A Postscript on the Bees

A few final notes following the pulling of fall honey from our hives.  We had mentioned a while back about small hive beetles and the damage that they can do in a hive.  If you have a strong colony, the bees will do a good job of fighting them off.  The guard bees run them out of the frames.  We help the bees out a little bit.  We learned a trick from our bee club that is doing the trick.

Swiffer sheets.  Yep, you heard me right.  Those sheets that you put on a dust mop to clean your kitchen floors have a dual purpose.  They will catch and kill small hive beetles.  We put a sheet on the top of the frames. The bees run the small hive beetles out of the hive and up to the top.  When they run across the Swiffer sheets, their little feet get caught in the microfibers and they are stuck together like velcro.  They end up dying.  Look at all the small hive beetle carcasses on the Swiffer sheets!: 

Tricia began rendering the beeswax from the cappings from our fall honey pull.  It only consisted of 21 frames, but we still save every bit we can.  Tricia puts all the cappings along with some water into a crock pot and lets it all liquefy.  This is then poured through a muslin cloth that acts as a filter.  We do this process twice to get a lot of impurities out of the beeswax.  It looks like a brick of gold.

We're saving all this beeswax for candle-making and making lip balm.  We are getting quite an inventory of beeswax and there are so many uses for it.

Once the beeswax has been filtered and removed from the crock pot, what remains is some honey that was trapped in the wax.  That honey, however, is mixed with water.  We tend to feed all this back to the bees.  In very early spring, we'll pull this out of the freeze and feed the bees.

So many uses of all the by products in honeycomb.  Not much goes to waste.

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.

Meandering on Monday Afternoon

“How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.” – Psalm 104:24

Lots of work on the computer today, sitting inside staring into a computer monitor.  Once I finished up work today it was time to get outside, touch the grass, and observe real things that are going on in the world right outside your door.  It's easy in modern society to live in monasteries of our own making and wall ourselves off from the real world.  What a tragedy!

Growing up, I watched a television program called Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.  The host, Marlin Perkins and the co-host, Jim Fowler, would wrestle anacondas and watch cheetah's chase down antelope.  I always enjoyed that show.  You know what?  There is a wild kingdom in your backyard.  Maybe we won't run into a rhinoceros or a crocodile, but who knows?  Let's take a walk and see what kind of adventures we can stumble upon in the great outdoors. 

In the back pasture, in what we call "the bull pen," because we quarantine the bull in there away from the cows until they come in heat, we have a water trough.  The bull (we call him Nicky) slowly drinks water from the trough on hot afternoons.  He's not the only one drinking water there, though.  Check out the honeybees that line the edges of the trough, drinking water.

The water trough is about 50 yards from the bee boxes.  If you stand at the trough and look back to the bee boxes, you can see a... beeline of bees.  It is a steady stream of honeybees back and forth, back and forth.  Sometimes some of the bees get clumsy or get knocked into the water.  Look at the poor girl below.  She's fallen in and she beats her little wings, making ripples in the water trying to get out.  Sometimes I'll use a leaf to scoop the bees up and rescue them like a lifeguard would throw a flotation device.

Why are bees drinking water?  Well, they need water like you and I do for hydration.  But on hot days like today when the heat index makes it feel like it is 105 degrees, the bees use the water to regulate the temperature in the hive.  The bees like the hive to stay between 91 - 97 degrees.  If it gets hotter than this, the wax could melt.  The way they cool the hive is that they carry the water back to the hive, spit the water on the comb and then beat their wings.  The honeybees create their own air conditioning!  On hot days like today, the bees will congregate on the outside of the hive.  Just look at them.

While we're looking at the bees, I went inside and put my bee suit on.  I pulled the telescoping lid of the top of each of the four boxes and placed a Swiffer sheet on the very top then put the lid back on.  There is a pest called a small hive beetle (SHB) that cause problems in hives.  If you have healthy hives, the bees are able to take care of the problem.  They'll round up the small hive beetles and send them up to the top of the box.

Here's where the Swiffer sheets come in.  They're used a a trap.  When the honeybees chase the small hive beetles to the top of the box.  When the hive beetles walk across the Swiffer sheets, they get their feet stuck on the microscopic loops in the Swiffer sheets.  It's kind of like Velcro.  The beetles have barbs on their legs that get tangled in the Swiffer by tiny microscopic loops on the sheets.  I opened up the boxes and placed a Swiffer sheet on top of each box.

We'll check back in aa number of weeks and let you know if our small hive beetle traps (Swiffer sheets)
were successful.