Beekeepers Friend

I was on vacation for two weeks with my wife and siblings. When there was a lull in the festivities, I had plenty of time to think about my bees. I had decided to move bees when I got back. I wanted to move 6 hives to a Palmetto location where I have an apiary with one hive that had died due to not having a queen.

As we were coming home from Texas, I called one of my new beekeepers to help me on Monday. We made plans to begin about 7:00 AM. Remember, I had not seen my bees for about 3 weeks at this time. We went to the apiary to pick up the hives and found that they had completely plugged out the supers with honey. We then went to another apiary and found that the bees had plugged out all their supers also. Since I did not think to take any empty supers with us. That day was shot.

The next day, today, I went by myself to pull honey. I only took one super as that was all I had ready to go. I started by pulling the top super and checking the second for brood. I moved all the capped honey to the super to be put on the truck and placed all the uncapped honey in the super with the brood. Capped honey is ready to extract and the uncapped honey was still being processed by the bees meaning that there was still water in the uncapped cells of nectar/honey. When the honey has been sufficiently heated and fanned by the bees to evaporate the water, they will cap the cells. Sort of like making gravy. Add heat and stir until the gravy is thick.

Being by myself with the temperature in the high 90’s, it took me about 5 hours to collect 8 supers of honey. I had intended to extract tonight, but I was tired and decided to get some sleep and move bees in the morning and extract the honey tomorrow evening when the temperature goes down to the low 90’s.

By not planning and having some supers ready to replace the honey supers, I wasted all of one day and I could have used the help of the young beekeeper and got all that work done in half a day and possibly have extracted Monday leaving today to move bees.

Planning ahead and keeping the supers and boxes clean with good comb or foundation is just plain good sense. Try to keep on top of you homework and the bee work will be fun again.

I did go to the apiaries to pull honey with my young beekeeper. I was expecting about 30-40 supers of honey and only collected five. I have two more that I can pull when I take an empty super to replace the full ones. This one hive is very strong. I split it one time and it swarmed three times after that.

Just when you think that you are making headway, Mother Nature throws you a curve. I do know that in order to have a good?! crop of honey, you have to make a simple schedule and visit the apiaries on a semi-regular basis. That way you can see if the colonies need help or not. That has been my downfall this year. The excuses kept coming up and I just didn’t make the choice to ignore them and go to the bee yards anyway.

I now have to start making plans for the summer. That is the time to start getting the colonies ready for Winter. In order for the bees to have a chance to get through the winter months, I will have to requeen with fall queens if I can find them or at least raise queens myself so the colonies will have young queens to lay eggs so that enough bees will hatch before the cold gets here. The young queens will not shut down their egg laying as soon as the older queens will. That means stronger colonies to go into the winter. The fall queens will also start laying eggs earlier in January and February. By March, the bees will be so strong that it will be necessary to put two or three supers on at the same time for the Spring honey flow just to help prevent swarming.

Maybe this is good for me, to kick start me into making good plans and executing them in a timely manner. But in the meantime, I need to get some honey ready to take to a customer and to my dad’s 90th birthday party Friday in Mississippi. Then the following week, I will bottle some quarts to take to Texas for my siblings.

Have a wonderful Memorial Day Monday!

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 variety.

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 me, we started to go through some of the hives checking for brood in the deep 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 two 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 bees 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 your 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 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 opposed 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.