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.