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.

Talking About Hives - But Not Beehives

I awoke Sunday morning to a rash on my inner thighs.  Weird!  Itching like crazy.  By late afternoon, the rash had advanced to previously unoccupied territory like an invading army coming to bring its wrath and destruction upon unsuspecting people.  

When I tell you I was at my wit's end, I'm not exaggerating.  I took a box of Benadryl, popping another tablet as soon as the 6 hours was up.  It made me sleep a lot, but didn't really do anything for the rash.  I took numerous hot baths with epsom salt and baking soda.  This actually calmed things down momentarily.  When I got out, well, it was on again.  Maybe at some point this will get better?

I thought to myself, "It will be better on Monday."  It did not get better on Monday.  It had worsened, encroaching to my private parts.  I felt like I was on fire.  On Tuesday, I expected a respite from my enraged skin.  Alas, it did not happen.  The rash was literally from the top of my head to the soles of my feet!  My lips had swollen.  I began to think that this must be the like the pestilence that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse brings in the end times.

On Tuesday afternoon, my wife made an appointment with Telehealth.  You connect with the hospital portal via computer and a Nurse Practitioner listens to you, looks at your condition and assesses the situation.  She was able to see my "rash" and said, "That's hives.  It's your body reacting to something you ingested.  A food.  A spice."  I began to rack my brain.  What kind of torture did I bring upon myself?

You know what?  We have guesses, but I still don't know what it was that caused it.  That means this could all happen again if I eat the culprit again!  In the meantime, the NP told me to go to the pharmacy and get some Zyrtec and Pepcid and begin taking that (filling in with Benadryl, if needed).  She also prescribed me some Prednisone, a steroid.  I've begun taking all the meds and fortunately, I'm finding some relief, but at the end of the dosage, it starts coming back!  How long can this last???

Hives!  I'll stick with the beehives instead.

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 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.

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.