Holy Bees

Today I did the last check on my bees before I pull off the supers for extraction. I mostly just did a quick check on things. I decided to remove the queen excluder to see if they will draw out he honey comb any faster. It looks as if things are going well.

I found out the hard way that jeans with holes in them and lots of bees don't mix well. Well the pants I usually wear are old ones so I don't have to worry about getting bee stuff on them and ruining them. It turns out that the ones I wore today had holes in the knees. Now I have never had a problem with them before while checking my bees, but today was different. I felt a little something on my leg and thought to myself "that had better not be a bee in there, and it had better not sting me". Just as I had thought that, I felt the little stinger on the inside of my knee. At this point I was right in the middle of checking one of the hives and I could not just stop and take care of it very good. I decided that even though I know bees die after they sting you I still wanted revenge so I slapped my leg where the bee had stung me to make sure it was extra dead. I had to stop for a minute to stand there and wait until the pain subsided enough for me to continue working. That was the first time I have been stung this year. Ouch!

Honey super #3

WOW is all I have to say! I went to check on my hives this last weekend. Three weeks ago I placed a second honey super on my hives. In order to see how the hive was doing I had to remove the top box to check the new box underneath it and boy was I surprised.

This is a picture of my hives with 2 brood boxes and 2 honey supers.

Here are my girls all hanging out on the front porch.

The big surprise was that when I checked the box I found that all the frames were full in the whole hive and not just one hive but both hives! There must have been an awesome honey flow going on, because they filled it up so fast. That meant that I needed to make an emergency run out to Eagle Mountain to get some more honey supers and quickly assemble them. I thought that the ones I had before were enough until I was ready to extract, boy was I wrong. Just like the other honey supers, I needed to place the new one just above the brood boxes so it will have a closer access to the hive entrance. Well a full honey super weighs about 70+ pounds each and I had to move the two full supers off of each hive in order to place the new one. That was tricky by myself because they were so heavy , but I managed :) I will be extracting my honey in about 4 or 5 weeks so I hope that the honey flow continues until then so I will have this new super full of pure golden sweetness.

My hives are now 5 boxes high. Just to give you a little perspective, that is almost 5 feet tall!

Utah County Beekeepers BBQ

This last weekend was the annual Utah County Beekeepers Association BBQ. At the BBQ they usually have a demo of some sorts, pot luck sides (they provide the main dish) and then an auction to raise money to support new beekeepers.

This year it was held in Payson and they decided to roast a pig. I will tell you that the pig was very good but I almost just liked smelling it better, but it sure did look cool. I had to leave early so I missed the auction, not that I would buy anything anyway, but I like to see what they are selling.

So here is a fellow beekeeper (Kevin Cook) giving all of us a demonstration on how to extract your honey. This was really good because I could ask all the questions I could think of to people who had a lot of experience. On the left is the extractor. Just to the right of Kevin is a shallow honey super that he brought. He really knows what he is doing. On the bottom right is the uncapping tank with the hot knife in it. The tank is really dirty because he said he did not have time to clean it out before the demo.

Here is Kevin slicing the cappings off the frame to expose the honey underneath. I will tell you that he is very good at it, I tried to do one while I was there and it was very tricky.

Here is the frame all ready to go into the extractor. He said that the reason it looks darker in the middle is just because at one time this frame was in the brood chamber. The brood chamber always makes the wax darker. So in this case, the honey does not come out darker.

Here is his extractor. This is a Maxant 2 frame reversible extractor with the hand crank on the side. We will see later what one I get :) The honey that spins out drains to the bottom of the tank. There is a valve that you can turn to let the honey drain out. When you do drain the honey, you need to run it through a filter to remove all the impurities. I don't have a picture of it but he did place a filter on the bucket and the finished product looked very good.

Here is what it looks like inside the extractor while it is spinning.

Imported Honey

This was an article in a Utah County Beekeepers Association newsletter and I thought it was very interesting:

Have you ever wondered how the grocery stores can sell honey so cheaply? Doesn’t it seem odd that some retail honey sells for less than what it costs you to produce it? Well, the answer to these questions may be more convoluted than you think.

Every year US beekeepers produce about 190 million pounds of honey but the US per capita consumption of honey is 1.1 pounds per year and equates to about 450 million pounds of honey consumed annually. This means that 60% of all honey packaged and sold in the US is imported. Of the imported honey, at least 50% of it originates from China no matter hat the label on the container says.

The problem with Chinese honey is that it has been dumped on the US market at prices as low as 22 cents a pound, it has a record of being adulterated with other sweeteners, containing banned antibiotics, and containing dangerous substances such as lead. To prevent the Chinese from dumping their honey onto the US market the US now charges a $1.20 per pound fee on all imported Chinese honey. USDA has tried to inspect some honey shipments but it is a low priority task compared to their other duties. Therefore, it is a rare occasion that the honey is inspected.

To get around the import fees and inspections the Chinese have found out that they can transship the honey through other countries and re-label it. In 2008, for example, it was determined that of the 665 shipments of honey from India 471 of them were actually transshipped from China. As a matter of fact since the import fees were added to Chinese honey the amount of honey coming “from China” has decreased but seven of the top 12 honey exporting countries now export far more honey than they produce.

They include Vietnam, India, Thailand, Russia, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Furthermore countries such as Singapore and Grand Bahamas, which have no commercial beekeepers, are now honey exporters. Now one might think that imported honey can be avoided by buying “good” US brands like Sue Bee, which is the largest honey cooperative and packer in the US. Unfortunately, that is not true. According to Sue Bee they buy all the US honey they can, which equals about 60% of what they pack, and then buy the rest from the overseas market. Investigators have found that some of that imported honey they buy is transshipped honey from China. Sue Bee does independently test their honey and they say they reject any contaminated honey but they also say that they just return it to the honey broker which in turn sells it to another packer at a discount. Sue Bee, like many of the packers, does not turn over or report the contaminated/adulterated honey to the USDA for follow-up. Sue Bee says that it is just following the standard procedures of most honey packers in the US. Therefore the USDA does not even find out that the shipment was adulterated or contaminated.

When we sell our honey we often brag of the health benefits of eating local honey but we may be missing the greatest health benefit of all. Our honey is local, not imported, and is free of antibiotics, contaminates, and adulteration. Local honey comes from a trusted known source, you. Local honey should therefore command a much higher price in that the customer can be assured that they are getting a quality product from a trusted source. It is imperative that we maintain the quality of our product and the customer trust.

Honey super #2

On Friday I put a new honey super on the hives. In order to place a new box on the hive it needs to be placed right above the brood boxes, that means that I needed to take off the full super and place it on top. The reason to do it that way is so the bees don't need to travel so far to place honey in the hive. I can tell you that a full honey super is definitely heavier then I expected, that is good (more honey).

Honey Checkup

I was so excited to go check my bees this week to see the progress they have made with the honey and I was not disappointed. My bees have been drawing out comb on more of the frames and filling them with honey, I cant wait to extract. I did grab a few frames from the brood box and add them to the honey super and put empty ones in their place. This way I think I will get more honey. So far I think I have about 9 frames of honey between the two hives. I don't know how much that translates into pounds but I hope a lot.

I went to a beekeepers meeting with the Utah County Beekeepers Association today and it sure is nice to have questions answered by people who know what they are talking about. I also picked up some more unassembled honey supers. All I need to do now is just put it all together and paint it and I will have more room for more honey. Oh yeah just a side note on honey, someone at the meeting brought some honey they bought in Yellowstone and it was dark purple in color (that was the natural color). It was huckleberry honey, and it was so so so good. It was like something you would put on your pancakes and lick the plate clean good. I can't wait to taste my own home grown blend. This makes me hungry just thinking about honey :)

Excluding the bees

I went out to the hives a few weeks ago and have not gotten around to posting a few pics. This post is for last week and this week.

Here is my hive with a queen excluder on it. As I looked in the hive to see how they were doing and how much honey they were making, I noticed that there were maybe only a dozen bees in the honey super. I did not like that. It had been on for two weeks and nothing :( I thought that maybe they needed a different entrance to the hive to deposit their honey quicker. So I offset the honey super to give them that alternate entrance. The other hive is looking really well too, I just need to get another excluder.

Well the next week I finally got the other exluder and put it on. Still not honey in the other hive :(

This week I went to check on them and some good things were happening. I looked into the hive on the left and again no honey:( So I decided to try something out. I decided to take off the queen excluder and try to invite the bees to go into the super by spraying the empty frames with sugar water. I also put 2 frames of honey from the lower boxes into the honey super. The lower boxes where chalk full of bees. In just a matter of minutes there were tons of bees in the honey super. I think that was a good move. In the other hive the bees seamed to be doing OK with the queen excluder in place. I think I will leave it there for a little while longer.

The white part of the frame is freshly capped honey :) I cant wait to eat some!

So as I was working with the bees I did not realize that I accidentally put something in front of the entrance to the hive. Well to say the least, the bees were not happy. There were so many bees flying around the entrance that it kinda got scary. As soon as I cleared the entrance it was like a funnel of bees. It was amazing!

Time for the honey super

Last year I did not get any honey from my bees. That was a sad year. I was only able to get the two brood boxes on the hive. This year however, things are going much better. I am ready to add a third box called the honey super. basically anything that goes into the honey super is what I get to keep. Yummy!

When I arrived I noticed the difference between the two hives. The one on the left has a ton of bees on the front entrance, where as the one on the right just has a few. The left one is stronger and more crowded.

This is going to be really hard to see but if you zoom in to the center of the image really close you can see lots of cells that have uncapped larva at different stages. I think it looks cool.

This is interesting, the whole frame is capped brood except for the center. It looks like they are filling it with honey. what that tells me is that there is a big honey flow going on right now. When the bees hatched and cleaned out their cells the other bees needed some place to put there honey. Normally the brood fills most of the frame with the top few inches filled with honey.

This metal grate looking thing is a queen excluder. What it does is it allows the worker bees to travel to the honey super to deposit that liquid gold and it keeps the queen out of that box so she does not lay any eggs there.

Here are my hives now, the one on the left has the honey super and the queen excluder on it. the one on the right will be getting the same thing in a week or two.

The grass has grown so tall that it is hard to see my hives let alone get to them.

Here I am hiding in the grass. Can you find me?

May Bees

So I forgot to post about my bees last time I went out to check on them. Here are some pics.

Here Are my hives! The other people who have bees near mine were very nice and cut down the weeds in front of the entrances so the bees can get out easier.

Here is a look inside one hive with a few frames removed. The were building up a lot of burr comb between the boxes (kind of hard to see in the pic). I scraped it out and saved it in a container for later.

Here is some burr comb at the bottom of the frame, it looks cool but not that efficient for the bees.

Here is looking in the other hive, they don't have very much honey comb built up yet.




This was taken 2 weeks later
Here is a pic of one of the frames that has a lot of capped cells with brood in them. If you look close you can see open cells that have larva in them to the left of the capped cells (they will be capped very soon). Once the larva matures, bees will come out of the cells.



I think I will be able to put on my first honey super on one of the hives, it is doing really really well. the other one may be another week or so more.

Creative Idea #2 - Bee Cam

Because my bees are not in my backyard anymore I find myself thinking more about them and wondering if they are OK. So I was thinking about how I could see what my bees are up to without actually going to the field everyday. I came up with a great idea and with some research on the Internet I have come up with a way to have a live camera that points to my hives and could be viewed from the web.

There are a few things that need to be resolved before much happens, but here is the basic plan. I would need a wireless web cam, a battery, and a solar panel. The solar panel would charge the battery for the camera, but I don't think I will need a full video stream, just still shots every 30 minuets or so. That being said I don't think I would need a large solar panel, just large enough to get a shot off. The wireless web cam has a built in router and can access the Internet from any wireless connection and send the pictures to my web server and I can post them on this web page with an updated view of what is going on with my bees.

There are two main things that this project will hinge on, one is money to buy the stuff I would need (if any of you would like to donate money or items to help out that would be great), the second problem is that I don't know if there is a wireless network that I could tap into. There is a neighborhood close by, but I don't know it there is a network that will reach that far or if could use it.

Here is my inspiration: http://www.jakeludington.com/video_security/20071226_solar_powered_wireless_security_camera_-_diy_project.html

Attack of the bees

I went out to visit my hives this week and it was an adventure for sure! Right as I drove up to where the hives are at I got attacked by about 5 bees, I was still about 30 to 40 feet away from the hives and not even out of the truck yet. The bees were ramming into me all over my body, especially in my hair. It took me a while to get my veil and hood on without getting and bees stuck inside (that would be very bad).

These are my bees when I got there. very peaceful.

When I opened the hive on the right, I noticed that there was a lot of wax that the bees were building on the top of the frames. I had to scrape that off, I was in the wrong spot. The feeder (the black thing in the hive) was bone dry, so I filled it up again with sugar water. They must have been really hungry.

Here are a bunch of bees on a frame.

Busy as a bee

Now here is a cool picture. There is a lot going on here. Let me point out a few things.
1. There are bees all over :)
2. On the lower left of the picture there is capped honey, yummy.
3. There are a few bees with their heads down the comb feeding.
4. And probably the coolest thing about this picture is in the center where the there are no bees. If you zoom into this picture and you look in the center of those cells then you can see small white specs. Those are bee eggs.

Well my bees are doing so good that it was time to add a second brood box to the hives. That way they will have more room to move and grow.

Google Map Test

Here is an example of what I may bee looking at. This is all made up data (NOT REAL), I just did it for fun. I still need to get a good process down so it becomes more automated.

Hive KMZ (download this and open it in google earth)


View Larger Map

Creative Idea #1 - Bee Map

This begins my first segment of creative ideas for bees.

When I first got my bees and people found out that I am a beekeeper, one of the very first (if not most frequent) questions I get is: How far do bees travel to find flowers? Eventually I got the idea to make a map. For those of you who know me and what I do, you should know that that kind of thing is right down my ally. Well here is my map idea. I want to create a google based map that lets a user place a marker of where their hives are at. Also they will be able to input information like name, address, how many hives, contact info, type of queen, etc. Then I want to create a buffer zone around each point to show the distance that a bee will travel to find food. In the end I want a person to look at a map and zoom to their home and see if they are covered by bees nearby so they will know if they are going to have a great garden that year. I plan on getting it out to all my beekeeping friends because the more data the better the information will be.


Well it took me a while for the light bulb in my head to go off, but now that it has I plan on listing all my cool ideas here. please feel free to comment on them and help me figure out a way to do them.

Year 2

So this is my second year beekeeping and I decided to start a blog about it.

A little history: Last year I had one hive and it was in my backyard and the only help I had was to ask some questions at some beekeeper meeting and some books. It was fun, but my bees died. :(

So this year I received an email from someone that wanted to have some hives on their 25 acres, and best of all it was in my home town not to far from my house! I decided to have two hives this year and start from new packages.

Here are some pics of the first bee adventure this year. I hope that you will all follow how my bees are doing and cheer them on :)

I picked up the bees in this warehouse place. All the white specs you see are bees flying around.

This is a tall stack of packaged bees, each box contains about 3,000-5,000 bees

My dad came with me to see what all the buzz was about and took this video. See if you can notice the bees flying in front of the camera. We arrived later in the afternoon so many of the packages had already been picked up, but I assume this place was full of bees.

My brother and I taking my bees to the truck.

Don't they look so happy?

This is the field they are in.

I hope they do well in this area.


This is shortly after I placed the bees in the hive, right before I closed it up.


A bunch of bees are already hanging out on their new front porch


Here are my two hives with feeders on top and the cages in front (that is so if there are any stragglers out there then they can find there way home).

He is so happy to be outside.

My hives are next to someone else's. This could be good for me cause I may see them out there sometimes and they can mentor me in the ways of beekeeping.

This is what my bees see when they leave the hive. What a great view!