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.

It's Almost Time

As we inch toward August, pulling honey from our six hives has been on the calendar, but we just haven't gotten the job done.  We'll try to get the honey pulled this weekend, but let's see how it goes.  Over near the purple hull pea patch, I planted a row of zinnias for the beauty, but also for the bees.  Zinnias are the easiest thing to grow.  In fact, they may grow easier than weeds!  As I look at the multi-colored blooms of the zinnias, I see that they are not disappointing to attract the honeybees.

Honestly, I used to not plant any flowers at all, choosing to grow things that we can eat.  I still do that, but I may have softened up regarding planting flowers.  I'm going to save all the seeds from the zinnias and plant a whole bunch of them next year as they produce both nectar and pollen that honeybees are attracted to.

I'm going to show you two of the six boxes of bees that we have.  As summertime temperatures mount, bees congregate on the outside of the bee boxes.  It's all about the heat.  Fewer bees inside the box means lower temperature inside the hive.  Just look at all the bees outside the box:

This photo just zooms in a little closer so that you can see the number of bees we're talking about:

Same thing on this hive.  You'll note that on the bottom there are two deep boxes.  This is where the brood is.  I have a queen excluder to keep the queen within the two deep boxes.  On top of the queen excluder are three honey supers.

In the next few days when we pull honey, we'll go through every single frame in the honey supers and pull out capped honey.  From this capped honey we'll extract our spring honey.  We'll show you the entire process once we get going.

Putting Together Frames For the Bees

Here's a look at one of the two bee hives that we have on the property.  It's been about a year since we caught two swarms - one in Jefferson Davis Parish and one out at the farm in Allen Parish.  I took this video, but wish I would've gotten film of the bees' activity today.  The video below is really tame compared to all the bees this afternoon.

We plan on expanding in the bee business this year.  We'd like to put out some additional swarm traps to see if we could be successful in catching more that way.  Primarily, though, we'd like to expand by making splits.  If your hive is healthy enough, you can make a split by taking a frame of eggs/larvae, a frame of honey and pollen and plenty of nurse bees from the existing hive and placing them in the center of another box surrounded by frames.

What happens is remarkable.  The bees immediately know that there is no queen.  They begin "making" a queen.  (You can also purchase a queen cell to speed things up.)  The queen will hatch, make her virgin flight, be bred by drones and return to the "new" box and begin laying eggs.  This will be a first for us.  We'll see if we're successful.

First, we need more equipment:  boxes, frames, bottom boards and tops.  Russ has a friend in a nearby town that had some new frames for sale.  We drove over last weekend and picked them up.  They came in pieces, requiring assembly.

I got some wood glue and put the frames together.  Once the glue had dried, Tricia began popping the foundation in place.  The foundation is coated with beeswax.

In a jiffy we had the 20 deep frames put together.  On Thursday afternoon, we'll head to Lacassine to purchase some boxes, bottom boards, and tops from a gentleman in our beekeeping club.  Then we'll be ready to go - either put up swarm traps OR make splits.  Our beekeeping club will be making splits in early March, so we'll try to glean as much knowledge as we can.

Inspecting The Hives

We have two hives in the side yard.  One of them we call the Jeff Davis hive since we caught the swarm in our backyard here in Jefferson Davis Parish.  The other hive which sits just to the north of the Jeff Davis hive, we call the Allen Parish hive since we caught that swarm out at the farm in Oberlin (Allen Parish).  For a long while we were opening up the boxes several times a week, checking out the growth and health of the colonies.  This hobby is kind of addicting.  Once it gets cold, you are not supposed to open the boxes as the bees work real hard to regulate the temperature in the hives.

The drought this summer was hard on the bees and then a few weeks ago, we had temperatures that plummeting into the low 20's.  We figured it best that we get into the hives and inspect things with a seasoned veteran of beekeeping - our friend.  Tricia invited him over and he brought his smoker and got into both boxes.  Here is what we learned:  The queen moved up vertically rather than horizontally.  That means that she filled up the foundation frames toward the center of the box, but the frames on the outside had not been filled out yet.

Both queens appear to be very strong, though, laying lots of eggs in beautiful patterns.  More on that in a minute.  With spring coming and lots of nectar and pollen soon to be available, we look for both hives to really thrive.  We'll pull honey in July, if all goes according to plan.

The queens in each box are laying lots of eggs and they are in all stages of growth.  In the photo below, the bottom center portion that looks like the sun is capped brood.  These capped brood worker bees take 6 days to hatch.  Just on this one frame, that's a lot of new babies.  The hives are about to explode with activity.  The rainbow portion above the capped brood are eggs that have been laid.  The egg stage lasts for 3 days and then it becomes a larvae.  Those cells will then be capped and will hatch out.  The upper left and right corners are capped honey.

The very bottom of the frame are some cells that are bigger than the cells in which the worker bees' eggs are laid.  These cells are drone cells.  The drones are males.  The males do two things:  They eat and they breed with the queens.  During winter time, the bees don't like the drones eating, so they kill them.  It is a brutal, woman-dominated society.  The drones fly up to the "drone zone" which is approximately 300 feet in the air and meet up with queens and get romantic.  The appearance of drone cells tell you that spring is on the way and love will be in the air.

This frame has a bit more capped honey on the top and both corners.  Honey is heavy.  

This frame is almost completely capped honey.  The comb is capped with wax.

While in both the Jeff Davis and Allen boxes, the queens in each were located.  If you look to the end of the finger, you can see one of the queens.  Here body is a little longer and redder and she has a black, shiny dot on her back.

Since the queens were located in both of the deeps, we added another deep on top to allow for growth and put a queen excluder between the second deep and the super on top of it.  That will keep the queen from going up.  The brood that hatches out of the top will mature and the bees will clean out those cells and fill the supers with honey.  (That's the plan, anyway.)

The bricks on top of the boxes tell a story.  If they are laid long ways like they are, it means that we have seen evidence of a laying queen.  In the next month, we'll be setting swarm traps in the yard AND we'll also attempt to make a split out of each box.  

What that means is you remove a frame of brood, a frame of pollen and honey and put it in another box.  The bees will immediately determine that there is not a queen in the box and will "make a queen."  Once she hatches, makes her virgin flight and is bred in the drone zone, she'll return to begin laying.  At that point the split is successful and you've taken one box of bees and turned them into two.  We can't wait to try it out.  We've successfully caught swarms, but have never made a split.  We'll report back when we try it.

Mid Summer Bee Update

The "flow" is over.  In our area, when the Chinese tallow trees bloom, things kick into overdrive in the hive.  Bees are bringing in nectar and honey production is on!  We had one major problem this year.  A drought!  It rained less 0.3 of an inch in June.  The grass stopped growing.  Plants stopped flowering.  Things slowed down in the hive.  Trouble in Beeville, indeed.

We began fervently praying for rain.  Not only does it affect the bees, but our cows, goats, and chickens enjoy fresh, green, tender grass growth.  I reluctantly rolled out the last round bale we had from last year.  I was rationing it for a special occasion - sort of an emergency pantry, you might say.  Well, this is it.  The cows promptly ate it in less than a week.

An experienced beekeeper friend stopped in for a visit and wanted to check in on the hives to see how they were doing.  Good idea!  We opened the two boxes and inspected.

I'm not too big of a man to admit when I make mistakes.  I made one.  The 'super' is the box that you put on top of the deep brood box on the bottom.  Really, you want to add the super once your bottom box gets 80% full.  If it gets too full, the bees could leave.  We didn't want that to happen, so we added a super.  It was too soon.  The bees moved up.  So now they are in the middle 3 or 4 frames of the bottom box and the middle 2 or 3 frames in the top box.  The other frames haven't been built out yet.  

We did see capped honey, pollen, eggs, larvae, and capped brood.  The colonies are healthy, yet small.  It is for this reason that we may not pull any honey this year and simply allow the size of the colony to grow.  I can get honey from my friend in exchange for labor when I help him pull honey from his boxes.  Sweet!

One note of bad news before we move on.  The colony of bees that live in the column on the side entrance of our home is gone.  They have been there for years and years.  On certain years they have left, but always another swarm eventually moves in.  We're hoping the same thing happens again.

In our little herb garden, we allow the herbs, like mint, dill, and parsley, to flower and go to seed.  Here is a honey bee on the parsley.  Busy as  a bee.

As I looked across the garden, I spotted more honeybees that had made a bee line for the dill that was flowering.

They are working hard!  One more thing I wanted to show you.  When you work your bee boxes, you have to use your hive tool to break the glue-like material (propolis).  It is made of bee saliva, beeswax, and material bees get from plants.  They use it to make a sealant.  It has great health benefits.

When you break the boxes apart, most of the time, you break open honeycomb, exposing the sticky sweet goodness.  The bees don't like it much that you've broken apart their home and have disturbed their food.  They gather around it to pick it all up and to repair their broken home.  Pretty neat photo below of them circled up around the honeycomb.

The trouble with this is that if you left it alone, when you go to put the boxes back together, you'd crush these ladies.  We don't want to do that.  So, we use the hive tool to scrape the honey and the comb off of the frame and put it in a cup.  When you walk far enough away from the hive, the bees will leave.  At that point, you can take off the suit and enjoy a nice sweet snack of honey and comb.