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.