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.