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.

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?