What We Do With Drawn Comb For The Spring

After we've pulled the capped frames from the hives and upcapped them, put them in the extractor to spin all the honey out, we put the "wet" frames out by the hives and let the bees clean them up.  They'll bring any honey we didn't get back to the hives to eat over the winter or put it in frames and cap it and we'll get it back in the fall when we harvest fall honey.  The "cleaned-up" frames still need to be dealt with though.

We want to make sure there are no eggs or larvae from wax moths or other bugs on the frame that will hatch and wreak havoc on the comb that the honeybees have worked so hard to draw out.  The reason why is that we'll put these frames back on the boxes this spring.  The frames get recycled and reused, you might say.  We want to make things easy on the bees.  If the bees don't have to draw out all the comb making wax to hold the nectar/honey, they'll use that energy to make honey.  That's what we want!  Efficiency.  Making the most of your resources.  Working smarter - not harder.

The way we make sure there are no eggs from wax moths or any small hive beetles or other creatures on the frames hiding in the comb is we stack the frames in the freezer for three days.  Three days below freezing will kill any opportunistic pests that may be hiding on the frames.  Here they are in the deep freeze.  It can only hold 10 frames at a time, so it takes a week or so to cycle through the frames.

Once out of the freezer, I put the frames back in the boxes and stack them criss-cross to dry out.  We'll leave them for a couple of days like this in our utility room.  We're quickly running out of space.  Had we known we'd be doing what we're doing (beekeeping, milking, etc.), we would have designed our home differently!  We might be in the market for a shed in the future.

Once we've ensured they are fully dry, we very gently put them in contractor bags.  We don't want to damage the drawn out comb, so the bees won't have to do a lot of repair.  In the spring, they'll clean out the cells and begin filling them with nectar.  The contractor bags are filled and we seal them up very tightly so that nothing can get in there.  Then we stack them in the garage out of the way.

They'll sit there safe and sound until the spring when the bees need additional honey supers.  At that point we'll pull these frames out, load them in honey supers and put them on top of each of the hives.  That's what a super is: a box of frames that sits on top (super) of the brood boxes separated by a queen excluder so that your honey supers contain exclusively honey - no brood.  Beekeeping is work, but it's rewarding and something that you always learn something new or a better way to do things.  Hopefully these frames will make it through the fall and winter and the bees will do their thing this spring and share their delicious, sweet honey with us!

The Honey Harvest - 2026 (Part Two)

We still have honey that's dripping off of the cappings, so we won't have final numbers on the total number of pounds/gallons of honey for another day.  Our plans were to purchase a "Honey House," essentially an outdoor shed to store all the honeybee equipment in and to do the extracting in.  We decided to hold off for another year.

As it turns out, the garage is a fine place to do the job.  I'll show you the setup.  After bringing in the wagon with all the honey supers in it, we take the frames out of each box and use the knife to uncap the frames.  You can see the white uncapping tank on the table in the center.  The extractor is just to the right of the uncapping table.  Food-grade buckets with filters are positioned underneath the honey gates of both the uncapping tank and the extractor.

It gets quite warm in the garage.  Therefore, we have fans blowing on us.  The space beneath the doors and the garage doors were sealed up and it worked.  There might have been a total of six bees that got inside the garage during the extraction process.

As we spun the frames in the extractor to remove all the honey, we placed the empty frames back in the boxes.  I brought them out and stacked them criss-cross on a bench near the hives.  Bees are opportunistic, hard working creatures.  They will go through each frame, picking it clean of honey.  They'll bring that honey back to the hives

We generally leave the boxes like this out for around three days.  By that time the bees have salvaged all the honey.  We'll take the cleaned frames and put them in the freezer.  We want to make sure that any insect that might have laid eggs in the frames will be killed by sub-zero temperatures.  

In the spring, we'll put the honey supers with these frames back on the hives.  Bees expend a lot of energy making wax to draw out honeycomb.  If you put these frames out that have drawn comb on them already, the bees use their energy to make HONEY, not wax.  Re-using frames with drawn comb gives the bees a head start and I think that translates into a better honey harvest.

When we stack the boxes by the hive, it doesn't take the bees long to find it.  The begin, in earnest, to cover the boxes, and get all the honey to bring back to the hive.  You can hear a loud buzzing when you walk outside.  Those bees are working to get their honey back!  Click on the arrow below to watch the honeybees fly around as they discover the honey remaining on the frames and work to bring it back.

We'll be back with the third segment of this Summer Honey Series in a day or two.

The Flow Is ON!

For about the first five decades of my life, I loathed Chinese Tallow Trees.  We also call them Chicken Trees.  Why did I hate them?  Because they are truly an invasive species.  If not kept in check, they will turn a lovely pasture into a scrub brush forest before your very eyes.  They encroach on the borders and outside levees of rice fields, suddenly turning a 50 acre field into a 47 acre field.  Birds eat their seeds and then sit on fence rows.  As a result of the bird poop propagation, Chinese tallow trees sprout up along these fence rows and before you know it, they've grown through the fence.  These trees require constant clearing, hauling, and burning - non-stop labor.  I wished we could eradicate them, make them as extinct as the dodo bird.

But then something changed.  When we began beekeeping, my intense hatred for the Chicken tree evolved into vehement dislike.  This spring I actually dug up two chicken tree seedlings growing in our flower beds and replanted them along the fence row bordering our neighbors in the back.  Tricia could not believe it.  Had someone abducted her husband and replaced him with an imposter?

As it turns out, the Chinese tallow tree is the primary producer of nectar in our area.  It makes fantastic honey!  The honeybees just love it.  Each year at this time, the tallow trees tassel and flower.  The bees are on it like white on rice and bring loads of nectar back to the hives.  When I walked out to the bee boxes today there was SO much activity!  Here is a shot of the Chinese tallow trees in bloom:

The flow is on!  I wanted to see if the honeybees had found it yet.  Within seconds, my question was answered.  Bees were all over the place, moving from one flower to the next.  They were moving so fast, it was hard to get a photo:

Now that the flow is on, we'll have to be diligent in making sure that we're adding honey supers on top so that the bees don't run out of room.  That means we'll be donning the bee suits once a week, opening up the boxes and checking to see if we need to add supers on top.  We have a little over a month until we're extracting honey.  Hopefully, we'll have another good honey harvest.  We're a land flowing with milk AND honey afterall.

Live From the Hive

Back in THIS POST we discussed our attempts to make splits.  We explained that we currently have four hives and how you can make splits from existing hives to expand your colonies of bees.  We attempted to split into a deep box and also a small nuc box that I made.  Well, it's been almost a month ago and today was the day we had marked on our calendars to check to see if the splits were successful.

When we pull the top off, we'll be looking real quickly to see if we can see a queen or eggs or larvae.  If we see any of the above, we have a laying queen and will have expanded our boxes from four to six.  If we don't see any of the above, we'll restack the boxes on top of where they came from.  Tricia and I put our bee suits on and headed out to the hives.  Lots of activity from all of the boxes - bees coming in and out.  Bees carrying pollen going in.  That's a good sign!

Using the smoker to calm them down, we opened up the deep box.  Here's the moment of truth!  It's windy today, so I'm going to be looking real fast.  I don't want our new queen, if we have one, to fly off.  Once I see the queen, eggs or larvae, I'm closing it up as we will know the split was successful.

There's a pretty decent amount of bees on the first frame and the cells are heavy and full of nectar.

We didn't see the queen; however, if you look at the very center of the frame below and to the right, you'll see white larvae in some of the cells that look like the letter "c".  There are also a few capped brood cells.  Even though we saw no queen, the larvae and capped brood evidence the fact we have a laying queen.  It's a successful split!

Let's check out the split in the nuc.  Only five frames in here, but there was a pretty decent population of bees in it.

A quick look.  This frame has nectar in it.  You can see the reflection in the bottom of the photo below:

I do a quick scan on one side and flip it over to see the opposite side.

As in the other box, we were unable to find the queen, but if you look in the very center of the photo below and to the right, you'll see larvae!

Another successful split!  We added a queen excluder and then put a medium box on top.  That will keep the queen out of the honey supers.  I moved the brick from crossways to straight.  That's my note to tell me that we have a laying queen in this box.  In the photo at the very top, you'll see that the bricks in the split hives BEFORE we checked them today had the bricks crossways.

We started with four hives - now we have six!  There's a story to the box on the far right with the top cracked.  Why is the top cracked?  That split hive was the one that was in the nuc.  The nuc was a homemade box made with 1x12 lumber.  It wasn't exactly square, so the lid didn't seal perfectly.  The bees in the nuc never used the front door.  They would go in and out through the gap between the top and the nuc.

When we moved the frames from the nuc to a deep box so they'd have room to grow, bees coming in from foraging couldn't figure out how to get in the box.  They were congregating at the corner where the nuc had a crack for going in and out.  What to do!  I've got to get the bees back in the box!  I had an idea!  I'll crack the telescoping top.  It worked!  The bees coming in went right in the box.  Bees don't fly at night, so after dark when all the bees were safely at home, I went out and closed the top.  Tomorrow morning when they go out the front door, they'll recalibrate and find their way back home.

From four hives to six

What good news!  We expanded our hives by two boxes.  It's important to do this as it is not uncommon to lose a hive or two every year for one reason or another.  Making splits and/or catching wild swarms is a good way to "insure" your beekeeping operation. Should you lose a box or two to wax moths, varroa mites, small hive beetles, or any other reason, you've added a couple boxes by making splits.

The Last Hurrah for the Broccoli

The big broccoli heads have long been harvested.  About every other day, I walk down the broccoli row and snip off the florets.  We've had broccoli in our fridge non-stop for at least a couple of months because of this.  All good things must come to an end.  But it's not really the end, is it?  When the florets aren't harvested, they flower.  Beautiful yellow flowers fill the garden.  Broccoli seed pods are forming and when these ripen and turn brown, I'll save a multitude of seeds since these are non-hybrid.  It'll soon be time to remove the broccoli plants and plant another crop, I'm thinking peppers, to fill that spot.  The broccoli flowers, apart from being pretty, attract our honeybees which are located just west of the garden.  During the day, bees dart this way and that around the broccoli flowers.

I like to watch the bees hard at work pollinating, flying greedily from one flower to the next.  You can hear the buzz as they work.  What an industrious creature is the bee!

Busy as a bee!  You can see why that phrase is repeated.

Stay tuned for more reports on the bees.  We've got lots to tell you.  Bees moved back into our hollow column on the side porch.  We also have a couple of swarm traps set in the yard.  Finally, we'll be attempting on our second try to make splits.  More to come on all this later.

Busy As A Bee

It feels like spring outside and the honeybees are doing their thing - flying around, getting pollen and nectar where they can find it and... getting ready to swarm.  As a result, we'll be going into the hives probably tomorrow, inspecting the frames and (hopefully) making splits BEFORE they swarm.  We have four hives to go through tomorrow.  After dark, I tipped the hives over to see how heavy they were and there is a good population in each hive.  That means the queens are doing a good job.

Why do I say the bees are getting ready to swarm?  Well, the photo below shows the column by our side door.  A number of colonies of bees have made their home in that hollow fiberglass column over the years.  It has to be absolutely full of honeycomb.  Generally, in the summer, the bees leave.  I'm not sure if it gets too hot in there for them or they fill it up and run out of room.  Perhaps it's a combination of the two.

The column has been absent of bees for the past 8 months or so.  This morning, we began to see scout bees checking out the place.  They have been sent by the colony to house hunt.  They went into the open house and (I'm sure) had little tape measures and measured out the square footage and amenities that the column offers.  They'll bring that data back to the hive for a vote, and we'll see if we get a swarm of bees to move back in.  What's that strapped on top of the ladder, you might be asking?

It's a homemade 5 frame nuc swarm trap.  I have it baited with lemongrass oil.  My goal is to tempt some of the scout bees to also look at this as a home to consider moving into.

But I have bad news to report.  The bees are ignoring the nuc.  There is just too much old comb in the column that they can smell.  Bees are opportunistic.  For every comb that they must build from scratch, it equates to less honey.  Bees moving into the column don't really need to make honeycomb.  It's already there.  More and more bees are checking out the column.  I'm certain within a week we'll have a new swarm inhabiting the column.  I've move the nuc swarm trap out into the yard where hopefully we can catch another swarm.

Giving the Honeybees a Jump Start

It is 79 degrees right now and feels like spring (or even early summer).  It won't be long now until we see new growth on trees and other plants.  The songbirds were singing loudly this morning, signaling their happiness in the change of seasons.  That's not saying that we won't get another freeze or frost, but the long range forecast through February 25th shows the lowest temps at 52 degrees with highs in the upper 70s on most days.

It's time to feed the bees!  We want to make sure they have enough stores of food to make it until the pollen and nectar starts flowing, especially since we pulled honey this fall.  Many bees starve in the early spring.  Lots of beekeepers feed their bees with sugar water, but we opt for a more natural food source.  We are feeding them back some of their own honey.  

When we pulled honey, we processed the beeswax in a crockpot with a little water.  This process separates the honey and water from the beeswax as the beeswax, upon cooling, will solidify at the top.  The remaining honey/water mixture is frozen in gallon-sized Ziploc bags for what we are about to do.

Honey water thawed and ready to feed to the bees

We use a large rubber feed tub in which we fill partially with pine straw.  The pine straw is used as a flotation device so that the bees have something to stand on while drinking the honey water.  If you don't do this, and we learned the hard way, many bees drown in the sticky concoction.  I then poured the honey water over the pine straw into the feed tub.

This was done at 8:06AM

The honeybees weren't moving until around 10AM, but at that time they found it.  Like a bad rumor being spread, the first bee that located this feed source reported back to one of the four hives and before you knew it, all the bees in all four hives were clamoring to get it.  There was a steady stream of bees from the hive to the honey water.  You quickly understand the term beeline.  They made a beeline for the honey!

It was a little dangerous to be this close to them without my bee suit.  The buzzing was loud and they were getting after it.

Here's a close-up shot of the bees getting their fill of the honey:

We took the photo below at 12:45PM, right after lunch.  There was absolutely nothing left.  Even the pine straw that once was a sticky mess had been scoured dry.  We have a few more bags of honey water and we'll be feeding them once a week until our supply runs dry.

By 12:45PM the cupboard was bare!

They bring all this back to the hive and fill cells in the frames and they'll use this as a feed source.  What feeding the bees also does is "fool" the queen into thinking that the bees are bringing in nectar - that it is spring.  She'll immediately begin to lay more eggs as she knows she needs more workers to gather pollen and nectar since it is spring, even though it's not quite spring yet.  This gives the hives a jump start, so that when spring actually arrives, there are enough bees to do all the work.  In economic terms, it is 'full employment.'  This also relates to more honey production, which is good for the colony and good for us too!

Nothing Goes to Waste with the Bees

Beekeeping is a hobby in which nothing goes to waste.  After pulling honey, there is a use for everything.  Let's look at the cappings, for instance.  The cappings are the wax cap that seals off the honeycomb.  In order to spin the honey in the extractor, you must use a knife to cut the top cap off in order to expose the honey.

Once the honey drains off of the wax, you are left with this.  We'll warm this in a crock pot with a little water, the wax will liquify and rise to the top.  We'll skim that off to make candles and chap stick.  The honey will be cooked out of the wax, leaving a honey/water mixture that we will feed back to the bees in the winter.

The frames that we've extracted the honey from still have some honey on them.  Unfortunately, you cannot get every drop.  That's okay.  We set the boxes and frames out on a bench about 15 yards from the hives, and the bees come back to reclaim what's rightly theirs.  Hundreds and hundreds of bees fly around the boxes, robbing the honey to take it back to the hives.  

After cleaning the honey off of the extractor with a water hose, the honey/water is put in a bucket and the bees come drink the sweet water to take back to the hive.  We put a float for them in the water so that when they step on the raft to drink, they don't drown.

Here's a photo of a couple of the frames that we extracted the honey out of and the bees have had a couple of days to clean them up, removing all the remaining honey from the frames.

They do such a great job on removing every useable bit of pollen, nectar, and honey from the frames. All of those products are carried back to the boxes and put back into "inventory."  We will put these cleaned up frames in the freezer for a few days to kill any hive beetle eggs that may be on the frame.  Then we'll store in a tote and these frames with drawn comb will be put back on the hive in the spring.  The bees will spend most of their energy making honey versus making honeycomb since most of the honeycomb is already constructed.

We poured some honey from the bottom of a bowl into a jar lid.  The bees quickly found it and have made it their ambition to rob this honey back and return it to its rightful owners.

The uncapping tub and filter still was quite sticky with honey and comb.  Rather than wasting time and energy scrubbing and cleaning, well...  We'll let the bees clean up the sticky mess.  You can see them scouring the screens, and uncapping tub.  It will be spotless before you know it.

Here is that jar lid that used to be full of honey.  The bees in a mater of just a few hours, have cleaned it all up!

Bees are really unique creatures.  They leave nothing, cleaning up after themselves and also will work for you as well.  Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.  They do it all.

Pulling Fall Honey

We pulled honey in the summer in early July and got 20.5 gallons of honey off of our four hives.  We've never pulled fall honey before, but this year we decided to see what we could get. Join us while we show you our extracting process.  First, we got the smoker going and went out to the hives, opening the boxes and going through each frame, pulling out only the frames that were completely capped.  

We used an organic compound on a fume board to push the bees off of the honey.  Then about 20 yards away I had a leaf blower ready and we blew the remaining bees off of the frames and then carried the boxes of honey in the garage.  We ended up getting 22 frames of honey.  Full boxes of honey are heavy!

We don't have our own extractor or uncapping trays, so we borrowed from a friend and set up in the garage, blocking off any way for the bees to follow us inside.  The previous day we had cleaned all of the extracting equipment.  Now, it is time to get the show on the road.

As mentioned the honey is all capped.  That means the moisture percent is correct and the bees have put a protective layer of beeswax on top to seal it off.  In order to extract it, you've got to take the cap off first.  Tricia accomplished this with a sharp knife.  The was falls into the tray along with some of the honey that drips out.

The uncapped frames are placed in the extractor.  It holds 8 frames at a time.  This extractor is manual.  That means you turn the crank by hand and the frames in the rack spin. Centrifugal force causes the honey to be slung out of the frame and on the walls of the drum and it drips down to the bottom.  When the frames went in, they were heavy, but once you're done, the frames now empty of honey are light.

Once we've spun 8 frames, we opened the honey gate at the bottom and a rich, sweet flow of fall honey comes out where it goes through a double screen before ending up in a food grade 5 gallon bucket.

These are the cappings in the uncapping tray.  Honey drips out of the wax into a reservoir in the tray below from which we drain the honey.  The beeswax will be rendered and we'll make candles and lip balm with it.

Once we emptied everything, we had roughly 5 gallons of honey for our fall honey project!  We are pleased with our first fall honey project.

I took a picture of our spring honey and our fall honey side by side.  What is easily seen is the difference in the honey.  The boxes are in the same place.  What's the difference, you may ask?  It's what the bees are foraging on in spring versus fall.  In the spring, the bees are largely getting nectar from Chinese tallow trees, privet and white dutch clover.  In the fall, however, the honey is mainly derived from wildflowers and Goldenrod.  This generates a darker, stronger honey.

Spring honey on left, Fall honey on right

Our fall honey pull yielded a little more than five gallons.  That's a success in our book.  In the next post (or the next) we'll finish up talking about honey.

The Beetles (Not the Band)

Let's quickly inspect the hives!  Although we pulled honey in early July, things aren't quite done.  We're planning on pulling honey again in October.  This will be the fall honey crop, and we've not done this before.  Fall honey is primarily made from goldenrod.  Goldenrod is a notorious weed around here that is not welcomed.  It causes many people to have severe allergy problems.

Goldenrod honey is good for allergies.  The odd thing about goldenrod honey is... it stinks.  Think the smell of sweaty gym socks.  In the fall you can smell it simply by walking around the hives.  When we had the colony inside our column by the side door, people would walk up to the door and say, "What's that smell?!"  The benefits are it's supposed to be really good for you.  We'll likely keep most of this for personal use unless someone shows an interest in it.

The hives are really active right now.  The bees are all outside the entrance and are pretty aggressive.  

What I'm checking for today is hive beetles.  I'm not going to use smoke because I'm just planning on opening the telescoping top to look in the very top of the hive.  Since I didn't use smoke, the bees start coming out of the top with an attitude.  They aren't liking my intrusion into their home, but I want to check out any hive beetle activity.  Hive beetle infestations can cause some real problems, especially if you have a weak hive.

Three weeks ago, Tricia and I put some hive beetle traps in the top, and we want to see if we've caught any.  When I say hive beetle traps, it's not really anything fancy.  You simply lay a Swiffer sheet up on top.  The bees run the hive beetles up and out of the frames of eggs, brood, honey, and pollen and bees actively corral them and keep them up top.  What happens next is that the hive beetles step onto the Swiffer sheets and the little barbs on their legs catch on the Swiffer sheets, and they cannot get out!

The first two hives did not have any hive beetles caught on the Swiffer sheet, but the third and fourth hive did.  In the center left of the photo below (and the bottom middle of the photo above), you can see three hive beetles that have met their demise.

So the trap appears to be working.  But what about the hives that had no hive beetles on the Swiffer sheets?  Well, it could mean a couple of things: the trap isn't working (which is unlikely as it was catching beetles in the second and third hive), or it could mean that there is not much of a hive beetle infestation in those hives.

There is another means (or two) of combatting them that I'm going to try.  The first is to put up a temporary fence around the hives and put some chickens in to scratch around and eat the beetles and larvae that are out on the ground.  The beetles go into the ground and pupate and the larvae come out of the ground before entering the hives.  If you put something on the ground to block their entrance into the ground, it helps.  I plan on putting a roll of thick black plastic matting under the hives to accomplish this.  As a side benefit, it makes it a little easier to mow and weed eat around the hives.  I'll try to do this when the weather gets a little cooler.

The Beetles.  They aren't quite as popular with beekeepers and the band.