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!

For the Bees, From the Bees

We're just coming out of 20 degree weather with more chilly stuff to come, but it did get up to 50 degrees today.  When the sun came out, the honeybees came out of their hives and gathered at the water trough to drink water.  I know it's early yet, but in just a few weeks, it will be time to set out swarm traps to catch wild swarms and also split our hives.  It's hard to imagine, but it won't be long until the bees become very active.  

Many people are feeding their bees now.  They take a bunch of sugar and mix with water in 5 gallon buckets.  The bees come and drink the sugar water and take it back to the hive.  So the bees don't drown in the bucket, folks put a bunch of pine straw in the bucket so that the bees can land on the pine straw and drink without falling in the sugary syrup water.  The idea of feeding the bees like this is to stimulate the queen.  When the queen sees worker bees coming into the hive with (fake) nectar, she is tricked into believing that the flow is on.  If she believes the flow (production of nectar) is on, she begins to lay eggs in abundance so there will be workers to bring in nectar and pollen.  This "jump starts" the hive.  This way, once actual flowers are blooming, the hive is up and running with lots of workers ready to go and theoretically, more honey will be produced.  Makes sense.

We like to be more natural.  Week after next, we'll begin feeding, but with honey that came off of their hives.  When we pull honey, we render down the beeswax in a crock pot.  Once the wax is separated, you're left with a lot of honey mixed with water.  We bag this up and freeze it.  We have several gallon bags of it in the deep freeze.  We will thaw this out, pouring it into a pan and set it out for the bees to feast on.  We'll show photos or a video of this.  It's something to see.  They'll bring their own honey back to the hive to feast on and the queen will do her thing and lay eggs in preparation for spring.  

So the honey water is for the bees.  Let's talk about something from the bees.  With the beeswax cappings we got in the honey extraction process, we heat it in a crockpot with water.  That's how we got the honey water discussed above.  With the beeswax, we plan on making candles.  Tricia tried her hand at making lip balm:

Our inaugural lip balm production was mainly for personal use and for Christmas gifts.  We plan on making more to sell alongside our honey.  The lip balm is a combination of beeswax, coconut oil, castor oil and eucalyptus and orange essential oils.  It came out great!  When we make another batch, we'll show you the process.

By-products from the Hive: Beeswax and Honey Water

When we butcher a cow, we use most everything except the "moo."  We make bone broth with the bones and pressure can it.  We render the tallow for soapmaking and for cooking and so on and so forth.  Same thing with the bees.  The honey is the main attraction, but there are other uses for what's left behind.  Tonight I'll show you what we did.  

Here's a photo of the cappings.  When the honey in the comb reaches the correct moisture percentage (17%, I think), the bees cap it.  In order to pull honey, you must cut the cappings.  You try to cut as little as possible so the bees don't have to work so hard to make comb and can make honey quicker.  Here is a container that catches all the cappings.  There is honey in it, too.  The honey drips down into the lower container, where it is drained off through a honey gate.

But what about all that wax?

The wax will not be wasted.  We manually squeeze as much honey as possible out of the wax.

That leaves little palm-sized wax footballs.  We throw those in a bag.

We put some water in a crock pot and warm up.  The wax is put into a muslin cloth 'filter' and is melted.

The wax runs right through and the muslin cloth catches most of the solids.  A lot of that is propolis.  We squeeze everything we can out into the crock pot that is heated up.

We set the bag that contained the wax on the back patio and the honeybees discover it quickly.  Nothing goes to waste with them.  They collect it all and bring it back to the hive to reuse.

Then we let the wax in the crock pot come to room temperature.  The wax is on top and the water goes to the bottom.

We did this numerous times to process all the wax.  It hardens into disks and then we weighed it.

Here is all of it once we were done:

The cappings from our 13.5 pounds of honey made 2.25 pounds of beeswax.  Our friend that let us use his honey extracting equipment did not want his cappings, so he gave it to us.  The cappings from his 16 pounds or extracted honey made 2.75 pounds of beeswax.  In all we have 5 pounds of beeswax!  We plan on making candles, lip balm, furniture polish, and melt some to brush on to frames prior to putting foundation in the hives to give the bees a head start.

But wait, there's more!  The 'water' at the bottom of the crock pot when the wax goes to the top isn't just water, it's honey water.  We filled bowls of it, but didn't throw it out.

We put it in freezer jars and freezer bags and will freeze it and give it back to the bees.

In the winter, when there's not much for the bees to eat, we'll thaw out the honey water and pour into bowls for the bees to come eat.  Many people feed their bees sugar water, but we'll try a natural approach and feed them their own honey water.  It'll have them fat and happy to begin making honey for next spring.