Nectar Sources

We pulled honey from our hive with the Hawaiian queen. Our Hawaiian queen (and her bees) are lighter than our Russian and split queen. Going along with the theme...the Hawaiian honey is lighter than our Russian honey. Of course, this has nothing to do with the coloring of the bees, but we thought it was interesting. All this means is the Hawaiians got a good part of their nectar from a source that is different than the Russians. Another HUGE difference...when we took the honey frames from the Hawaiians, they were very chill about it. Just picture them peeking out of the hive and looking at us like, "Hey!!!, what's up??" No anger, no chasing, no increase in hive sound. These bees are just really calm and relaxed. The Russians however....well, they were another story. They were almost homicidal! They chased us down the driveway and hung out by the garage....1 even chased me onto the back porch. The Russians didn't give up easily either. We found out they have very good memories because a couple of them hung out for about 30 minutes reminding us how unhappy they were with us! It seemed that every time we thought it was safe to remove our veils, 1 would be there to start "bumping" us in the head. Don't get me wrong...we love our Russians and they are hearty, productive bees. They are just a bit more temperamental. We've been told the Hawaiian queen may not tolerate our winter well. As chill as she and her bees are, we are certainly hoping we heard wrong and she comes through the winter with flying colors!

Solar Wax Melter

If you go down a few posts when we were extracting the honey, you'll see a picture of the wax "cappings" the bees put on the honey once it has reached the ideal percentage of moisture. (which is typically 17% or below) When you extract honey using an extractor, you cut those cappings off and the honey will be free to flow out of the comb. We let the cappings drain for a few days (and actually got a few more bottles of honey off what was on the cappings) and then gathered the wax cappings to melt. We saw online how to build our own solar wax melter. It required a styrofoam cooler, a plastic food container filled with a little water, paper towel, and a piece of glass that acted as the lid for the cooler. We put paper towel over the plastic food container and secured the paper towel with a rubber band. We set the clump of wax on top of the paper towel. Crazy Bee Man put duct tape around the glass so we didn't cut ourselves on rough edges. We put the homemade wax melter out in the hot sun and let nature do the work. The wax melted and filtered through the paper towel. The piece you see in the picture sits on top of the water, pretty as you please! Now we wouldn't win any wax contests at a fair, but this was our first time and we were pretty pleased with the results. We can melt this wax back down and put it on the frames for the bees, (it has been our experience that bees accept the plastic frames better when there is wax on them) or we could make lotions, salves, balms, etc. with the wax. I really wish our computer screens had scratch and sniff, because this wax smells incredible!!!

Cleaning Ladies!

Did you know bees clean up after themselves?? They're kinda special that way. After filling the honey jars, we carried the bucket outside and let the bees get the leftovers. We did this with anything that had honey in it. The bees LOVED us! You can see a bunch of them in this picture. They go in there, gather up the leftovers, and carry it back to their hives. When we went back after a couple hours, you would've never known there was honey in there. It wasn't even sticky anymore! Gotta love these girls!