Beekeepers Friend

I am questioning if I am a bee keeper or bee haver or maybe even if I am a Wannabee.  I have had 6 nucs (splits, swarms, etc) and one swarm that had moved into one of my honey supers to be cleaned. All these were in my back yard (I use the back yard as a first aid station). My friend, Doug, and I had clipped and marked each of the queens. They were all queenright and growing. This was about 2 1/2 weeks ago.

Today, I went outside to check and clean them up, you know, burr comb, add frames to the ones that were short and get them ready to go to the field apiaries. Well, I checked the first one and all I could see was some honey and no worker brood, but spotty drone brood. No queen and just a few, 1000-2000 bees. There should have been 5000 + bees. Oh well, maybe the next one.

That was a disaster. Only honey and mostly burr comb, but lots of bees and no brood or queen. The same was true for the next 3, no difference. The 6th nuc was the strongest and it was in a brood box ready for a super, I thought. When I looked in, I found lots of beetle larvae and shiny, wet looking top bars. This one had been slimmed and again no queen.

Surely the swarm in the hive out in the back of the yard would need a super and I got a brood box ready to put on top so the bees would move up and start laying in it and I could then remove the honey super and get it ready to put on the top to be a honey super. Slimmed again.

Summary: What I did was neglect the bees. They were just outside my kitchen door and I could look in on them anytime, so I just procrastinated and didn’t take the time “right now” and it turned into two and a half weeks, giving the beetles a chance to decimate the hives and not checking on the queen helped the bees to start a slow and deadly decline. I am now reaping what I sowed (indifference) and have lost 7 colonies of bees. I could try combining all the different colonial bees into one hive using minted sugar water, but that would be more trouble than it would be worth to me. I would still have to come up with a queen and I couldn’t get one in the mail in time to save them. Remember the jungle? “A swarm in May is worth a Bale of Hay. A swarm in June is worth a Silver Spoon. A swarm in July ain’t worth a fly.” I would spend too much money, sugar, and time trying to keep the bee alive and I would still have to feed them through the winter.

Conclusion: What I should have done, and this I will do in the future, was check the swarms and splits every 3-5 days until they are strong with at least 3 frames of brood, some pollen, and honey. Then I would let them alone for 7-10 days at a time. When they are ready , I would put them in a brood box and move them to the field. That would make me a bee keeper taking care of my livestock.

Remember, just because a person has kept bees longer than you, doesn’t mean he is infallible. Even the “Oldtimers” make mistakes and shows poor judgment at times.

Get ready to enjoy the Forth Of July and read some in the Bee Culture, I got mine today, and make plans to visit your bees soon. Did you check to see if they needed a super yet? Give them room to put up honey and you might keep them from swarming especially this late in the year.

Happy 4th of July!!

Since my wife was in the hospital for 5 days with E. Coli in her blood, I was at a standstill. I was able to attend a 4H camp and talk to about 200 students and adults one evening. But since then, my wife just got out of the hospital Thursday. I could not let her stay home by herself, so I didn’t get to go to the Blueberry Festival Saturday, here in Pensacola, FL. My friend and co-beekeeper, that usually goes with me, or me with him to these different functions, had to go by himself and he said that he sorely missed me. There were several people, both vendors and visitors, asked where I was. They expected to see me there and was disappointed that I couldn’t make it.

Just a thought here. As you get known in the honey, bee, and teaching/talks circles, you will be either in demand, or you will be the one they wish wasn’t. You have the opportunity to decide which one you want to be. Your attitude will be the deciding factor. Make the best of it. This is a very enjoyable vocation and it should be reflected by you so you will be in the looked up to group. I like it.

Now is a good time to check your bees. They are working hard for you and you need to make sure they have plenty of room. If you don’t, then they will try to swarm and if they succeed, then you run the risk of losing both the parent hive and swarm. It is too late for them to try to get ready for Winter without help from you the beekeeper. I do make early Fall splits, but it is by design and I am prepared to feed, feed, feed pollen substitute and sugar water. If I can find sucrose syrup, then that would be better. However, when I split, I usually requeen both splits with a young laying queen. Young queens will lay longer than one year old queens going into the winter and they seem to over winter better.

Till the next time please read, read, read, and start planning to take care of the bees that take care of the bees that take care of the Winter bees that will be the workforce for the Spring honey flow.

I have in my yard right now, 8 boxes (nuc size) of bees I have caught as either swarms or splits for different reasons in the last 4 weeks. In this group there is a swarm that moved into one of my “to clean” boxes. It is a honey super. I had to change the box which means that I had to take the frames out of the dilapidated box and place them in a better box. It was a shallow super and all I had was a medium. When the bees get settled and start to really set up housekeeping, they will put comb on the bottom bar of the shallow frames to fill up the rest of the space down to the bottom board with just the bee space below that. I will have a honey super on top so they will have some place to put their Winter honey.

In the Spring I will place a brood box on top so the queen will start laying in the brood box after the two honey supers have been filled up with babies. When I see that she is laying in the brood box, I will then put it on the bottom board and place a queen excluder (QX) on that and then put the two honey supers with brood on top.

I will put a stick under the first super between the super and the QX. As the full grown bees emerge the cells to begin their work, they can pass through the QX, but the drones cannot. That is what the propped up super is for. When all the bees are hatched, the workers will put nectar in the brood cells and when all the cells are capped, then I will remove the QX.

As a rule, the queen will not cross capped honey. It will act as a QX and there will be no honey excluder to impede the bees from the honey comb. Some beekeepers will not use a QX because their thinking is “the bees just will not make as much honey when a QX is there to slow the progress of the worker bees.

Today, I asked a new beekeeper to go with me to hive a swarm that was on the steps of a funeral home right at the entrance that the public uses. There was to be a funeral at 4:00 this afternoon. This swarm was BIG according to the Funeral Director. In truth, there was maybe 1/2 to 3/4 of a pound of bee therein this swarm. However, one of the employees is allergic to bees, so that was reason enough to go and get them. I will probably combine them with the split that I got from the Observation Hive that I mentioned earlier. I just will have enough time to get them settled into a deep brood box by November and by feeding them, I think that I can have a new working colony by Spring.

Any swarm from now on this year, will be iffy to a no go. A jingle to help you remember: “A swarm in May is worth a bale of hay. A swarm in June is worth a silver spoon. A swarm in July ain’t worth a fly.” Unless the swarm is a Huge 3-5 lbs, I wouldn’t even try to capture it unless there is an emergency such as: “allergic to bees”, or they are on playground equipment. You could be throwing your money and time away for a “just might be a Winter survivor”. That will be your call.

I now have to get ready to help a beekeeper pull his honey and extract for him so you just keep on reading and thinking what you need to do in the next few months to be ready for Winter. As Kim Flottum says, “Take care of the bees (Fall) that take care of the bees (Winter) that will be collecting your honey in the Spring.”

My friend Doug got the glass replaced in the observation hive and brought it to me yesterday. After finding the queen, marking her with green paint, and clipping her wing, we took a frame of brood and bees with the queen from the nuc we had to use when we broke the glass. Only one frame of brood and then we added a foundationed frame and no added bees.

We then placed the OB hive where the nuc had been sitting and allowed the bees to start going into the OBH. The nuc with the frame of brood and bees along with two frames of foundation went to the nuc stand where there were five nucs of bees already. The thought is that the bees in the new nuc would probably go to the OBH when they left the nuc. If not, there were plenty of eggs so the bees could make a queen if they want to.

While we were already set up to clip and mark the queens, Doug suggested we finish all the queens in the yard. That made sense to me so we proceeded to do just that. Now I don’t have to set up again. All I have to do now is load the five nucs and one full colony and take them to the one apiary that I had with only one nuc. Later, I have the option to use them to combine with weak colonies in four apiaries in that same area.

I don’t have to use them, I can always take full brood boxes up there and transfer the nucs into them and have the makings of full hives by late fall. At that time, I will make the decision to re-queen or not. Just depends on the brood pattern and the strength of the colony.

This has been a great day. All my immediate work is done. Don’t get me wrong, all my work is not finished. Just the job of marking the queens. I still have boxes and frames to clean re-foundation, and paint. At that time I will also cull out the wooden ware that is starting to rot and not be salvageable.

Hope your day has gone as well. Until we meet again, keep your veil close, your smoker lit, and your hive tool sharp. Yessss, I got that from Kim Flottum.

I have been keeping an observation hive for the circle of bee speakers (three of us) that go to schools , 4H assemblies, and Garden clubs for Show and Tell about bees. It was used today, without me as I had another commitment, and when it was brought back, we, my friend Doug and I, decided to replace the top frame so the bees could work on another foundation. This would keep the bees busy and would also keep them from wanting to swarm.

We were going to find the queen and clip her wing and also mark her so we could find her easier. Before we even found her, we started cleaning the glass panes, when one of them slipped and broke. That made the bees decide that this is not a good place to stay so they swarmed. We still had a bunch of bees left over, so we put the frames in a nuc box until we could get the pane replaced.  Fortunately, the bees balled (landed and clustered up) in a tree in my yard and were easily caught in a swarm catch bucket on a pole. Then we put them into the nuc with the original frames.

While we were waiting for the rest of the bees in the tree to settle down so I could bump them again with the bucket, we spied a swarm of bees in a stack of supers that I had not cleaned yet. We found the queen and she had been busy laying eggs. There was a large section of larva already in the process of being capped. Doug, caught the queen, clipped, and marked her. We changed the super as, the one that the colony was in, was ready to be put into the burn pile.

After Doug left for home, I received a swarm call and took my wife with me to hive them. It was just a little swarm and all I had was a standard brood box. I will get a nuc cleaned in the morning and transfer the swarm to it.

All in all, I had a good day. Two swarms and recapturing the Observation Hive swarm. I will probably have to feed the swarm I had to go get, but the other two will be okay without my help.

Just another day in my life. Hope you enjoyed reading about it.

I had a short conversation on the phone with a new beekeeper. He had bought a nuc from me and was calling to ask questions about it. He also mentioned that a friend was buying a nuc from a bee supplier in Marianna, FL. My young beekeeper said that he had asked his friend to purchase one for him also. That was when we got around to discussing what to do next.

My advice was to wait til the bees got settled in then call the bee inspector to come and check both hives and get registered. “What?!! Why?”

The answer is simple. It’s the law in the state of Florida that all beekeepers must register their bees. The best reason that I can think of is, the inspectors are the best people to get answers about what you need to do to keep your bees healthy and disease free. If your bees contacted American Foul Brood, you would want to know about it. AFB is a very contagious disease that attacks the brood and can spread to your whole apiary in just a matter of days and wipe you out completely.

The inspector is not the bee police. He is there to see that your bees are healthy and if you have a problem, he will tell you how to correct it. He is a source of information about what the state is doing and the research that has been conducted. The inspector also can explain what takes place in the hive so you will be better informed.

The Florida State Bee Inspector in Northwest Florida is Doug Corbin: corbinc@doacs.state.fl.us . He also does information talks at schools, 4H group meetings, Public Awareness meetings, and goes to different Beekeeping Association meetings to answer questions and give out new information that comes down from the state.

He has given me information on books and pamphlets that I need to read to help me be a better beekeeper. He encourages all of us to try different approaches to keeping bees so we can find a program or system that is comfortable and that works for each of us.

Back to the registration. You will be given a registration number that you use to mark your hives. Sorta like branding your cattle or horses. Unfortunately, there are still some bee rustlers and honey thief’s. Not so much in densely populated areas, but most of us have our bees in the country at someone else’s farm.

I didn’t mean to make you worry, just stating facts. Relax and enjoy you bees. You probably will not have any uninvited guest of the two legged kind.

Remember, you should have extracted by now, if not, then you need to check to see if you need another super.  Adiós until next time.

A couple of days ago, a new wannabee (maybe) asked to ride with me to see if she wanted to keep bees. I asked her to come by this morning and we would put on some supers. At the time I thought I would have the medium supers that I would have extracted ready to go back on the hives so I could pull the shallow supers back off. As it was, I did not.

So I decided to restock the observation hive and get a queen in there. When we got ready, the young lady in my bee suit and me in my heavy shirt, we got the observation hive (OBH) down from it’s perch on top of the freezer-turned into a honey heater. Right off the bat, I saw a beautiful queen bee in the hive just alaying eggs as fast as she could. I don’t know how she ended up in the observation hive — I can only speculate.

I put the OBH back on the honey heater and we left to make a split at an apiary about 30 miles away. The hive that was strong the last time I saw it had bees out on the porch and up the wall to the 2nd story. Amanda took pictures of that awesome sight, to her, as I got the smoker and started smoking everywhere. I found drone cells in the first and second supers. Not a good sign. However, when I got into the brood box, I found 5 frames of worker brood. There were about 5 queen cells for supersedure and several swarm cells that were capped. There were several queen cells in the two supers also. Along with the closed queen cells, there were, in the three boxes, about 6-8 cells that had been torn open from the sides. Could have been remains of earlier supersedure cells and/or swarm cells.

At this point, I really didn’t care. I went ahead and split the bees, hoping that either would have enough queen cells to make a queen if either split did not have one. There were easily 80,000 to 100,000 bees in the colony. I could not find the queen, but I only looked one time as the sky was getting ready to dump some rain. I quickly made the split, closed everything up, and loaded the new split onto the truck.

We made the transfer to another apiary about 60 miles away. An apiary that I had bees in, but didn’t at the time. After that, we stopped to eat lunch and talk.

After returning home, and she left, I still don’t know if she wants to be a beekeeper, however, she did volunteer to help me clean boxes and frames. That in itself is promising. I’ll let you know about that later.

In the meantime, sharpen your hive tool and get some dry smoker material in a bag just in case the rains come. It is very hard to start wet material.

Here is the low down on my honey extraction. Today, I got to extract the honey I had pulled 7 days ago. Let me tell you, I am real disappointed with myself. I have been told over and over and over again to extract within three days of pulling honey. I was even told why. Now I know for a fact.

The Small Hive Beetle (SHB) has probably laid eggs in the honey. When the eggs hatch, the larva starts eating the wax and some honey. The wax is protein and the honey is carbohydrate. The larva has to poop and it does that where it is at - in the honey. At first there is very little poop. But as the larva gets larger, then the poop gets to be more and more.

If you extract when you first pull the honey, up to three days, then when you strain the honey, you strain the SHB eggs out and the honey is still clean and it can be bottled. If you wait for more than three days, then the larva has a chance to defect in a lot of honey making it uneatable. You lose; honey, time and fuel. You gain a lot of work for nothing.

Now I have to clean the supers, frames, wax, and extracting equipment. And also I have to put up with my wife and beekeeping friends’ “I TOLD YOU SO” commits .

The way to clean the supers and kill the SHB larva is to either put all of the super, frames, and honey in a 1) solar wax melter to kill all the bugs and to melt the wax, or 2) place the super, frames, wax, and honey in a barrel of water mixed with a little dish soap and maybe mixing  some liquid chlorine in at the same time.

A solar wax melter will heat to about 190 -210 and melt all the wax and kill the bugs at the same time. As the wax melts, the honey will flow down the ramp into a catch container. After the wax solidifies, it will be on the top and you can throw the honey away. The wax melter will hold the larva and let the wax flow on down.

I will make a solar wax melter and post how I do it, explaining the steps and hopefully having some pictures to show at the same time. That is my next project. I have enough wax on hand to justify making one at this time.

Until then, enjoy your bees and hopefully you have already extracted some honey and can share it with some of your family and friends. By the way, I did collect about 5+ gallons about 70 lbs. of honey that I can use.

I said that the next post would be about the extraction, but I have reneged. I haven’t had the opportunity to do so. I have been busy with more pressing matters. One of them being getting an observation hive ready to show.

I have had the same bees in the hive for over 6 weeks now. the two frames that was in it became two frames of brood and no place for honey. When the top frame was removed, I accidentally broke the glass and I had to place all the bees in a nuc box while I got another glass panel cut to fit. I took the original bottom frame and placed it back in the bottom section of the observation hive and picked up another frame of partially pulled comb and put it in the top section.  I looked for the original marked queen and concluded that she probably got killed when the glass broke.

I used the observation hive without the queen for 3 more days. I decided that the bees would take to another laying queen real quick and found one in one of the swarm hives that I had stashed in my back yard. She had 4 frames of brood and eggs, so I figured that there were enough new larva that the bees in the swarm nuc could make another queen.

I picked the queen up to mark her and just as I got the paint stick close to her thorax, my thumb holding her twitched and flipped her into some high grass and weeds. I just plain lost the queen and had to show the observation hive once more without a queen. That was Saturday. Now in the morning I will look for another queen in another nuc and try to introduce her into the observation hive one more time. If I succeed, then all will be well. If I don’t then I will have to put the two frames in a nuc and get a frame of brood and larva to place in the nuc to maybe entice the bees to make a new queen.

This is what you will probably face in the future if you work with the bees long enough.  I also have to try to extract tomorrow and if that goes as planned, then I will post the results hopefully in the next post.

Keep on reading books, watching bee videos, and cleaning equipment. Until the next post, just enjoy your bees and honey.

My wife has now advanced in her rehab enough to drive one block to take care of some business for our son, then drive one block back to the house. She told me to go ahead on and take care of my bees.  Thank you, Dearest.

I had a young beekeeper to volunteer to help my pull honey. He has the strength and a good back so naturally I said, “Meet me at my house at 6:00 in the morning.

I had good hopes of pulling at least 10 supers from 12 hives today. Boy was I ever wrong. The first apiary had 2 strong colonies when I saw them one month ago. Well, let me tell you that I was very disappointed to fine one colony had been slimmed with Small Hive Beetle larva poop. The other one had brood in the honey super, so we just pulled a frame of honey up into the new super, scored the caps to spill honey down to the bees, and placed it on top of the brooded honey super. Letting the honey run down to the bees lets them know there is another level to their hive.

The next apiary had 4 colonies. Three had brood in the honey supers. Had to place another super with scored honey frame on those. The other one was still cross combed. Last Winter, I had put the cross combed super on the bottom and a honey super on the top.  About 5 months ago, I found brood in the honey super and I proceeded to put the honey super on the bottom and a deep super on the top so the bees could move up. I added a queen excluder to the top of the brood box and placed the cross combed super above that. Today, we found the bees had skipped the brood box and went into the cross comb again. I think that the queen never got out of that super. Anyway, the other 3 didn’t have capped honey, they had brood in the honey super. Rats! I struck out again. Put empty supers on those.

Apiary number 3 had one colony. Capped honey! Wonderful. Get the smoker quick! OH NO! It started to rain, HARD! We closed up the hive and jumped into the truck and decided that we were through for the day. Bombed out again. Oh well, that is the life of a beekeeper.

We started home. About 25 miles down the road, we hit sunshine. Hey! Maybe we can go to the next apiary. When we got there, we were able to pull one super of capped honey. Great! Get the Bee Blower. This is a leaf blower that I use to blow the bees out of the super and from between the frames. I don’t have any trees, so I just renamed it the Bee Blower.

Went to the next apiary and it had one colony and I found that 2 of my 5 nucs had survived. We added a nuc deep to each and said “Multiply girls”. The colony in the full hive was weak when I left it a month ago. It had a deep brood box and 2 supers of babies. I have to go back and probably divide it into 3 colonies. That will be later. No honey, but I am not mad.

The final apiary had 4 colonies and one of those was slimed. Now I have 3 colonies, butI got 5 supers of capped honey. I am very happy. On the way home, we decided to visit my helper’s apiary. He had a bear visit him and out of the 6 colonies, only one was torn into and he lost some honey.

We went through all of his hives and found 2 that didn’t have queens. We pulled2 frames of brood from one of the other hives and placed one in each of the queenless colonies and are hoping the bees will make queen cells. If not, then he will have to purchase a couple of queens real soon. If not able to do so, then he will have to combine those 2 colonies with two queenright ones. That way he will not lose his bees.

We unloaded the honey from my hives into the honey house —-now I will continue the extraction in the next post. Good night.