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.

Attempting to Make Splits

We've got big plans for our four honeybee hives.  Here it is April 16th and we're almost out of honey.  We pulled honey in July and again in the fall and our inventory is low.  I think we'll run out before we rob the hives.  So we got to thinking that we need a few more hives. If we had 6 hives instead of four, that would be perfect.

I do have swarm traps out to try to catch some wild swarms, but so far, no luck.  The other option is to make splits.  That's exactly what we did.  You'll notice the splits below.  Moving left to right, the third box and the last box are splits.  The splits come off of the existing four hives, and I'll try to explain what we did.

A quick description of making a split is as follows:  You get an empty box.  Then you open a healthy hive of bees with a strong population.  As you go through each frame in the brood chamber, you want to locate the queen.  On frames where the queen is NOT there, remove a frame of honey, a frame of pollen, a frame of eggs, a frame of uncapped and capped larva and put it in the empty box.  We attempted a split into a deep box and another split in the Nuc.

Within five hours, the nurse bees in the split hives realize that there is NO queen in the box by the lack of the scent of her pheromone.  That spells doom for a colony of bees, so they pick out a cell for the bee in which they'll make a queen.  To accomplish this, the nurse bees begin feeding it nothing but royal jelly that they produce from a gland in their heads.  I'll show a projected timeline below:

We made splits on April 6th, 

On April 9th the bees select the larvae that will become the queen cells
On April 11th, they cap the queen cells

On April 19th the queen hatches and leaves her cell
From April 22-April 26, the virgin queen takes orientation flights
From April 24-May 3 the queen takes her mating flight where she flies to meet a drone to get bred.
On April 26-May 3 you'll see your first eggs if mating was successful
By May 12, you'll want to investigate to ensure they've been successful in creating a new queen.

Here is the split hive that we put in a regular deep box:

And here's one that we put in a nuc.:

If the splits were successful, we should see a queen in the split hives as well as eggs by May 12.  We use bricks positioned on the top cover to tell the story about what's going on in the hive.  A brick laid longways tells us that we either saw the queen or we saw eggs.  A brick laid crossways, like the third and last hives tells you that no queen was located and no eggs were located.

If the splits were successful, we'll know about it and will be able to move the bricks on the 3rd and 6th hives longways.  We certainly hope we're successful in splitting and moving from four to six hives of honeybees.

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.

First Frost 2025

Sometimes the weather forecast is right on the money.  And then other times, they totally miss it.  I can understand.  Weather has a lot of variables and conditions that affect it.  In planting crops, I like to have a pretty good idea of when to plant things in advance of a rain, so that the crop will be watered in.  It hasn't rained in several weeks now, so I'm a little concerned about the crimson clover that I planted.  The ground is as hard as a basketball court.  I don't know how the crimson clover will germinate and grown on that!

I also like to know when high winds are coming and, of course, when a freeze or frost is coming.  We have lots of tomatoes on the vine that I'd pull if a freeze was coming.

But frosts...  What about those?  Frost won't damage most of the stuff still growing in the garden from the spring, like tomatoes and peppers.  I looked up the Farmer's Almanac for the first frost date for our location.  I put in our zip code and it said: "The average first frost date is November 9"  November 9th came and went with no frost, but...

We woke up on the morning of November 11th to this:

It was a good first frost.  Not enough to damage anything in the garden, but enough to slow down any new grass growth in the pasture.

The cows, goats, and chickens will continue to clean up the last remaining grass and then it will be time to start supplementing with hay.  Last year we rolled out the first round bale on January 1st.  I'm thinking this year will be sooner to hay the cows.  At the bee club meeting, some of the beekeepers were saying that the bees were completely stopping up all the holes in their bee boxes with propolis, and they are reading that as a prediction that a cold winter is on the way.  Who knows?  Weather forecasters, Farmer's Almanacs, and beekeepers can all be wrong.  We'll have to wait to find out.

Something New for the Bees

October is usually one of our driest months.  Up until two days ago, we'd only gotten half an inch of rainfall so far during the month.  When I saw that Saturday and Sunday we had chances of precipitation, I set my plan into action.  That plan involved seeding around the beehives and garden in the side yard with Crimson Clover.  Why?  I think the honeybees will enjoy it this Spring.  I know the cows will enjoy it, too.  Finally, it sets nitrogen in the soil, so it will be growing its own fertilizer, one might say.

Our local feed store sells it priced at $3 per pound.  I'm not working up the soil.  I'm just broadcasting the seed by hand.  To do this, you want to make sure the seeds make contact with the ground.  It's still a little risky, but I ventured to spend $6 for 2 lbs of seed.  If it doesn't germinate, I'm out of $6.

The Crimson Clover seed looks like it has a treatment on it.  I read that it takes between 1 - 3 weeks for the seed to germinate.

I simply grabbed a handful and scattered the seed like the Sower who went out to sow.  There's nothing precise or scientific in how I'm seeding.  If you look closely, you can see the grey seed below contrasted against the soil.

I made sure that I primarily planted in two main areas - the area in front of the hives and behind the hives.  I'm envisioning a sea of crimson clover covering the landscape.  Won't that be pretty? 

We also seeded Crimson Clover by the garden in the side yard.  After broadcasting the seed we got 6/10s of an inch of rain and the very next day, 7/10s.  Today, I got out there and sprayed the whole area down with water.

Looking forward to seeing if this was a worthwhile endeavor.  We'll keep you posted.

The Honey Harvest 2025 (Part 2)

In Part 1 we talked about putting the 1 way entrance board beneath the honey supers that we wanted to extract honey from.  The thought being that the bees on the honey frames could leave, but would not be able to get back in.  That way, in the morning, the honey supers would have no bees in them and we'd be able to just remove them quickly devoid of bees and we'd take them to start extracting honey.

Well... it didn't work.  We pulled the lid off and the honey supers were full of bees!  Oh well, we were ready for this.  I had made a fume board.  A fume board is simply a board that is the same size as the honey box and it has a t-shirt spread across it.  We use an organic, all natural spray that the bees hate.  This is sprayed on the fume board and the fume board is placed over the top box.  In about 10 minutes, most of the bees will be pushed down away from the scent into the box beneath it.  Then you repeat that process until all the boxes are cleared of bees.

You can see some of the bees coming out of the very bottom.  They don't like that smell. 

We kept working and working, box after box, making our way to the last one.  Try as you may, there will always be a few bees in the box.  They like to protect their honey.  Next year, I'm going to use a leaf blower to blow the last remaining stragglers out.  I just don't think they are going to like the sound of the blower.  It's worth a try.  I don't like to get the bees all riled up, though, or we won't be able to go in the back yard without being attacked!

You'll see in the wagon below we have four full honey supers.  Bees will go back to the honey so the boxes are stacked in a telescoping lid on the bottom and one on top to keep them out.  Boxes full of honey is heavy.  A medium super full of honey weighs between 40 and 50 pounds.  We had to make several wagon loads to the truck.

We are taking the boxes of honey across town to a gentleman in our bee club that has some real nice honey extraction equipment that he offered to let us use.  We like to operate in the black, so we haven't purchased any honey extraction equipment until we pay off the investment in bee suits, boxes, frames, etc.  Here you can see we have 9 medium boxes of honey all stacked up.

In the next installment, we'll show you the honey extraction process!  

The Honey Harvest 2025 (Part 1)

 

We started off the year with 6 boxes of bees, having caught two swarms and making two splits.  As things happen in life, you win some and you lose some (and sometimes you get rained out).  One of our two splits was successful - we lost one of them.  And surprisingly, we lost one of the swarms by way of losing a queen.  In the photo above, the swarm box on the far left was so weakened, we stacked the deep box containing the remaining nectar on top of the deep box in the middle (the tallest one).

This left us with four boxes of bees.  The other boxes were very active and healthy.  The medium boxes on top of the deep boxes are called honey supers.  They are called supers because they go on top of the brood boxes.  The brood boxes are separated from the honey supers by a queen excluder.  The queen excluder is basically a screen that has gaps big enough to let all the worker bees go up, but not big enough to let the queen go up and begin laying eggs in the honey supers.  The goal is to have the honey supers ONLY having honey - no eggs or brood.  This makes the extraction process easier.

When you go to remove the honey supers for extraction, there is a problem.  The honey supers are full of bees.  These bees are very protective of the honey.  This is their food source.  This is what they've worked for all spring to produce.  And these humans are going to rob it!  So you must get the bees out.  This is done by using a fume board.  A fume board is basically a board covered with a T-shirt and sprayed with an all natural scent that humans love but bees hate.  You spray this on the fume board and set it on top and the bees move downward.  That's the idea anyway.

A friend of ours introduced us to something new to try.  It is a board with a one way entrance.  The bees that go out cannot get back in.  We wanted to experiment with this new tool that might make the job of removing the honey supers for extraction easier.  So the day before, we inspected each hive and reorganized the honey supers, moving the supers that did not have capped honey down to the very bottom just above the deep boxes of brood and then placing the board with the one way entrance above the supers with uncapped honey.  Uncapped honey will not be pulled as the nectar or honey within them is too high in moisture and you run the risk of your honey fermenting.  We want to make honey and not meade!

So we lit the smoker and smoked the bees and rearranged the order, putting the one way entrance board in.  In part 2 of this post which will likely be posted Sunday night, we'll show you the results of this experiment and go on and show you the honey extraction process.  Ya'll have a great weekend!

The Flow Is On! - Checking in on the Bees

The flow in south Louisiana in our area is dependent primarily on the Chinese Tallow Tree.  The flow means that the tallow tree (and other plants) are producing lots of nectar.  The busy bees gather it, bring it back home and make delicious honey.  The tassels you see below are the flowers of the tallow tree from which the honeybees harvest nectar.

Here's an up close shot.  There were bees really working it, but I couldn't capture them as I was far away zooming in.

As semi-novice beekeepers, we've learned that when the flow is on, you don't want them to run out of room to put the nectar.  We check the boxes every week, adding honey supers to give them more space.  A super simply means a box placed on top. Here are our hives.  You'll notice that there are five.  Last week we had six.  I'll explain that in a minute.  Let's go through the boxes one by one.

The first box is a swarm we caught in the yard this spring.  You'll notice the brick is sideways.  That, in beekeeper language, means we could find no queen.  I did, however, find some larva, and that means there WAS a queen.  I'm going to give it one more week.  If I find no queen and no eggs, I will stack this deep on top of a healthy hive and they'll be able to use the nectar in these frames.

This second box is a swarm we caught this spring.  It's blowing and going.  In fact, I added a honey super to the super that was already there, because the first super was about 80% full of capped honey.  One thing you'll note is there are 2 deep boxes.  The reason for that is that one of the splits that we made failed.  No queen and no eggs.  I stacked the deep on top of the existing deep and put the queen excluder so that the queen won't go up into the honey supers.

The third hive is VERY active.  I added another honey super on top of the four honey supers already on there that are full.  We're really happy with this one!

This is the sad story we were telling you about.  One of the splits that we made, although initially successful, failed.  Rather than lose the nectar, we moved the deep box with the bees and put it on top of the second hives' deep box.  They'll use all that.

The fourth hive is doing well.  I didn't add a honey super to the top of the three existing supers as the top one wasn't quite full.  We'll check again this week.  One thing to think about when adding supers is this:  When we pulled honey last July, we put the supers with drawn comb in the freezer.  Using supers with drawn comb gives the bees a head start.  If they don't have to draw out the wax, they spend more of their energy making honey.  Supers with foundation only (meaning no drawn comb) requires the bees to build out the honey comb first before making honey.

The last hive is the swarm we caught at the farm.  These are "mean" bees.  When you pull the lid off, they are in your face, angry.  It is important to always wear your bee suit.  The good thing is that mean bees make more honey.  We added a new honey super to the top as the one beneath it was almost full.  This super was a new one with foundation only - no drawn comb.  It will take them a while to build out the comb.  They have about a month and a week before we pull honey.

Temperatures are in the 90's already and it is humid.  Even though ventilated, it is hot inside a bee suit.  Handling the boxes with angry bees flying around is tricky.  Honey is heavy!  A medium super with ten frames full of capped honey weighs about 50 pounds and when they are stacked high, are hard to lift and maneuver.  When we pull honey in July when the flow is over, it will be a hard job, but there are fruits to the labor: Delicious, healthy, raw honey!