Spring harvest, inspection

We pulled 4 frames of honey recently, and last weekend we 'processed' it.

Honey progression.

From this (frames of capped honey):


To this (strained honey):


To this (many jars of honey):


And this (see if you can guess!):


And finally, this:


We inspected the hives today, and found both to have brood, so apparently the frame of brood we added last week was unnecessary. All's well though, they can probably use a few more worker bees.

We also went in initially without smoke, and the bees were a lot more aggressive.. As soon as we started smoking the hives, they really were a lot more peaceful. I suppose that makes sense, but it's good to verify sometimes :)

-tmk

I'm the one that gets stung

Kevin has thicker hair, clearer skin, can hold his breath longer, and beat me in almost every game/sport at which we have ever competed, there remains one biological arena in which I best him: allergic reactions.--

Mosquito bites have little or no affect on me.

I don't have cold-urticaria. (alright that's an easy one, 98% of humans don't)

And pertinent to this beekeeping blog, beestings to me are a minor nuisance.

I've been stung about 10 times now over the past year. I had never been stung by a bee before we had our hive. Stepping on a wasp at age 24 was the first "sting" I ever received. (I'm indoorsy)

I had gotten so lax about the stings, that this last time I was stung (yesterday afternoon) I didn't think much of the stings.

But some combination of factors led my stings to amount to more than tiny purple marks. I have a cookie-size hive at the locations of each sting. (I remember a similar reaction to a fire ant bite when I was a kid)
Was it the new breed of bees I caught and introduced to our hive?
Did I not remove the stinger fast enough / correctly?
Lack of ibuprofen / Zyrtec?
I dunno.
But I don't like the ugly spots on my arms, that's for sure and I'd like them to go away. So I googled and found this interesting article: The Best Bee Sting Remedies from Slate.
Really, click the link, it really is interesting!


(in this re-enactment, the part of "my arms" is played by a purple daisy)

I'm pretty sure more than 24 hours after the stings, alot of those solutions wouldn't really help me. I should just ice them, but they don't bother me that much that I'm going to hold packs of ice on/off my arms for a couple of hours.


How did I get stung this time, you might be wondering?

Well for starters, I was out there (by myself) because we saw that our big first hive had no new grubs (brood) or eggs.
Which means they have no queen.
Which is like bee anarchy.

So we had decided Sunday afternoon, after the honey harvest, that we should swap out a grub frame from the second hive for a honey frame in the queen-less hive.*
Which is what I was doing yesterday when I got stung. I was rushing, and I didn't cover my arms with enough layers to keep out stingers. And when I jacked up a super-full frame of honey, the "anarchists", who were already mad because of not having a queen, stung me through my sleeves. I still had to do the swap and put the hives back together so I didn't immediately tend to my stings.
And now, welts. Boo.


*How does swapping help our the queen situation?
The other hive can magically** transform those eggs into a new queen.

**Magically, seriously?
Um, no, it involves Royal Jelly which I don't like saying out loud because it sounds like knock-off of Dark n' Lovely or an altogether more unmentionable product.

and here the honey is...inside buckets

On Mothers Day (yesterday) this honey was harvested. For hard data, see previous post.

Also, for Mothers Day, my mom got me bee themed salt/pepper shakers (from Cracker Barrel, who knew?)

So I thought I'd couple them together for a portrait. :)

The best part about the honey having to sit n' filter for a couple of days is that the kitchen smells awesome. I didn't expect it to waft around so much, but since it's warmer than it was in December when we had our last batch, it's gettin' around.

For the last few months Kevin has been saving every random jar that passes through our kitchen, in preparation for the next honey-jarring session. I keep tossing out (recycling) the ones with the ugly lids. You can imagine how Kevin feels about that, but I have aesthetics standards-- even for honey that comes from beside our garage.

Which reminds me, I gotta order some labels right now!...

Honey Raid, Inspection report.

Quick recap of recent events:

* about 18 days ago, we tried to capture a swarm, but they didn't stay in the new hive we built for them. Instead they joined our existing hive. OK, so far so good.
* the next day, that same hive did a practice swarm, where 11 lb of bees left, flew around then came back.
* 14 days ago, we did an inspection, found queen cells, and split the hive. This means we took honey, brood, and some frames with queen cells and put them in the new hive, which we had prepared for the swarm. Handy.
* 11 days ago the first hive swarmed for real. It was a 7.5lb swarm. We tried to capture it, but it didn't go so well. In the end we regained 5lbs of bees, but lost 2.5 lb and the queen. See previous posts for details, if you want.
* 7 days ago we noticed a lot of bees on the outside, and since the weather was warming up, we added a couple supers and vented the top.

Here's the graph showing all the above events from the scale's point of view.


We've pretty much let them be since they swarmed. It takes a while for a new queen to hatch, mate, and start laying, and it takes about 10 days for eggs to become capped brood. Since it's been over 10 days since the old queen left, we know that if we saw any eggs or grubs today, we'd know for sure that there was a queen in the hive. No need to see the queen, just eggs or brood.

So today we inspected both hives. The original hive is now queenless - no eggs or brood. We did see some tiny 'emergency' queen cells, one of which had hatched. Not sure if that was recent, or if that queen will even be viable.

Since it was filled up with honey, we took 4 frames from it. Will have to be sure they don't totally fill the hive with honey before we can get a new queen going.

By the time we were done, they were mighty angry. At least that hive is still full of bees, so we're hoping it's not too late and we can turn things around.


On the other hand, the new hive has lots of brood and seems very happy. So that's good at least. The colony survives!

We decided our best bet is to buy a new queen for the old hive, since it'll take 2-3 weeks for them to make a new one, if we give them eggs/brood today. We may swap some brood frames over to the old hive once we put a new queen in, to keep their numbers up.

-tmk

Swarm outcome, sort of.

We are apparently bad as a couple at swarm capture

I climbed a ladder, cut the branch with the swarm on it

slowly

gently

painstakingly

patiently

Got the branch down to the ground.

Then i found the queen in the swarm and just had to get a closer look. She crawled on my clippers and then she flew away

That's right, she flew away.

So for the uninitiated, when the queen flies away, the bees go find her. or go somewhere else, but they don't stay where you put them.

In this case it doesn't seem like they went to the new hive (but it's hard to tell), but at least 4-5 lb of them rejoined the current hive, so it wasn't a total loss.

Perhaps the rest landed in the new hive we set up. No scale on that one so it's hard to tell :)

This graph tells the tale:


You can see the drop where they leave, a couple hours of normal nectar delivery, then a faster increase in weight where they start rejoining. Just at that point is where the branch was tapped to dump the bees on the new hive.

-tmk

Gosh darnit, bees!

On Easter afternoon, we had scheduled to extract the eastimated 50 lbs of honey from our hive (according to Kevin's bee scale data).

But no! When we opened the hive, we found in frame after frame, the bees had mixed their brood (baby bee grubs) and their honey! So we couldn't get any of it! All messed up!

I was so depressed about it that I took out the one and only frame of honey without grubs that I could find. And Kevin told me not to, because it was old and wouldn't taste very good. But I wasn't leaving that honey store without honey, so I took it! Even if it does taste funky.

And now, 3 days later, after we tried to spread out the frames and new queen cells to the new empty hive, the bees swarmed anyway and are amassed in branch near our driveway. A very tall, hard to reach branch. Arg!

...stay tuned for the harrowing outcome...

sometimes you gotta carry bees home in a Civic

Well it's swarm season. Or maybe I should say "swarm season's greetings."

And this afternoon, at my work no less, there was a swarm-- just confused and clustered on a bushy tree.

Perfect opportunity to try my hand at swarm capturing! *DING!*

I got a 5 gallon bucket, a "lid" (not really a lid, but it worked), some branch clippers, gloves n' hat and my "dress whites" and drove back over to the office.

Kevin expressed concern, to say the least, but gave his partial blessing, and let me go [solo].
You know, the bees could be a not-so-friendly breed, and could mess with our hive, etc.

But I'm not known for my calculated caution, so I got on the step ladder, clipped some branches, dropped a branch of bees, scooped up said bees, thwacked some more bees off into another bucket and loaded them into the backseat of the Honda.

There were still some bees left, but I didn't have alot of time to hang around and get every last bee, so I left some. If they're still there in the morning, I'll get the rest.

I brought them home, unsure whether I got the queen or not.

I mean, it's really hard to tell where the queen is when I'm looking at our neat n' tidy hive.

In a buzzing ball of swarming bees, it's pretty much impossible.

So I have no idea if we have the queen. Some of the bees were doing what I call "treadmilling" (flapping wings, but not going anywhere) that is what they do when the queen is near, so I think that's a good sign. But then Kevin said the fact that there were still bees stuck back on the tree when I left is a bad sign. So it's a draw.

When I came home and dumped the bees into the empty hive box that Kevin prepared, they seemed fine.
However, he just checked on them (hours later) and they are back out and hanging around the buckets...to which he said "you gotta find the queen and put her in the hive."

Great....I gotta get a flashlight and find one bee out of 100,000 bees in the dark...fantastic....

UPDATE: mission locate queen: fail. I got stung twice (because *someone* said I didn't need to put on the full get-up. *squint*). I did dump more bees back in the empty hive and put a glob of honey inside, so they'd have a snack and stay awhile.

Now I have to sit and wait until they calm back down so I can put the lid back on. oye.