• Tag Archives honey

  • Bee Diary: July 17, 2010

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                    Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    Hive inspections today focused on the need for additional honey supers.  The package colony had the third hive box about 80% drawn out with honey and brood, so I stuck a honey super on it.  The divide has two hive boxes.  As Dave suggested when he came out a week ago Tuesday, I had left the queen excluder off.  I put it back on today, carefully checking both honey supers to see if the queen had gone up into them.  She hadn’t.  At least I don’t think so.  She has a mark and I didn’t see one on any of the bees, but I did see a large, unusual looking darker backed bee.  Sort a bee goliath.  Probably a drone.  The divide bees have not done much in the two empty supers, so we’ll have to see.  I may stick a frame from a parent colony super in one of the divide’s supers.

    The parent colony has done a good bit of work.  One honey super filled up a while ago.  The second one I put on with it has begun to take on weight.  The other two have a good bit of drawn comb, but not much weight yet.  A filled honey super weighs around 50 pounds, plenty for this guy to lift.

    I did take one full frame out of the honey super already filled and replaced it with an empty one.  The full frame will be part of the Woolly meal on Monday night.  Just what we’ll use it for is not yet decided.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees 📎and tagged

  • Bee Diary: July 2, 2010

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                   Waning Strawberry Moon

    Just sent an e-mail to the Minnesota Hobby Beekeeper’s Association.  I need help.  We’re in mid-season now and I don’t understand what I’m seeing in the hives, nor do I understand enough about where things should be right now.  The two  make a whole.  That is, I don’t understand what I’m seeing because I don’t know where things should be right now.

    I did a reverse on the parent colony, the last one, according to the book.  I do have more weight in the second honey super, but little action in three and four. This colony continues to be defensive, much more so than the package and about on par with the divide.

    The divide has filled the third hive box with honey, no brood at all.  I don’t know what that means, though I suspect it might mean I’ve had a swarm and am now queenless.  I did see brood, but workers will lay if a queen is gone.  Trouble is, since they’re not fertile, the only thing they can produce are drones.  There did seem to be a number of drone cells–they have a higher cap to accommodate the drone’s larger body.

    The package colony looks pristine, the larvae laying pattern seems ok and there is a general air of healthiness.  Not that there isn’t in the other two, but this one is like a puppy, all fresh and perky.  It has not, however, done much work at all on the third hive box, a bit of drawing out comb, but that’s about it.  Again, I don’t know what that means.

    I did get stung a couple of times, but I smoked the stings, scraped them off–rather than pull them out which injects more venom–and applied sting-ease.  The parent and the colony both have a more defensive posture than the package.  It could be, too, that I’m still somewhat clumsy with my frame inspections and crush the occasional bee.  There are many more bees in both of these colonies, so more chance for accidents.

    So much to learn.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees 📎and tagged

  • Bee Diary: June 24, 2010

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                              Waxing Strawberry Moon

    I got through 2.5 hive inspections.  The package colony has beautiful comb, an excellent egg-laying pattern and is now ready for the third hive box.  That’s as far as it needs to go as soon as it fills out at least 8 frames in the new hive box.  That should happen over the month of July.

    The divide has had three hive boxes for a week now and has begun to fill up frames in the third hive box though they are far from full.  I see no evidence that either of these two have swarmed and I saw few swarm cells.  Still a bit difficult for me to recognize for sure.

    All of the colonies were a bit more aggressive than usual this morning, a surprise to me since it’s sunny and warm, a good day to go gather nectar and pollen.  In my opinion there was no need to harass the bee-keeper, but the divide began whacking at me and got me in a tender space right on top of my thumb’s joint.  That hurt!  I completed that inspection, too, trying to follow the check every frame idea.

    When I got to the parent colony, I removed the two empty honey supers I put on last week.  Nothing.  Nature’s Nectar, a blog about bee-keeping kept up by the guy who sold me my queen and my package, however, said he had little new honey, too.  He’s thinking it will pick up this week.  It’s nice to have that kind of confirmatory message since it makes me think things are ok here at Artemis Hives.

    When I got the honey supers removed, I began my inspection of the top hive box.  It is full of bees.  Mad bees.  I to about half way through the inspection of the top box and the bees had begun to dive bomb my hands as I reached for a frame.  Game over.  I’m not willing to spend a week with swollen hands.

    I’ll go out tomorrow or Saturday to finish the inspection.  I don’t know for sure whether the irritation of hive inspections transmits from colony, but if it does, then the parent colony was ready for me.  I may try starting with it next time.

    Other than that my fears of a foul-brood infection seemed to be misplaced.  I saw none of the signs.  The egg laying pattern in the parent colony seems uneven to me, where the other two looked more compact. (better)  I’m still a long way from feeling sure about what I see and what to do with the information.  But, I’m much further along than I was in April.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees 📎and tagged

  • Bee Diary: June 16, 2010

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                           Waxing Strawberry Moon

    My inexperience is showing. At the Hobby Beekeeper’s meeting they suggested we look at each frame.  I did that.  With three colonies that’s a lot of frames.  In the package colony it seemed to me that there were not as many bees as there should be right now, though I stopped here to read Nature’s Nectar and it sounds like other beekeeper’s with packages from his second load (mine) have about the same activity as I do. I put in another pollen patty and left the syrup the same since it was down only about half from the last week.  There were larvae so it’s still queen right.  It needs to get to three deeps by the fall.  I imagine it will make it.

    I put a third hive body on the divide.  The bees had drawn out comb on the second hive body I put on last week and there were frames with brood.  The overall colony looked pretty good.  I guess.  It’s hard for me to judge since I don’t have an exemplar outside of my own colonies.  There were swarm cells and some of them looked chewed.  At the Beekeeper’s meeting last week they said that usually means the bees have swarmed.  I can’t tell.  When bees swarm, they leave a colony behind and a new colony takes off with a queen.

    The parent colony has one honey super that is heavy.  Really heavy.  A second one has some honey and the bees have begun to draw comb on the other two, but not much.  Since the bees don’t go out on rainy, cloudy days, the production of honey has slowed down.  We need a run of sunny, warm days.

    Since I’m studying bee diseases in an online course right now, I imagined I saw disease.  Don’t know if it was or not.  A learning curve.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees 📎and tagged

  • Bee Diary: Memorial Day, 2010

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                       Waning Planting Moon

    Hive inspections today.  A rhythm to the process has begun to set in, not jelled quite yet, but getting there.  In the honey house, the converted machine shed where we parked our various internal combustion contraptions, off come the hat, the gloves, sweatshirt.  Pick up the smoker, toss two handfuls of hamster bedding in it and light.05-31-10_beeyard Open the package of dense cotton clumps, tear off a piece or two and shove them into the  side of the smoker, being careful to keep the flame going.  Pick out a square of cut-up cotton cloth and set it on fire next to the dense cotton, hit the bellows a couple of times to make sure the thing gets stoked.

    (bee yard)

    Put on the bee suit, being careful to tighten the velcro around the wrists.  At this point it would also make sense to tuck my pants into my socks, but it seems I still require the sight of a bee on the ground.  Then I do it.

    Pick up the hive tool and stick it in my back pocket, close and pick up the smoker and head out to the package colony, #3.  I do them in the order of orneriness.  The package bees are very calm, the divided colony less so and the parent colony, #1, can be downright aggressive.  This way I leave fewer excited bees in the air as I get closest to the end.

    After a little smoke under the copper top on #3 and dash at the entrance, I lift the copper top off and put it standing up against a baby oak tree nurtured by Jon.  This reveals the empty hive body that protects the syrup bucket positioned upside down over the opening in the hive box cover.  Today it was not significantly down so I left it alone after removing it.  A little more smoke and the hive box cover comes off, the frames and foundations of this new colony now are visible.  Being careful to keep the frames over the hive box (in case the queen is on the frame and should fall off she’ll land back in the hive), I look at it with the sun to my back, then flip it over and do the same with the other side. I find larvae, so we’re still queen right and work has proceeded on several frames, but  there’re no where near the 80% needed to add another hive box.     (colony 3)

    05-31-10_colony3

    This colony had eaten through the pollen patty I provided, so I had to interrupt my visit with a trip inside, down in the basement to get a pollen patty from the small refrigerator we have down stairs.  Made me think it might be nice to have a small fridge in the honey house.  I could keep pollen patties in there along with water and Sharps.

    Looking at the bees at work, once you get over your fear of getting stung, counts as one of the pleasures of bee-keeping at a hobby level, so I indulge myself.  Nursery bees go head first into comb to clean it out, or add more height, do something hygienic for a larvae.  Worker bees are adding pollen to combs and honey, too, creating a food supply around the colony’s nursery, ensuring food for the long haul. Close it up and move on to

    #2 has a lot more bees.  With its copper top off the hive box cover has a solid mass of bees.  The new hive box, on top of the divided box with the new, marked queen, has a number of frames with drawn out comb, but several are still empty.  This means the colony has plenty of room and I see no swarm cells on the top box.  Should I reverse them?  I couldn’t remember.  I don’t, figuring that the crowded bees are in the divided box and the more roomy box is on top.  Since the queen tends to move up, it makes more sense to me to leave this hive in the status quo.  Everything gets put back together in the reverse order from which it was removed.

    Colony #3, the package Mark and I hived last April in his surplus equipment he loaned me to get started, is mature.  It has a year plus old queen still in her peak fertility years, a full contingent of workers, two hive boxes with drawn out comb, larvae and plenty of food for the colony.  From a honey production perspective this is the point of the whole process.  As I lift the outside hive cover, metal topped to protect the colony from the elements, there are not as many bees here as there were in #2.  That makes sense because the hive cover here is over a honey super, not directly over a hive box.

    Just by looking I can see the honeycomb drawn out on almost all of the 10 frames in the honey super.  This is exciting.  When I lift this honey super off, it’s heavy.  Heavy05-31-10_filledhoneysuper with honey.  More smoke.  The second honey super does not have as much honey because they had to draw out comb for it, but there is still a substantial amount, maybe half of the frame sides.  It comes off, lighter than the top one.

    Below the honey super is the queen excluder.  It has bees all over it and experienced bee keepers assure that many times the queen, just out of contrariness, will be on the underside.  So, I’m careful to lift the excluder over the hive.  I look for the queen but cannot see her.  She could have been right in front of me and I’m not sure I would have known.  She’s longer, that’s the most obvious difference.

    (a full frame of honey)

    Today colony 3 seems calmer.  Maybe it’s me, getting more acquainted with the work.  I can’t tell.  These two hive boxes are full of bees.  The U says to reverse them every 7-10 days, so I’m reversing them.  What do I know at this point?  Both the hive boxes are heavy two with stored honey, larvae and bees.  Since I’m not turning pink and sweat is not blinding me as I make every move, I’m slower, use my legs.  Not a problem.  After reversing them and checking for swarm cells (maybe, but there’s not much I can do at this point except put on more honey supers which I have with me.), I put the honey supers back, starting with a new pair just constructed by Kate and beautiful to see.  This means I have chosen, not sure why, to put the heaviest box on top.  This could get unwieldy pretty fast. (see picture)  The hive box cover goes on over the top honey super, the metal covered top and another hive inspection is in the books.

    Hilo, who lay at the edge of the bee yard as I worked, and I go back to the honey house, open up the smoker so it can burn out, put the hive tool away, hang up the bee 05-31-10_colony1suit and head out to the chair sitting on the bricks in front of the honey house.  I finish off the Sharps, look at the trees, marveling at these unique living beings and watch a sparrow gathering material for a nest.  Until next week.

    (new honey supers on colony 3)


    📂This entry was posted in Bees 📎and tagged

  • Bee Diary: May 24, 2010

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                          Waxing Planting Moon

    Discovered an important aspect of bee-keeping this morning.  When the temperature is 87 and the dew point is above 70, it gets really, really hot in the bee suit.  Hot 05-24-10_bee-diary_6701enough that by the time I finished I had begun to get dizzy, sweat literally dripped off my forehead and face.  I couldn’t get the bee-suit off fast enough.  Came inside, sat down and drank a couple of glasses of water, didn’t move.  Better now, but whoa.

    (a frame of honey from colony #1)

    Colony 1 has begun to produce honey!  The top honey super has several frames full.  The second, bottom super is not as full.  I’m not sure whether I should put on another honey super or two.  Need to poke around in the bee literature.  Colony 2 has filled up the hive box divided from the parent colony (#1) and has begun to build comb in the new hive box.

    While inspecting this colony, I transferred all the new frames and foundations to a new hive box.  When I put the current one on, I didn’t notice I had failed to drill an entrance hole in it.  I took one out with a hole and switched the frames into it, then closed up colony 2.  Its primary job is to fill two hive boxes and make honey for overwintering.  Beyond that it may make some honey late in the summer, but maybe not.  Either way is good.

    The package colony, #3, has drawn out a good bit of comb and has made progress with larvae, honey and pollen, but is not yet ready for the second hive box.  That goes on when 80% or so of the frames have drawn out comb filled with those three.

    Two stings today, both happened when lifting frames.  I inadvertently placed my index finger on two different bees.  It is not a big deal at all now, a nuisance.

    The smoker stays lit for the whole operation, too.  That’s a big and important advance for me.  My movements have slowed down and my inner world has a much calmer 05-24-10_bee-diary_6702aspect to it.

    (colony #2 with its hat at rakish angle)


    📂This entry was posted in Bees 📎and tagged

  • Getting Things Ready

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                       Waning Flower Moon

    After checking the parent colony with the queen excluder in, I found larvae in the top hive box.  That’s evidence of the queen.  That meant I shifted the middle hive box over to the new foundation and bottom board.  A syrup feeder pail went on top of the new, child colony.  This calms everything down and allows for a peaceful slow release of the queen tomorrow.  Leaving the queen excluder on the hive box in which I discovered larvae, I put two honey supers on it and replaced the inner cover and the telescoping outer cover.  The parent colony now has two hive boxes, one with a queen and brood, plus the other, lower box, which will get reversed on top in 7-10 days.

    Tomorrow I’ll check the package colony for larvae a second time.  If they have none, I’ll have to get another queen for them soon.  If there is no queen in the hive, the lack of her pheromones turns on egg laying in the workers, but, since they’re not fertilized they produce only drones.  Once a hive converts to worker egg-laying apparently you have to start over.

    This has been a busy couple of weeks for the bees.  Kate’s been making supers and frames and hive boxes, too.  If the divide and the package colony take, things will calm down for a while until the honey flow ends.  Then, there’s an end of the whole process I haven’t encountered.  Honey.

    Two more bags of composted manure on the leek/sugar pod pea bed, another on the sun trap and a lot of planting.  The herb spiral has the herbs Kate bought Friday at Mickman’s.  I also planted beets, mustard greens, fennel, onions and a pepper plant in the sun trap.  The tomatoes and other peppers will go there, too.  Those two beds, along with the other bed where I have green onions plants along with radicchio, beets from seed and thyme will be our kitchen garden for the growing season.

    Kate did a lot of weeding, including the blueberry patches.  It really makes a difference to have her focused on that aspect of gardening.  She’s also in charge of pruning which has its on rules.

    The leeks, onions, kale, chard, garlic, parsnips, butternut squash, other beets and carrots will also be available during the growing season of course, but most of these will get canned or dried or frozen for the winter.

    I would not like to do the cost accounting on these vegetables and the fruit because the two fences and Ecological gardens have created a lot of sunk costs.  It will take years for them to zero out the costs, more years, I imagine, than we have left in this house.  In our case, of course, that’s not the big point.  The big point is a more sustainable and healthy lifestyle and in that regard the cost accounting has already tilted in our favor.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Garden Great Work permaculture 📎and tagged

  • Avoiding the Swarm

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                   Waxing Flower Moon

    A bruising middle finger, swollen passes the inflammation onto the top of the hand.  It itches.  This aspect of bee-keeping has its annoying moments.  Like using same finger to hit the i with regularity, or the comma both assigned to this one on the right hand.  This will, however, pass.  Kate says it is possible to develop an allergy of significance, I hope I don’t.

    This time of year in bee-keeping the primary task is to keep the colony from swarming.    My hive had burr comb when I opened it, comb on top of the top frames;  it also had swarm cells, that is, cells in which the larvae have been fed royal jelly to produce a queen.  Both of these are symptoms of a colony ready to swarm.  Swarming is natural, the way feral bees keep their population at optimum size and spread their kind.  It robs a beekeeper of the honey flow, however, because it is the over-wintered colony that produces the maximum amount of honey, so beekeepers want to keep their bees happy.

    One way to do this is to do a partial reverse, which I did Saturday.  Since a colony tends to move up during the winter, this puts the largely vacated middle box on top, thus creating more room for the hive.  A hive with room and food is less likely to swarm.  Another critical point comes in ten more days, when I then do the complete reverse.  About 10 days after that, I’ll split the colony in two.  That means I’ll have two colonies, plus the new one I’m starting this weekend while Kate’s away in Colorado.

    I’ll have three colonies through the fall, while the parent colony (if it doesn’t swarm.) will naturally die out.  If things have gone well, I’ll have two parent colonies next spring which I’ll split in May, thus giving me four colonies, two producing a lot of honey–the parents–and two perhaps producing some, but their primary task lies in producing a strong parent colony for the next spring.  Then, I’ll have two colonies which I’ll split and so on.

    Spread composted manure and hummus on the bed I plan to use as part of our kitchen garden after shopping at the Anoka co-op.   Not such a great experience at the co-op.  It was an old style co-op with few price labels, indifferent and largely volunteer staff, crowded aisles and only a modest selection of food.  Think I’ll stick with the Wedge.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Cooking 📎and tagged

  • More Bee Stuff

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                           Waxing Awakening Moon

    The bulk of the bee woodenware has come:  frames for honey supers, honey supers, foundations for honey supers, a bee brush, a feeder for syrup and a bunch of pollen patties and goop to make my own if I need to do so.   While this may seem like a lot of gear, and it is, by next year we should have four colonies with two producing a lot of honey and two ready to divide to create two more good honey producers and two more developing parent colonies that will provide the honey for the year after that.

    This system can work with any number of colonies, but if focuses on producing two at a time and can reach a steady state at any multiple of two.  In the first year (last year’s for me) the goal is to create a parent colony that can divide in mid-May.  With the division there are now two colonies, one with an established queen, the parent colony, and the division, which initially has no queen.  The parent colony produces a lot of honey while the division with a new queen builds itself up to three hive boxes and may produce some honey.  Over the winter the parent colony bees die out–the usual life span of a queen is two years and worker bees somewhere between 30 and 90 days on average.  The parent colonies hive boxes get cleaned out and accept the division from the new parent colony and so on.  By adding a new package of bees this year in a new hive box in the orchard, I’m preparing a parent colony for division next year there.

    After next year we will have four colonies, two producing a good bit of honey and two strengthening themselves toward division in the upcoming year.  With careful attention to bee diseases, hygiene and good management this can self-perpetuate.

    On April 24th or so I get my new 2 pound package of Minnesota Hygienic bees.  They’ll go in the orchard with the fancy new copper hivery top.  We’ll see these two hives out our kitchen window year in and year out so I wanted them to look good.  Mid-may I divide the old colony and start stacking up honey supers.  Then we should be off to the races.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees 📎and tagged

  • I’m Not There

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                               Waning Green Corn Moon

    Once again a movie arrived late in the pick-up zone.  I’m Not There, the movie about Bob Dylan, was on view here at the Seven Oaks Family Theatre.  It took a while for the dizzying shifts and the multiple actors to make sense, but they did at last.  Cate Blanchett amazed me, as she often does.  She is one of the finest actors working right now.  I found Christian Bale’s performance less compelling, but good, too.  Richard Gere made an interesting Billy the Kid and the young black kid, Marcus Carl Franklin, in a difficult role, performed with great skill.   Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw, who played an enigmatic, trenchant Dylan giving an interview, also appeared.  I’d give it 3.5 stars.  But you saw it years ago, I suppose.

    There was a 7.1 magnitude earthquake in the Izu islands about 100 miles from Tokyo.  It shook buildings in Japan’s capital city, but there was no tsunami.

    The bees have been busy, but there is little  honey in either of the supers.  I checked the top hive box and there is comb honey there.  Some of the frames had a long dark streak through the honey cells.  It didn’t look right, but I really don’t know.  I need some help.  I did taste the honey and it was delicious.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Cinema and Television 📎and tagged