Beekeepers Friend

There are actually three ways to clear bees from honey supers. (1) Use Bee Go which is very smelly and can keep everyone out of your truck for 2-3 months, or use Fischer’s Bee-Quick which has hardly any smell at all, (2) use a bee brush to brush the bees off each frame, and (3) use a leaf blower which I have renamed a bee blower.

The first two ways you need a fume board which is a cover made like a telescoping hive top but is the same dimensions as a super. It has a felt pad attached to the inside top of the cover. You sprinkle the liquid Bee Go or Bee-Quick onto the felt pad and place on the super felt down. You need the sun’s heat to activate the liquid. As it evaporates, the fumes will drive the bees down out of the honey supers. The temperature needs to be in the high 60’s degrees Fahrenheit and no hotter than 89 degrees. If it is too hot it could actually kill the bees before they could clear the fumes out of the hive.

The bee brush is time consuming and you have to brush each frame and put it in a super body away from the brush area so the bees won’t be tempted to get back on the brushed frames.

The bee blower can blow the bees out of the super fairly fast and it is easy to do. Stand the supers on end and blow the bees out then turn the super around and blow the other way. Always blow the bees toward the front of the hive so they will be enticed to go in rather than coming back to the super.

I have elected to use the blower because I don’t have to wait for 5 to 10 minutes for the bees to exit the super before I take it off the stack and I don’t have to depend on the sun to stay out of the clouds.

Just thought you might like to know this. I am getting ready to take one of my young students with me tomorrow to pull honey and he will like the blower. Since I don’t have many hives and only about 30-40 supers, the job will take only about 6 hours travel time included.

Now to get my extractor cleaned and ready to extract the liquid gold that tastes so good.

I had a call from a landowner about my bees. It seems that he had left a gate open to a closed area in which I have a colony. Normally I have anywhere from one to ten colonies at this location. I moved all but one back to my main apiary for the winter and just haven’t gotten around to moving them back.

Back to the story. A big black bear had entered the area and just knocked my one hive over. Didn’t destroy anything and apparently lost interest and went on through another open gate into his yard. The owner said that the tracks were the largest ones he had ever seen.

If a bear finds a way into your apiary, then he will remember it for a long time. I hope that with the gate closed, he will lose interest in my location. There is 2 things I have to think about. 1. Do I keep my bees there any more? or 2. Do I erect a bear fence with a solar battery? That is a question I will have to wait to answer. I restacked the hive and I am going to leave the hive there to see if the bear will come back. That is a good location for Palmetto honey. Five colonies are marked to be transported there in the next week.

Palmetto honey has a nutty taste to some people. I haven’t had the chance to taste it so I don’t know first hand. This will be my first crop. I will post again if I am lucky enough to harvest some.

Try to get several kinds of honey to give your customers a choice. It makes good sense and cents because sometimes they will buy two or three different types just for verity.

After reviewing what I needed in the hives, I met my young beekeeper and his friend who had decided to tag along and see what the fuss was about bees. We met as I was eating breakfast and they had coffee. You don’t have to be a coffee drinker to be a beekeeper, but you will find that the majority are coffee or tea drinkers.

We went to the apiary that had the extra supers and with the queen excluders I brought with m, we started to go through some of the hives checking for brood in the super. Remember, I said that the first super on the top of the brood box belonged to the colony. We found brood in most of them. I only had 4 queen excluders which we used up 2 in the first apiary. Only 5 colonies in that yard.

The next had 9 hives and only 7 had a colony of bees. Lost 2 2 to hive beetle slime. That is when the beetle larvae is boring through the honey cells, eating, and defecating. That makes a slimy concoction in the honey and on the tops of the frames. It is shiny and wet looking. The honey is ruined and has to be washed out of the combs. After washing with hosed water, you can let the combs air dry and use again. The bees will clean the wax up and start using again.

I will have to go back and take more queen excluders the next time I am there. We also had one hive with the honey super on the bottom because at the beginning of spring, all the bee moved up into the honey super to feed. Bees very rarely move down, so I had reversed the brood box and super. Now that all the bees had moved up into the deep brood box, we changed it so they could start all over in the correct box and fill the super with honey while the queen was busy laying eggs in the bottom deep brood box.

I didn’t find any diseases and very little evidence of varroa mites. Now all I have to do is get some screened bottom boards made up and go back and exchange the bottom boards and put in the queen excluders and get ready to pull honey and extract.

The Gallberry  is beginning to bloom here so I need to get some more supers ready to change out with the wildflower supers and get ready to work for the next 2 months and hopefully have a breather before I have to keep check on the food supplies during the dearth months.

From August to Sept is the time to get my feeders ready and order some pollen patties, and new queens if I can find them to try to make strong hives with young queens to go into the winter with.

The reason for the last statement is the heart of a later post. Get ready to start enjoying you honey to eat and to sale.

6 posts ago, I said that I would “write about my bee yards”, in the next post. Well as you can see I had other posts on the net before I put what I said. Sorry. “Better late that never”.

I went to the last 5 apiaries today just to see what has to be done. I have made a list so my young beekeeper can see what we are going to do tomorrow.

There will be top board to change, taking frames of live bees out of a dilapidated brood box and putting into them into the new one, adding some inner covers, and checking a colony to find out what is ailing it to the point of not producing like the other colonies in the same apiary.

I have 25 hives left from winter. All but one is medium strong to real strong. One is not on the same level as the others and that is the one I need to go through thoroughly. The real strong one is getting ready to swarm and that is the one I want to split. I will be looking for queen cells in that hive so I can requeen any colonies that have spotted brood patterns. That is a sign that the queen is getting old and running out of eggs to lay. By using a queen cell, I don’t have to spend money for a new queen, and the hive that I am going to split is a gentle hive, hygienic, and a very good producer of pollen and honey. That is the kind of queen you need to use as a breeder for other queens.

I will continue this discussion in another post. Now I suggest that you read a book on bees and order a monthly bee magazine, either and/or all, Bee Culture, American Bee Journal, Speedy Bee. These are good sources of information.

Until next time, keep enjoying your bees and honey.

I was reading my Bee Culture, reading Yahoo forum, and daydreaming when I had a flashing thought. I tried to find the basis for this thought, but came up with a blank. I realized that the Spring major Wildflower nectar flow here in NW Florida is nearly over with if one wants to go to Tupelo and Gallberry. However, wildflowers are still blooming during the late Spring and Summer. Just not as much as in the early Spring. I just like to collect different single nectar sources so I can offer a variety of  honey tastes to my customers.

I just had another thought. I have elected to do this post and research during the day as apposed as the night and now I have lost half of the daylight that I could have been working in the apiaries, or visiting that area of my back yard that I have chosen for cleaning boxes and frames, replacing foundation, painting and marking my wooden ware. That was a choice that you could say was a bad one.

Working with bees and bee related stuff has to be flexible, but should be done with a plan to get the maximum amount of work done in a minimum amount of time. This is where organization of time would benefit the beekeeper. Also it would give him/her more time to rest when rest would be more beneficial to the body. I never said that I was organized.

While we are on that subject, you should have all your apiaries neat and trimmed so the landowner will consider letting you keep your bees there awhile longer. Besides making a good impression on the landowner, the bees will benefit from a trimmed apiary by not having to work through a jungle of weeds and grass just to get out of the hive and back in again. Also, if you have weeds growing in the entrance of the hive, that would be like giving the ants and termites a super highway to the hive.

Mowing and trimming should be done 2-3 times a year. In January/February, May/September, and any other time that you have a good rain and the growing things get tall. It also makes it easy for you to work your hives without tripping on vines, or getting you feet wet, or dropping the hive tool and losing it because it hid in the tall grass or weeds. One other thing comes to mind, the tall grass/weeds can hide critters that you might not want to stumble upon a suddenlike. Hehe.

That is enough for now. Have a Beeutiful day!

I am helping two beginning beekeepers for two reasons. First for credit for Beekeepers’ College, and because I enjoy helping new beekeepers see the beauty of God’s handy work. One of the questions was, “What do I need to start Beekeeping?” The answer is simple: You need certain equipment, like wooden ware, bee vale with or without a separate hat, hive tool, gloves that cover your arms up to your elbows, and a smoker with shield.

It is recommended that you start off with two hives so in case something goes wrong with one, you can use the other to help bring it back up to snuff. If one hive becomes weak, then you can use frames of brood from the other to help strengthen the weak one. If one becomes low on honey stores, then the other one could share some of it’s honey.

A hive consists of a bottom board, deep brood box, queen excluder, 3 honey supers (either shallow or medium), and top board. If you use the telescoping top, then you need an inner cover. The bees will glue the inner cover to the super and usually leaves the top cover alone. If you don’t use an inner cover, then the bees will glue the scoping cover down and it will be hard to pry it loose.

Once you have completed assembling your hive, you need bees. You can get a package of bees through the mail from a bee supplier or you can purchase a Nuc (short for Nucleus) locally from a beekeeper. A package will be at least 21 days before the first new bee emerges. By that time your package of bees will be only half as strong as they were when you received them due to die offs. A nuc will consist of 3-5 frames of brood (baby bees) and bees to cover. The bees will be emerging as fast of faster than the die offs which means that the colony will stay strong rather than getting weaker.

By the time you get to this stage, you should have bought, borrowed and read several books on bees, beekeeping, honey, and sales. Also there are several videos or CDs that you can get at your local library that you can watch. The key here is to keep learning through books, magazines, local bee association, and beekeepers. This is an ongoing learning curve that will last the rest of your life. One more thing you need. Find a beekeeper that will take you under his wing to help show you the ropes. He will be a great source of information.

Now that you have reached this level of education, you will be the bee man of your neighborhood and people will look to you for bee information. You are well on your way. ENJOY!

The last two days of vacation, my visitors from West Virginia, asked if they could clean my back yard. They had done all they had planned and were without something to do. I was happy to say “YUP! And I will supervise.” Now you have to understand, I have over 300 supers, deeps, mediums, shallows, and nucs that needs to be cleaned. But before I could do that, I have to be able to get to them. Various reasons as to why the yard got in bad shape. I also had some trees with long limbs swinging down onto the stacks of wooden ware. I welcomed the help and with 2 adults and 4 children working, it got cleaned up and now I have a work area large enough to place a 10′ x10′ canopy up to have shade to work and, if it rains, I can still be dry.

I also have 2 new beekeepers that I am to mentor this year through next Spring to help me do that cleaning. This will be good experience for them. The cleaning will consist of: scraping the wax moth cocoons out of the boxes and off the frames, removing the old wax comb and replacing with wax or plastic wax coated foundation, cleaning and building screen bottom boards, and painting the hive bodies for the new year.

Now that I have told you where I get my help on occasion, you can look for your own form of help and get some of your work done. You can also trade your labor in return for labor on your equipment.

Until the next time, keep reading and learning, and attending your local bee association.

I finally got to go to 3 apiary locations. I had two dead outs. One was due to starvation and the other was from beetles. I didn’t get to my yards very much during the last 4 months. Reasons: Workshop, rain, cold temp, hot temp, visitors, bee college, more visitors, and just plain lazy. Some were unavoidable and then there was procrastination.

You should have been in your hives by this time and know what you have to work with. The spring wildflowers are still blooming, but some of the target flowers are just beginning to open up. Such as Gallberry and Tupelo. They will be making nectar within the next 2 weeks. If you want a single source of honey, then you should be getting your supers ready. Take all the honey supers away from your bees and move the colonies to the Gallberry patch and put clean wax comb supers on, or at least put new foundation on. That way the only honey in the super will be your target honey.

I will have another post or two next week and I am getting ready to mentor a new beekeeper Monday which will be another post. I will stay with him for a year. He will be working with me in my apiaries and I will be helping him in his. Be sure to check with your state to see when your state beekeepers association will be meeting and attend. Lots of good information can be gained there.

I thought that by now I would have been in the bee yards checking to see what I needed to do for or to the bees. Alas! I have been entertaining visitors, all family, for the last two months, going to the bee college, more family visiting, getting ready for some friends from W. Virginia, and collecting swarms from tree limbs, and out of a building to be demolished.

The swarms were from two of my hives. I made a split from one hive and it swarmed three times since. Only one was a true swarm and I think that the other two were mating swarms. However, the last two have made good nucs. The parent colony is still strong and has a queen. Go figure! I think that I need to use that queen as a breeder queen. It seems to be a survivor and is a strong colony. That will be a separate post since I, as of this time, have not attempted to make queens.

I regret that I did not have my camera with me when I removed the colony from the building. It was a beautiful 10 comb hive about two feet by three feet in size. I got a five gallon bucket of wax comb and a five gallon bucket of combed honey. Most of the comb was dark brown to nearly black. I can only extract the honey and melt the wax as I would not eat the dark wax and will not sell it as comb honey.

I did get two honey customers during the extraction and there were 5-8 people taking pictures with cameras and cell phone cameras. I had an opportunity to talk bees and honey to the spectators and possibly will be invited to a school to give a demonstration.

Now I have to build a solar wax melter to melt all that wax as the one I did have has expired and I had to tear it down and throw the rotted wood away. I also need to try my hand at building a wax press to extract the honey comb. If I succeed, I will write about it.

By now you have started a good honey flow for Wildflower honey. It will be just a few weeks and the Palmetto and Gallberry will be blooming and you can get some specialty honey. The Tupelo will be blooming at the same time for those of you that have a Tupelo site in the Apalachicola swamp area. Now is not the time to sit back and relax. Just keep plugging along and you will be able to rest during the Summer time. Until next time, keep on enjoying your bees.

This was the first Beekeeping College of this kind in Florida. It was held on March 13-15 in Apopka, FL. Thursday 13th was for the experienced beekeepers. We had some lectures and then we went to the bee yard and had a test on lighting a smoker and keeping it lit for the duration of the exercise with the colony. There were 6 stations where 6 individual students were asked to explain how to smoke and enter a hive, find eggs, queen, drones, and look for pests and diseases. Then we went into the lab area where we were given a test on identifying various parts of the wooden-ware associated with a hive. Also, we were to identify some pests and tell why they were in the hive and what we could do to prevent them from getting a disabling toehold on the colony.

We had a lunch break on our own and then had some more classes that afternoon. We then had a two hour supper break and study time. We were told to report back at 7:00 pm for a 2 hour test. Then the next day, we were to choose what classes either in the beginners’ and/or advanced that we wanted to attend.

That night at the banquet, we found out if we passed the advanced tests of the previous day by receiving an Apprentice Beekeeper certificate.

Saturday we had more classes and labs to dissect honey bees to see Nosema and Trachea mites. The beginners, instead of the lab, went to the bee yard and were shown the hives with instructions on what to do. There was information for everyone on their level of knowledge.

Now you may think that this is a snap. Well let me tell you that just ain’t so. We have computer homework, books to read, community services to perform, and we also have to keep records of what we do in our bee yards. We have to document everything we do, which includes: signed statements for the community service, photos of our work in the bee yards if we can, show where we get our queens and when we requeen, and…well, you get the picture.

I just can’t wait to go to school next year. That will be my Advanced Beekeeper rating. The following year will be Master Beekeeper, and the final year, if I last that long, will be Master Craftsman Beekeeper. That is all for now.

The next blog will be on what’s going on in the bee yards.