Honey Bottling

After extracting the honey, we left it to strain and set up a few days. By letting it set, the air bubbles rise and debris that may have made it through the strainer will rise to the top of the honey where you can skim it off. We used a 400 micron strainer, so we didn't see any debris on the top of our honey. We then began the bottling process! We ended up with 42 bottles of honey, and will get another 2 or 3 from the wax cappings we cut off the frames. (see previous post) The fruit of our precious bee's labor. These girls are amazing!

Our First Honey Harvest!

Oh my word.....we got out and pulled frames of honey from 2 of our 5 hives. This is the 1st time we have ever done this (and we are VERY excited), but it is hard work!! We currently have 5 hives, but have been feeding sugar syrup to 2 of these hives. (1 was a swarm we caught, the other was a nuc we purchased and received in April) Although the bees make "honey" out of the sugar syrup, it is not "real" honey, so you cannot package that and sell it. Ethically, anyway. We ended up with 14 frames of honey from the 2 Russian hives we have. We were told last year when we purchased the Russians (after having almost lost everything) that Russians are a bit more aggressive, but are strong bees and excellent honey producers. They have proven this to be true! If you remember, we split this hive earlier this year. We really weren't expecting much since we had split them. These girls are monsters though! Wow, do they work hard! We pulled 3 frames off the hive where the queen hatched. (I also got a great picture of this beauty I will share later!) The other 11 frames we got from this queen's mama and her hive. All this honey, and we left them plenty! We also checked our hive with the Hawaiian queen. We will probably get about 8 frames of honey from them, they just didn't have it all capped yet. I'll have to do a post on the honey making process....these bees are really amazing creatures! We've been told to expect 2 1/2 pounds of honey from each shallow frame. I'll let you all know how much we end up with and share some pictures from the extracting process.

Busy as Bees!

We have basically just been letting the bees do what the bees do. We haven't really dug down into the hive to do inspections as the queen is busy laying and the bees are making honey. Now that our nectar flow is basically over, we will get a little deeper into our hives to see what is going on. I did like this picture from our last hive check (to see if we needed to add another box to our hives). Most of these girls have their heads in the cells and their bottoms sticking out. They were either adding or taking honey. These ladies are definitely 'busy as bees'! I will be posting pictures of when we extract some of this delicious honey!

Hive Inspection

We went and did an inspection in 2 hives of friends of ours. Both hives had swarmed. 1 had no queen, but had 2 capped queen cells waiting to hatch...the other had a very active queen. I've enclosed pictures of the 2 queen cells. What is very interesting is it appears there may have been a hatched queen, because the 1 picture shows a hatched queen cell (the bottom of the cell is open), and next to it, a queen cell that appears to have been ripped open by another queen to kill the queen in the cell. Worker bees often make more than 1 queen cell. The 1st queen to hatch will look for the cells of other queens, chew out a spot in the side, and sting the unhatched queen. You see evidence of that in one of the pictures. That queen may not have made it back from her mating flight, or she may not have mated well and was killed by the workers in the hive. Whatever the case, there were 2 new capped queen cells in this hive. They also had 2 queen cups right in the middle of a honey frame! The other hive had a working queen and she was doing a great job! The brood frame is just want you want to see....a great brood pattern, lots of capped brood, and honey and pollen in the corners of the frame.  The last picture is purely honey....wonderful, delicious, HEAVY, honey!

Queenless Hive (No More!!)

So, we got in our queenless hive to see if the queen cell had hatched, and to see if we had evidence that our queen had gone on her mating flight/s, come back successfully, and started to lay eggs. We are SO happy to report that WE HAVE A QUEEN!!! We are so very thankful! This was our 4th queen, and (from what we can deduct), our other 3 did not make it back from their mating flights. We have lots of birds around here that just love to spot a beautiful, juicy queen to gobble up. They are also eaten by wasps, dragonflies, and hornets. It's always sad when you open a hive and know you should be seeing brood, but see a bunch of empty frames, sad bees, and no queen. Although we didn't see this little lady, she is in there working hard. We saw lots of eggs, lots of larvae, and lots of capped brood. I also took a picture of a yummy honey frame. It was a great day!

Natural Comb

This is our hive that is made up of the swarm we caught on our butterfly bush. We fed them syrup to help them build comb. Well, they've not only built comb INSIDE the hive, they're building it everywhere! This comb was attached to the bucket the syrup was in on top of the frames. I've wanted to do natural beekeeping since the beginning, but my husband wanted to do foundation. After seeing all this beautiful, natural comb....I have the itch again. I'm going to do more research and start my own foundation-less, natural comb hive. I've read natural comb helps keep mite populations down. While we haven't noticed a mite problem...anything we can do to help prevent this issue is a bonus in my book!

Queen Cell

This picture was from our queenless hive. If you remember, we had added a frame of brood to this hive after losing the queen we had seen. We are guessing she was eaten by a bird or bug while she was out on her mating flights.  Well, the bees found a young larvae (less than 36 hours old), that they liked and have made a queen. This picture is a capped queen cell. The time for her to hatch, harden up, take her mating flight(s), and begin laying is about 28 days. We waited about 30 days before we checked on her again. We had high hopes this queen would actually come back home.  We prayed our luck would change with our queens!

Bees Being Bees

My best friend lives in Nevada and saw these sweet girls working in her plants. She grabbed her camera and took some pictures to share with me. You'll notice these ladies don't have pollen in the pollen pockets on their legs which means they are most likely gathering nectar to make that sweet, delicious honey! I just love these pictures of bees being bees!

Split Hive

We went into the hive that we were trying to make a split from. We had queen cells in this hive, and had even seen a queen a couple weeks before this. We went in to see if she had the opportunity to go on her mating flights and had started laying eggs. Much to our disappointment, there was no sign of her. We didn't see a queen, we didn't see capped brood, we didn't see larvae, we didn't see eggs. We have successfully raised queens, we just can't successfully get them back from mating flights. This is very discouraging and sad. We evaluated what to do next. We basically had 3 options.  We could give it more time as maybe she was out on a mating flight and hadn't started laying yet, we could add brood from another hive to this one to keep laying workers at bay and hope they'll make another queen with what we give them, or we could combine this hive with another hive. On the plus side, this hive is making honey! It looks delicious. I've also put a picture of a drone. Drones can't sting and they die after mating. They are larger than worker bees and their little eyes sit right on top of their heads. I may be biased, but I think he is quite handsome! 

Pesticides and Neonicotinoids

As you are planting your gardens or flower beds, I wanted to give you a warning about pesticides. The use of Round Up to kill weeds could also be killing our pollinators. Plants are also now being treated with neonicotinoids, which is a pesticide to treat insects. The unfortunate thing about pesticides is they cannot differentiate between pests and beneficial insects. In a study done in 18 states, 51% of plants sold at Home Depot, Lowes, and Walmart were treated with neonicotinoids at levels that harm or kill bees. Home Depot is phasing out plants treated with neonicotinoids by 2018, and Lowe's by 2019. From what I've read, plants do not necessarily have to be labeled. If they are, I've enclosed a picture of what the label may look like. There are some websites that state the fears of neonicotinoids are nonsense, and there isn't enough "evidence" to support claims that pesticides do damage to bees and other pollinators. I can tell you I've spoken to enough beekeepers that have experienced Colony Collapse Disorder and dead bees (hundreds and thousands in front of the hive) to lead me to NEVER use anything that may damage our precious pollinators. Please shop wisely, ask questions, and help save our pollinators! (Heirloom seeds will be your best bet!)

Swarm Catchers!

So a swarm showed up at our house.  Short of knocking on our door and asking for a hive box to go in to, they really couldn't have made it much easier for us to catch them.  They were on a butterfly bush in front of our house.  Easy to see, low to the ground, easy to catch.  Obviously, these girls wanted to be ours!  We loaded our utility wagon with a hive body with some drawn comb frames, grabbed our tool bucket with hive tool, smoker, saw, gloves, spray bottle with sugar syrup, and headed to the swarm.  This was our first time catching a swarm, so we weren't really sure what to do or expect.  We had seen some YouTube videos, so we figured we were somewhat educated.  At first we tried scooping the bees with our hands and brushing them into the hive body.  There were A LOT more bees than we thought, and we wanted to move quickly so as not to get them aggravated.  Some people think that swarms of bees are dangerous.  This is not true.  Bees that have swarmed are actually quite docile as they have nothing to defend.  We ended up cutting the limb off the butterfly bush and gently shook the bees into the hive body. We left the hive sitting out overnight to let any straggler bees get the scent of the queen and head into the box.  The next day the bees were still with us, so we moved them to their new location.  We added sugar syrup to a feeder, closed them up, and left them alone.  Sometimes a swarm will decide they don't like their new location and leave.  We saw bees flying in and out of the hive, so we figured they had decided to stay.  Free rent, free food, luxury accommodations....what more could they want???  The bees are still with us, so they must like their new home!

Welcome to Our Bee Journey

We started beekeeping in May of 2015. Down here where we live, we were right in the middle of a nectar flow. We had no hope of getting honey, our purpose was to keep our bees alive through the winter. We had a strong hive and a queen who was laying like nobodies business! (she is marked in with the blue dot) Well, at the end of the season, before the summer solstice, we decided to split that hive. We moved this queen and some worker bees to a friend's house. A storm moved through and knocked this hive over. Our bees disappeared and we couldn't lure them back. The split we made with these bees hatched 2 queens, but (best as we could figure), neither made it back from their mating flights. Bees can be eaten by birds, hornets, dragonflies, etc. We had lost everything and reached out in desperation to our bee club for help. Some wonderful people stepped forward and helped us maintain the bees we had left with frames of brood. Without a queen, these bees would also eventually die out. We ended up buying 2 nucleus hives from a man in our bee club. 1 nucleus was European hybrid bees, the other Russian bees. We combined the bees we had left with 1 of the nucleus hives. Our Europeans were weak, and did not survive the winter. The Russian bees were VERY strong and made it through the winter with flying colors! We split this hive in April.  We also purchased a package of bees that is doing well and caught a swarm that has decided to stay with us.  Welcome to our bee journey!!