top of each hive and filled them with cedar shavings to provide extra insulation and ventilation. I used those last year and both hives made it through the winter. We'll see if I get lucky again. 

The Apivar strips had been in for 6 weeks so it was time to take them out. I hated to open the hives in the cold (about 40) but I didn't want to leave them in any longer than I had to.

It was kind of fun to suit up one last time and fire up the smoker but the bees were definitely not happy about it. No surprise there. I will remember this next year and time the mite counts and treatments better. Live and learn!

Ready for Winter??

A beautiful Indian summer has come to an end. We had a gorgeous October with mid-afternoon temps getting up to the 60s and no hard frosts until just last week.

See how low the angle of the sun is getting? Well, take my word for it... This is facing south.

The nice weather made it possible to feed the bees sugar syrup to boost up their food stores. They were bringing on pollen all month long too. I don't think they're quite as heavy as they were last year, but the the top boxes are full of honey. I've been working hard on getting them healthy too. They have Apivar strips in right now because the mite counts were still high after the Formic strips back in September. I think the night time temps were too low for the Formic to work. Fortunately, the last sugar shake I did showed a dramatic drop in the mite load (0.5/100) when I was about 2-3 weeks in to the 6-week treatment period for the Apivar. That'll be done the end of November and then the strips come out. The girls will be on their own until spring!

 Cam, Toby and Mom helped me sell the last of the honey at garden club last month. I can't believe how fast 300lbs of honey can disappear! There's a little bit of comb honey and that is it.

Enemy Number One

I've been waging a war again the varroa mite all year but it got worse recently. The official mite count from WSU is 5 per 100 bees for Cam's hive which is a little high.

Unfortunately, Toby's hive (which I didn't send to WSU) was showing signs of an exploding mite population: mites visible on adult bees when I inspected the hive and even some bees with deformed wings. The queen even stopped laying. Signs of trouble! So I went ahead and started a treatment with Formic acid. I checked it again today and did a "sugar shake" to measure the mite load. Here's how it goes:

I put a piece of screen in the lid of a mason jar.

Opened up the hive...

Stuck about 3/4 cup of bees in the jar with some powdered sugar.

And then you shake the sugar and mites out onto a paper plate.

Hmmm. It turned out to be 2.4 mites per 100 bees. So lower that it was before most likely. I think this seems to work a little better than the sticky board. 

Fair Time

The Spokane Fair just wrapped up yesterday. I spent Friday at the bee club booth which was fun.

By far, the most popular exhibits were the observation hives. Everyone loves to try and find the queen, especially the kids. They were marked so it was pretty easy.

This was my favorite part of the booth! A blue ribbon for my cut comb honey sections. Those were a lot of work, though. Maybe next year we'll try to win the trophy for heaviest extracting frame. That would be cool!

It's also time to start getting the hives ready for winter. Already! I'm giving them a little boost with some sugar syrup and Honey Bee Healthy. Cam's hive has a lot of honey stores but Toby's hive and the former nuc (now a two-deep 8 frame) could be heavier so they have feeders on right now. It's amazing how fast they can empty a gallon feeder: only 3-4 days.

Buckets and Jars

This can only mean one thing:

Honey time! I spent hours in the basement bathroom with the heat cranked on high (to keep the honey flowing) filtering and bottling honey.

I got 230 pounds from Bill and there's still more to go! That's 250 total so far if you include the comb honey. 

Lots and lots of jars to clean, label, and put ribbons on. Amazingly enough, all of the quarts and pints were sold (or already pre-ordered) within a week! I still have a bunch of half and quarter pint jars that are good for gifts or samples.

Oy! The cleanup is almost done but I'll have to do it again later this month for batch #2. That'll be a lot smaller though: only a couple of supers.

Meanwhile, the bees are getting ready to hunker down for the winter: kicking out the drones and topping off food stores. There's still lots of honey left for them! 

Happy Birthday!

Here I am modeling my new bee suit that my hubby got me for my b-day. It's made of layered mesh fabric so that it breathes more than my regular jacket and jeans combo. Maybe I won't be dying of heat stroke as bad with this on!

Jon says it reminds him of the movie ET.

Does anyone look good with a bee suit on?? I don't think so. It's all about function.

Bee Cocktail

I had to sacrifice some bees today! I felt horrible but the life of a bee is short and I needed a sample to send to the WSU bee diagnostic lab.

The bees will be tested for tracheal mites,  varroa mites and nosema. It'll be interesting to get the results which should be sometime next month. I chose the weaker of my two hives to test (the one that had AFB) which still filled six honey supers. It's looking pretty good but I think the mite count is higher and there aren't quite as many bees as the other one. 

What else is going on? I can tell the bees are starting to get ready for winter: there's gooey propolis everywhere, drone production is way down and the top boxes are getting heavy with honey stores. Fewer drones means that drone trapping isn't going to work to control mites as well so I started another round of the powdered sugar dusting. It's kind of a pain but it's non-toxic so I giving it a try this year.

Honey Harvest 2013

The girls are still bringing in honey, but it's slowing down (I hope!). I dropped off 7 supers plus a couple of frames as well as a deep to be extracted tonight. Whew! It's a lot of work to get it home and get it bottled but I'm glad to get things started. I still have two supers and a half-full deep that are on the hives that need to be capped. That'll be batch #2 I guess....

Pulling Honey Supers

After putting on the bee escapes two days ago, Jon and I went out to the bee yard to pull our honey supers tonight.

This is the little plastic gadget I use. It worked great in Cam's hive but Toby's bees were less cooperative. Who knows why. It was pretty easy to shake off the remaining bees though. Of course, it had to rain all day today for the first time in about a month and a half. 

So far, we have six full supers in the shed, three still on the hives (not all capped yet) and a deep box full of honey.

I pulled the supers a couple of weeks easier than last year since we're going on vacation. I hate to have to take multiple trips our to the guy with the extracting business but I wasn't sure it was ok to pull the frames that were only half capped (some not capped at all). We'll see what happens.

The Honey Is Coming!

Uh oh.....

This means work! The honey harvest is coming up next month. There are 6 supers on Cam's hive and 5 on Toby's. I think last year I had maybe 7 or 8 total. My back hurts just thinking about it. Stay tuned.

Harvesting Cut Comb Honey

The honey harvest starts this year with comb honey. 

This is the first of the five frames that Toby's bees made for us. 

Isn't it beautiful?

I cut squares of comb out of the frame with a metal stamper tool. They have to drain overnight so all of the honey leaks out of the open cells. 

After they finish dripping I place them very carefully into boxes for storage. It's a very sticky process.

Each one weighs a little over a pound. They go into the freezer next to prevent wax moth damage.

Batch #2!

The Leaning Tower of Supers

Holy cow! Cam's hive is going crazy right now. Up to six supers now which is one more than last year. 

Toby's hive has just three supers because I'm trying to convince them to make comb honey. Of course, things don't always go according to plan. It looks like they're trying to do anything but: the regular frames are getting huge and they're taking forever to finish capping the comb frames. Oh well. 

I had to get the step stool out to put the last box on. Not sure what I'll do if they fill that one.... I have an appointment with my chiropractor this week!

Honeycomb For Dinner

One of my nucs built a bunch of burr comb that I had to scrape off. It was full of honey so it didn't go to waste:

Yum! The boys were thrilled to have "bee gum" with dinner. We put chunks of it on pretzel rolls. So good. They chew on it for a while and then spit out the wax. They're used to it and love it but a lot of people give me strange looks when I talk about eating honeycomb. It's just not something you see every day. It makes me wonder if anyone will want to buy any... 

Comb Honey

Toby's hive is doing a great job bringing in the nectar so I set the girls to work making comb honey for me. Check it out:

That's a frame in the top super that doesn't have foundation. The bees are filling it with pure new wax. Beautiful! Here's a close up.

I have three of these frames in the top super.  The other four frames are already full of honey.  The bottom super is full so I'm using it as a "queen excluder." If I'm lucky, they will draw these frames all the way out and then fill them with honey over the next couple of weeks. I can pull them after it's been capped and harvest the comb. Yum! We'll see how well it works.

Cheers!

Not really beekeeping related but still fun:

 Look what I found at TJ's! Had to get it even though I don't like sweet wines at all. With the help of my friend Amy, we used it to make a yummy summer cocktail. Let's call it The Queen Bee. 

Ingredients:

1/2 lime

1oz gin

Moscato wine 

Tonic

raspberries

Muddle two lime wedges and 4-5 raspberries in a pint glass. 

Add a shot of gin and stir.

Add a couple of ice cubes.

Fill the rest of the glass with equal parts wine and tonic. 

Cheers!

What's For Lunch?

Who's that hiding in the beauty bush? So many flowers blooming for the bees.
Shrubs and trees especially. The honey flow has started!

Does this flower make my butt look big??

Surviving Swarm Season

This is the time of year when healthy bee hives think about swarming and their beekeepers try to stop them. My strong hive has been building lots of "queen cups" which are precursors to swarm cells. I've been trying to give them more room so they don't feel crowded by pulling frames of brood (to donate to the weaker one) and honey for the honey bank. They've already filled one honey super and are working on a second. Hopefully they'll stay home and keep making honey!

Lots of flowers for the bees to enjoy now. This is a brunnera.

Drones on a Stick!

Mmm. Don't think we'll be seeing these at the fair any time soon....  The good news is that I didn't see any mites on them this time. Three weeks ago, almost every larva I saw had a mite on it. Ick! Hopefully the drone trapping is working in addition to the powdered sugar. I need to do a mite count again for comparison by the end of the month. 

Drone frame. The empty cells were full of nectar. It was dripping all over the place. Wish I could have pulled it earlier in the day before they filled it up! It's in the freezer now to kill the mites. This is the second frame I've pulled out this season.

Bee ID

So who are these hard working bees in my back yard? I got a question about what variety I have. I started with two Carnolian queens last year. One was superceded in the fall so who knows who that queen mated with. The nuc has a Carnolian queen also. It was the hive with the original queen that had the dysentery and then the AFB this spring. We'll see how well it recovers. I can always requeen with the queen from my nuc if I need to but since that hive produced over 100lbs of honey last summer, I'd like to keep the original queen going at least for now.

Heat Wave

What the? 87 degrees in  May? My bees must think it's July. Good thing the sprinklers are on. I can tell they're thirsty: they're finding every dripping faucet, puddle and watering can in the yard.

Here's Toby's hive with the girls cooling off in the evening on their front porch. 

Nuc Update

Looks like the little "princess" in the nuc is up and running! I made up the nuc a couple of weeks ago and it spent the first week at my friends Carol and Dennis's house. I let the queen out of her cage a couple days later and then brought it home last weekend. I took a peek today and saw the queen on the new frame which was completely drawn out and full of eggs. They're going to run out of room fast! They might have to donate a frame of brood to Cam's hive. 

Back home in the "back 40" near the shed.

Beekeeper-in-training Carol.

Bee Picnic

This is the yard of a beekeeper: dandelions galore!

Spider Victim

Uh oh! One of our girls fell prey to a spider who was camping out in front of the bee hive. The bee latched on to her head/neck and the bee was paralyzed. Poor bee!

AFB Salvage

After conferring with several experienced beekeepers, we came up with a plan to try and save Cam's hive. I already pulled five suspicious frames earlier in the week but the AFB spores can persist in the stored honey and old comb. So what I did was to shake all of the poor bees out of the old frames onto all new foundation. I basically turned them back into a package so it was like turning the clock back to where I was a year ago. I can't use the frames of honey that I put in the honey bank last year either. Bummer. I can extract them later though because the honey is safe for people, just not for bees.
There's a feeder and a reducer on the hive now. I also gave them the first of three doses of an antibiotic. Toby's hive got a prophylactic dose too. Now I just wait for the bees to draw out fresh new comb and keep their feeder full. I might give them a pollen patty too. There's lot of pollen available, but they have no place to store it yet.
I did a mite count last week, too. What a pain. I put cooking spray oil on pieces of paper and put them on the bottom board. After several days, I pulled them out and tried to count the mites. Ick😁. I saw mites, dirt, pollen, bee parts, all kinds of debris. Hard to tell what you're looking at. Next, I'm trying a natural treatment with powdered sugar weekly for the next month. It's supposed to dislodge the mites that are on the adult bees. For the mites that are on the brood, I'm using the drone comb. I replaced the frame in Toby's hive and Cam's has been removed in the AFB process. Whew!