• Tag Archives honey supers

  • Bee Diary: August 6, 2010

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                     Waning Grandchildren Moon

    Hive inspections today.  The package colony, the youngest of the three, began life here in late April.  Now it has three hive boxes full of brood and honey, a honey super full and has two near empties for the rest of what the summer offers.  I’m pleased I’ve gotten honey from this colony so soon.  The parent colony still has two full honey supers, a third nearing full and two near empties.  The divide has expanded itself to the necessary three hive boxes for overwintering, but early on filled the third hive box with honey.  Since then it has shown little interest in the two empty supers I put on a month or so ago.

    The upshot of all this, at this point, is that we will have honey.  How much depends on the nectar flow over the next couple of weeks, but enough to justify purchasing extracting equipment.  It also means that I have two strong parent colonies going into next spring, the divide and the package, assuming, that is, that they survive the winter.  My mentor indicated that some people “knock the old queen on the head” in a parent colony, then requeen it.  If I decide to do this, it would see me next spring–again, assuming winter survival–with three parent colonies.  That would mean that in May I would have six colonies instead of four.

    Right now four seems about right for what I’m trying to do.  I don’t have commercial intentions, though I may sell some honey.  I want honey for us, for friends and family, for gifts and I want to continue learning about bees.  I’ll decide over the next few weeks.

    After extracting the honey, I also have to check my bees for mites and nosema.  A bridge not yet crossed.

    Also spent time in the vegetable garden where I found my onion crop ready for harvest.  I pulled them out, whites reds and yellows, put them on another raised bed, now empty of its parsnips, so they can cure in the sun for three days.  Then, some weeks on a screen drying further and finally downstairs in the storage room cum shop.  Picked green beans from the plants I put in between the potatoes and also gathered in some swiss chard.  Greens tonight.  New potatoes aren’t ready yet.  I look forward to them.  Potatoes fresh from the garden are like a different vegetable.

    Under my new schedule I’m supposed to work out now, but I’m going to do it after the nap.  At 4:00 pm I claim an hour of my birthday present from Kate, a massage at the oddly named, Massage Envy.


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  • Bee Diary: July 24, 2010

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                                 Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    Tried out my new Alexander bee veil.  It ties across the thorax with a string and has only covering for face and neck, preventing bees from crawling under the veil and from scrambling for a hit to the face.  Having suffered one of those I’m glad to have my face protected.

    The virtue of the Alexander is that it is much, much cooler than the bee suit, requiring no heavy upper body jacket.  The disadvantage, that I discovered today, is that bees can sneak in under the sweat shirt and sting  your wrist.  Next time I’m going to wear a long-sleeved t-shirt and maybe rubber bands at the wrists.

    Today, like last week, involved checking honey supers.  The package hive has begun to fill up the single honey super I added to it last week, so I added another super to it today and put on the queen excluder, which I forgot last week.  The parent colony has two supers pretty full, perhaps all the way, but the other three supers have little weight.  I don’t candlemoldwhether this is normal or light, though some folks seem to have several honey supers filled on older colonies.  I guess you get what you get.

    The divide, too, has made little headway into the honey supers.  The divide has already filled its top hive box with honey and could be “honey-plugged.”  Maybe I’ll have to reverse the hive boxes.

    Dave convinced me to start gathering bees wax, so I’ve begun scraping it off where it’s in excess, balling it up and bringing it inside.  I forget whether I mentioned getting a candle mold and candle-making accessories, but they came with the Alexander veil.  A late fall project.  I want to make enough candles to burn during the long night of the winter solstice.

    This is a bit easier stretch with the colonies.  It will be followed by a lot of extracting work.


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  • Bee Diary: Supplemental

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                Waning Strawberry Moon

    Got this note back from the Beekeeper’s president:

    “Also, add supers ASAP. Many hives are plugged with honey in the top box and have swarmed or starting to swarm (They think they have run out of run and most have.) There is a major nectar flow going on right now so the more supers right now the better.”

    I just came inside from a quick move on the divide.  After his advice, I reversed the bottom two boxes, left the honey filled hive box on top, added a queen excluder and tossed two honey supers on top.  Good to have folks willing to help and with knowledge based on experience.

    Kate’s beginning to get curious about inside of the hives.  She wants to see.  I can show her the package colony because they’re not so defensive.  She has a veil and upper cover for insects that should be ok as long as she’s not in the hive itself.


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  • 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.


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  • 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.


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  • Bee Diary: June 7, 2010

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    05-31-10_colony1Beltane                                           Waning Planting Moon

    Hive inspections today.  Looking to see how the bees are using the other two honey supers I put on last week, now a total of four.  They have two almost full, but they have not begun to draw out much comb on the two with bare foundation.  At least not yet.  I did another reversal of the hive boxes–at least I think I did, the bees got pretty mad about the time for the reversal and I couldn’t recall afterwards if I’d switched the boxes or not.

    Novices leap ahead where veterans fear to tread.  In the bee newsletter from the MN. Hobby Beekeepers Assoc. this month, Gary Reuter of the U Bee lab recommended taking frames out of a bustling parent colony, one per hive box and putting them in a divide or a package colony.  The divide, if you recall, is the hive box I moved from the parent colony late in April.  It received a new queen, a marked Mn. Hygienic.  I’ve not seen her, but I have seen brood.  The package colony is the one growing from the two-pound package of bees I got in mid-April.

    There is, of course, a possible major problem with this maneuver.  What if you take the queen from the parent colony over to the new colony?  So, I decided that careful observation would take care of that.  I scanned both frames and tried to do it in an organized fashion, looking for a longer, more slender bee with her abdominal end deposited in a cell.  Didn’t see any.  Of course, as I learned long ago in philosophy, you can’t prove a negative, so all I can say for sure is that I did not see her.  If I was wrong, I guess I’ll know next week.

    The divide and the package colonies have made progress since last week.  I decided to put another hive box on the package colony so all three now have two hive boxes.  The parent remains the only one with honey supers.  If the divide kicks into gear as the nectar flow starts (I’m not exactly sure what that is, but it’s good and a big deal and supposed to be happening about now this year.)  The goal for both the divide and the package colony is to have three hive boxes before winter with enough honey stored to feed the colony until the spring.

    That’s what my current parent colony did, so I have evidence that it can be done.  It seems to me they’re both on track to get that much done and I would be surprised if I didn’t get some honey from the divide.

    No stings.  I’m moving slower now and have mastered the art of keeping the smoker going for the length of time I’m working in the bee yard.  The package colony needed another bucket of syrup, but the pollen patty was fine.

    I closed them all up, took off the bee suit, put my hive tool and smoker away and came in the house to make these notes.


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  • Tincture of Time

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                     Waning Planting Moon

    Bee work inside.  Kate finished several honey supers and three hive boxes plus frames before she left.  I didn’t know how many I would need in her absence.  All but one of the honey supers now have foundations.  I ran out of foundations and will have to order more.  All the hive box frames have foundations and I have added one new hive box and two honey supers in the time she’s been gone.  This Monday I may have to add one more hive box.

    Feeling better now, tincture of time as Kate likes to say.

    All the dogs are in bed and I’m headed up to read some more in the Three Kingdoms.  Night.


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  • Bee Diary: May 9, 2010

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                        Waning Flower Moon

    A new feature on ancientrails, the ancient trail of bee-keeping.  This diary will serve as my record of work with my colonies and a way to review the year’s learnings and prepare for next year.

    colony2colony1

    From left to right is colony 1, the parent colony of bees started with a package a year ago.  The parent colony has two honey supers on it now, the gray boxes, and a queen excluder which you can see as an unpainted strip of wood between the honey supers and the top hive box. The bottom hive box sits on a bottom board which rests on a leveled foundation, in this case bricks.  Colony 2, with the silvery metal cover, is the hive box, painted gray, and an empty honey super covering a plastic pail of 1 to 1 sugar syrup.  The green board underneath is the bottom board and the foundation in this and the next instance are a heavy plastic decking plank cut into small pieces.  Colony 2 was the third hive box on the parent which I divided a week ago and to which I introduced a new Minnesota Hygienic Queen on Monday.  The third box, with the copper top, which all the colonies will have eventually, is the colony started a two weeks ago from a 2 pound package of Minnesota Hygienics.   In the final frame I’m smoking the top hive box of the parent colony preparatory to an inspection of the frames.  Kate took this picture last Monday and the other pictures were taken on May 1.

    Today I started by preparing the smoker, the metal object you can see in the picture with me.  This has taken a long time for me to learn and I finally have found a way to colony3keep it working for the 30-45 minutes I need to do my inspections and whatever work I need to do.  I now use hamstermebee670050210 bedding to start the fire, throw in some compressed wood pellets, pumping the bellows to create a flame and embers.  Then I put in smoker fuel, a cotton product that I assume is leftover material from spinning cotton into thread.  Once this has established itself I put on the suit, zip up the headpiece, cinch up the sleeves and put my pants into my socks.  I learned this last one the hard way when that bee crawled up my pant leg and stung me on the butt.

    Each time you start work on a colony you smoke the entrance, which is to the back in the colony 1 photo and to the right side in 2 & 3.  Then, each you time you lift something, like the top or a hive box you put smoke under the object you’re lifting before you take it completely off.  The smoke calms the bees and, it just occurred to me, the beekeeper.  Often when you crack a hive box you have to use a hive tool to break the propolis the bees use to seal up their hive.  It’s a sticky, brownish substance that sets to a somewhat pliable but sturdy joiner.

    Each time you check the hives you look for several different things:  swarm cells, which are really new queen cells indicating that a swarm is imminent, larvae which mean the current queen is at work and present–this is a situation bee-keepers call being queen right, disease, this one is tough for me since I’m not sure what I’m looking for and pest invasions like mice or ants. In addition to this general inspection there are also specific tasks related to each inspection since the goal is to disturb the hive as little as necessary while maintaining a good weather eye.

    Today

    Colony 1 (the parent colony with a year old queen):  I checked the honey supers to see if they were full.  They weren’t.  Had they been I would have added two more.  I also removed the queen excluder and checked a couple of frames in the top hive box and underneath it for swarm cells.  After setting the top box on the ground, I did a similar inspection of the bottom hive box, then reversed the two by putting the top box on the bottom board and the bottom box on top of it.  Queen excluder.  Honey supers.  Top board.  Hive box cover.  Done.

    I noticed pancake shaped cells constructed on top of the cells on the frame foundation.  I have no idea what this means.  I saw a few swarm cells and what looked like a large number of drones, fat bodied male bees.  I also found larvae which meant colony 1 is still queen right.  You can kill the queen during an inspection.  That’s a buzz kill.  Ha.  If a colony is not queen right, it will not produce worker bees or honey.  This is one of the reasons you stay out of the hives as much as possible.  In addition, the bees know much more about being bees than you do.  Let them handle it.

    Colony 2 (child of the parent with a few weeks old queen):  There was pancake shaped cell structures in this colony, too.  Again?  I did see larvae here and an empty queen cage, so colony 2 is queen right.  It looked to me like a lot of these guys were drones, too, but what do I know at this point?  There were a lot of bees and they did look and sound crowded–a lot of buzzing–so I added a hive box with ten frames and foundations, left the original hive body on the bottom board and put the empty on top.  Then I closed colony 2.

    Colony 3 (package with few weeks old queen):  I lifted the copper hive cover, found the syrup pail still had plenty of syrup, smoked the hive box and lifted out a few frames.  There are larvae and the  beginning of the ovoid structure of brood, then pollen, then honey.  The pollen patty has had little activity, but I left it in just in case they need it.  After hiving a package, the population of the colony declines for the first 21 days as the queen lays and workers go out seeking pollen, many of whom will die.  After the brood begins to hatch and the nectar flow begins in earnest, the population will ramp up.  When 80% of the frames have brood, I’ll add another hive box on this colony.  Both colony 2 and colony 3 have the same task this year, build a strong parent colony, three hive boxes, that will over winter and divide next May.

    Colony 1, if all things go well, should produce honey this year.  Next year and from then on, again assuming things go well, we’ll always have two parent colonies producing honey and two child colonies in the process of becoming parents.

    Under any circumstances I go the Minnesota Hobby Beekeeper Association meeting on Tuesday, May 11th, and found what those pancake things are.  Until the next entry in the bee diary.


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  • 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.


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  • A Warm-Blooded Insect?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                         Waxing Awakening Moon

    Sunny, but cool though warm weather seems fated to come our way.  Ice out has advanced on Round Lake though there is still rough, weak ice over most of its surface.  Many daffodils have speared their way up through the leaves and other detritus from last falls end of the growing season.  I’ve seen a few hosta roll-ups, too.  I put in my last order of bee stuff yesterday, bringing seven honey supers, 70 super frames and 50 super foundations, a copper hive cover and 75 frame and foundations for the deep hive bodies.

    The old machine shed, now to be the honey house needs a thorough cleansing which will be an early task once the weather moves away from soggy and I have some time for outside work.

    Today, in just a couple of minutes, I have a call about Matt Entenza’s gubernatorial campaign.  They want my thoughts on environmental issues.  They can have every one of them.  After the call, on to the language of ancient Rome.  Later in the day I may revise Liberal II.  That novel just sits there right now.  Waiting.  Meanwhile my promiscuous creative spirit entertains other guests, a new project, a big project, that will follow After the Hawthorn Wars.

    Here’s another jaw dropper that I learned about bees during my bee course.  Over the winter the colony becomes a large cluster with all the bees hanging, literally, together, shivering.  The shivering produces heat and keeps the colony alive during the temperature drops of winter.  This means, said Marla Spivak, that in winter the colony, the whole colony, acts like a warm blooded animal.  The colony is a super-organism that gathers food, births larvae and nurses them, takes diseased and deceased members, defends itself and takes up a lot of time with architecture as well.

    Since the cluster happens inside the hive boxes, it is difficult to picture.  I’ve chosen a swarm in the picture here, to show you a cluster, but not like the one I had in my first colony this winter.


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