July 5, 2013

July 5, 2013

Left Hive (closest to fence)

• 2 deeps on hive
• small amount of brood
• some drone cells
• average amount of capped honey
• average number of bees in hive
• sugar roll test: 0 mites

 Right Hive

• 2 deeps/1 super on hive
• reversed deeps
• very good amount of brood
• very good amount of capped honey
• large amount of bees in hive
• sugar roll test: 4 mites

June 24, 2013

June 24, 2013

Left Hive (closest to fence)

• 2 deeps on hive
• small amount of brood
• average amount of capped honey
• average number of bees in hive
• sugar roll test: 5 mites

 Right Hive

• 2 deeps on hive
• very good amount of brood
• very good amount of capped honey
• large amount of bees in hive
• sugar roll test: 0 mites
• added a super to the hive

May 6, 2013

May 6, 2013

Checked the hives today and both have nice drawn out comb and several frames of brood. This is very good news since I was afraid I released the Queens too early. Added 1 gallon of syrup and closed up the hives and let the bees to their thing. I'll check back in a week to see if its time to add another 'deep' to each hive.

April 22 - 24, 2013

April 22, 2013

I went into this past winter with one healthy hive and it seemed to be doing well thru March of 2013. But in late March I lost the hive. After opening things up it appears that all the honey reserves were gone. I did however have granulated sugar left over that I had put in the hive as an emergency feed. Not sure if the bees starved or the died off from something else. Oh well.....

After several weeks delayed due to the weather, I picked up two bee packages that I had ordered from Mike. I installed them in the hive that afternoon when I thought it would be the warmest part of the day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

April 24, 2013

 

 

Checked both hives today to see if the queens were released from their queen cages. They were not. Since I was pressed for time, I helped things out a little by making a small hole in the candy so the queens could escape. Later, both queens were able to get out of their cages and join the hives. I'm hoping I didn't rush things along too fast and both hives will accept their queens. After the queens were with the rest of the bees, I put the remaining frames in each box and installed top feeders. I put 1 gallon of 1:1 syrup in each feeder and shut everything up. I'll check next week to see if they need more syrup and if the queens are laying eggs.

 

 



Aug 11, 2012

Lost one of my hives today!

I guess when the hive got robbed several weeks ago, it put too big of a stain on the colony.

When I opened the hive today there were just a hand full of bees and most of the frames were filled with wax moths!

I disassembled the hive and got rid of all the wax foundations.

I still have one strong hive left. I've been feeding it syrup and the brood seems healthy.

Hopefully it will winter well.

July 27, 2012

July 25-27, 2012

Wed around noon.

Since I was going to go to the York County Bee Assoc meeting tomorrow, I thought I'd checkout my hives. If I see any problems, I could ask the experts at the meeting. Both hives had plenty of honey stored and both were a little light on brood. But, since it been really warm and nectar isn't as plentiful, I didn't really see any problems.

Here some shots of the honey stored in one of my hives:

Here's are some shots of the brood:

Wed around 4pm.

I noticed a lot of bees flying around my house. More then usually. I went down to checkout the hives again and found bees all over the one hive. I thought, oh no they were getting ready to swarm even though they had swarmed earlier in the season.

What the heck is going on?

Well, the next day I went to the bee meeting and took along my pictures and video along to see if anyone knew what was happening. I got my answer real quick. My hive had been robbed!! Robbing is when bees from outside your colony go into a hive, open up all the caps and steal the honey. In a matter of hours, all my honey was gone! It is amazing how fast the bees can work. My other hive sitting 5 feet away wasn't touched!

According to the guys at the meeting, if I had know what was happening, I could have stopped the robbing by blocking the entrance and thereby making it easier for my bees to defend their hive.

Oh well, now I know!

Here are those same frames as above minus the honey:

June 28, 2012

It's honey time!!!

After all the work we put into keeping bees, we finally got some payback.

We decided to make the honey extraction a group effort, so we got several of our local bee keepers together. This included my current neighbors Lee and Diann and my old neighbor Joe. Oh, we also had Diann's granddaughter Sara to make sure we did things correctly.

Since none of us had previous experience extracting honey, everything was a learning process. The first thing was....how to uncap the honey frames. We did have use of the clubs heated uncapping knife, but really didn't want to get into processing the wax cappings. Instead, we tried two different ways to do the uncapping. The first method was to use a heat gun to melt the caps. This worked pretty well with little mess. The other method we used was scratching the caps open with a uncapping fork. This worked faster then the heat gun, but put a lot more wax in the extracted honey.

Here are some shots of Lee and Joe using the heat gun method.

We found out very quickly that using a handcrank extractor is a lot of work!!

Our total processing for the day was two supers of Joe's and one super of mine.

I think we were all glad we didn't have more supers to process since we were only able to include two frames at a time in the extractor.

Here's a shot of Lee cranking and Joe holding down the extractor.

After cranking for several minutes, we would remove the frames and inspect them to make sure most of the honey was extracted. We then flipped the frames and extracted the other side.

Another shot of Lee and Joe using the heat gun.

When we finally got all the honey extracted, Joe had 3 to 4 gallons and I had around 2. We filtered the honey thru a screened mesh when it was drained out of the extractor and then ran it thru a meshed nylon bag that is normally used in wine making. I then used a ladel to fill my jars. Here's are some shots of my bottled honey.

This is a short video showing the amount of work required to run the handcrank extractor.



One final note. After extracting the honey out of the frames, you never really get all the honey. This could make storing the supers for next year very messy. To do the final cleanup, we let the bees do the all the work. I placed my extracted honey super outside near the bees and in one day they had all the remaining honey cleaned out of the frames. They also cleaned up the excess wax around all the cells. They are amazing working bees!