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!

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.

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!

Making Splits

We've never done this before on our own.  As relatively new beekeepers we've made our share of mistakes, and we're certain to make more.  We decided to make our own 'walk-away splits' this spring.  A split is where you take a colony of bees, split it, and make two colonies of bees.  It's like compound interest.

Of our four hives we had at the end of last year, we have two left.  One was lost due to wax moths.  The second is a mystery.  Perhaps the queen died?  Perhaps they were a little weak and the cold weather did them in?  Whatever happened, we are told it is a common occurrence.  "If you want a beehive, get two," they say.  Some people lose all their hives, but they catch more swarms and resume.  

Tricia and I put on our suits and unstacked one of the hives we lost.  Here she is cleaning the bottom board.  She'll put that back down as it will serve as the base for one of our splits.

The two remaining hives appeared to be very healthy, and that is a must in order to make splits.  You'll note that we have two deeps with a queen excluder and then medium supers on top.  To make a walkaway split, you simply move one of the deeps and put on top of a bottom board and you're done.  But there's a few things you need to check before doing that.

Despite not feeding our bees, they have plenty of stores of honey in the supers.  This is money in the bank.  Spring has arrived and the bees are bringing in nectar and pollen and will have lots of honey to spare when we pull honey in the summertime!

Capped honey in the supers

Then we got down into the deep boxes.  We used our smoker to calm the bees.  One hive is naturally calm.  The other hive is aggressive and get up in your face.  The first thing you want to see is drones or at least capped drone cells.  The drones are the males and you need males so that when a new queen is made, there will be drones in the area (from your colonies or another) for the virgin queen to mate with.  We went through the boxes and found capped drones.  Good news.  The drone cells are laid on the bottom as their cells are larger and don't fit in the regular foundation.

Now we look for the queen.  In the frame below we found eggs, larvae, and capped brood.  All letting us know that we have a laying queen somewhere.  We flipped the frame over and found her!  Her tail is longer than the others.  She's a little difficult to see, but once you get the hang of it, she kind of stands out.  Good.  So that box with the queen gets moved to a new location.  This is done to fool her into thinking she's swarmed.  That's what we're told, so we did it.

Nurse bees and eggs

The other box must be gone through frame by frame.  The boxes must have at least 3 or 4 frames of eggs and brood and these are positioned in the middle, and then several frames of honey and pollen and drawn comb on the outside.  As long as you have this in both boxes, you should be good.    The box with the queen will continue going as normal (but with half the bees).  Not to worry.  She's laying eggs like crazy and the hive will grow exponentially in size.

The box with no queen...  Well, what happens next is simply amazing.  The bees in the queen-less box will realize there is no queen in about 5 hours.  They will begin to feed royal jelly from a gland in their heads to some larvae and these will make queen cells.  In about 16 days a queen will emerge.  She will get her wits about her and will make her maiden breeding flight where she will fly up to the drone zone and get bred.  She'll return to the hive and begin to lay.

So in the photo below, you'll see that we made two splits.  The bricks on top of the hives denote what's in them.  The bricks laying long-ways (the first and third hives) have a laying queen.  The hives where the bricks are laying cross-ways (the second and fourth hives) have no queen.  We will check both of those boxes in about 3 1/2 weeks to a month.  What we're looking for is eggs.  If we find eggs, we will know that the split was successful.  

You can buy a queen cell and speed up this process, but we opted to let the hive do it themselves.  You lose a little time, but that's okay with us.  Now, we wait...

What happens if the split didn't work?  Well, we'll be disappointed, but we'll stack the boxes on top of the existing healthy hives and we will try to make another split OR we'll try to catch wild swarms in the yard.  We actually got called to go get a swarm in someone's yard last Saturday, but we had company over.  When the company left, we put on our suits and started to go, but the swarm had left!  Oh well.  We'll keep you posted with our first attempt of making splits.