Honey Extraction

More Thoughts on Queen Excluders

When I first started beekeeping, I asked about queen excluders. An experienced beekeeper in the area advised that he never used the things. He called them ‘honey excluders’ and went so far as to tell me that he believed that nectar laden bees would sometimes be so swollen that they couldn’t get through the excluder to store honey. So, he never used them.

What about wax moths? Everyone says that if the queen lays in your honey supers, you’ll end up getting wax moths during the off months. He replied that he would put his wet (extracted) supers back on the hives after getting the honey from them. The bees could then guard/maintain them until the first frost, when he would yank them off and store them stacked in a pole shed nearby. The wax moth wouldn’t bother his supers, even if the queen had laid in them.

So, I decided that I would take this strategy too. I think the primary underlying reason, for me, is that it was just one more thing (both to manage, re the bees, and to purchase, re my wallet) – I was not interested in one more thing. Therefore, I never used them the first few years. In truth, I remember giving a few away that I ended up with when I purchased some fellow’s equipment. I was done with them (before I had ever used them!).

As a side note, there are other good uses for queen excluders than simply keeping the queen out of the honey supers. But, I didn’t know that then…

Things went along just great for a couple of years. My queens would obey the rule that you do not cross the honey barrier, primarily laying and living in my brood chambers – leaving my honey supers alone. Then, it happened – first with one colony and then to several – the crazy Lady crossed the honey barrier! In every case, the colony had put away (capped) two supers of honey. But, when I came to extract, the queen had moved right up the middle (in one case, it was the actual outer two frames) of the hive, laying as she went.

At this time, I had several hives with a mixture of shallows and mediums. This prevented me from simply consolidating the capped frames into one super. In the end, I remember taking just the capped frames (but, being new, I had nothing to replace them with as far as drawn comb is concerned), running home to extract them and returning a day or two later to put them back into the hive. It was a real logistical nightmare (of course, I’d forget one and come back – sometimes months later, to find a mess of wax in that empty slot!)

On the plus side, I was able to successfully store these supers (those with and without brood in them) through the Winter by just stacking them in my shed and didn’t have a wax moth problem. But, storing them over the Winter was not the real challenge that I would face.

After a lot of problems with the queen going up, I did start to use a queen excluder sparingly. I have definitely found that certain lines of queens are more likely to move up (when one moves up in a year, you can be pretty sure that her daughter will move up when you (or they) replace her.) It’s some kind of genetic thing (I moved one hive several times – not because of her proclivity to lay in the honey supers, but for other reasons – and she (or her daughters and grand-daughters) almost always moved up in June or July…so, location seemed to be ruled out.)

The real problem came in the Summer of 2011 when I had two hives really out perform, honey-wise. They put it away like no one’s business. I’d have to check my notes to be sure how many honey supers were on the one at Westover Plantation, but I do know that it was too high for me to look down into the hive without some kind of ladder. The kick in the gut came when I went to get the honey supers and found the hive mostly robbed out. They had swarmed and reduced in population a lot (probably swarmed many times) and simply could not protect all of the honey. The bees were still holding on in their brood area, but most of the honey supers were torn up and I even had some wax moth issues. This was a real wake up call.

So, I realized that I couldn’t always simply leave supers on the hive (nor could I put them all back on the hive once I extracted them.) I needed a way to store them in the Summer. I quickly found that my ‘pole shed stacks’ worked just fine in the Summer, but only with the clean supers that had never had brood in them. Now, I started to understand the wisdom of the queen excluder. You need to keep that queen out unless you can keep the supers to two or three boxes at most. If your colony of honey bees can produce more, you must extract the extra before they need 4 or more supers and put the wet super back on the hives.

But, that is not an option for me. With real life constantly throwing me curve balls and sucking up my time, I need a method that requires the least visits to the hives. Queen excluders were the answer. I not make a concerted effort to keep one on ever hive (I just ordered another group of them for the new hives that I added this year.)

But, what about the honey excluder idea? Well, for one, I never use an excluder on a super of foundation (undrawn frames.) I’ll put it on there once they have it drawn out and are filling it, but not before. Secondly, when I find a hive that is definitely acting reluctant to use a super above an excluder, I’ll remove it for 2 weeks and let them start to use it. I have had queens use that opportunity to jump up there, but mostly they don’t immediately go up there until there’s a lot of resources stored up there to feed the babies.

So, all in all, I now am an advocate of queen excluders. It’s a big flip-flop, but what the heck!? It’s part of beekeeping. What about those times when the queen moves up into the super? I do my best to consolidate the frames with brood evidence and keep them on the hives (to protect them from wax moth) through the Summer and Fall. I’ll remove them for Winter and used them to checkerboard come Spring.

At any rate, that’s where I am on this one now. I’ll probably flip-flop again, based on my history, but I feel very comfortable with my current strategy (of course, I probably said that when I was ‘disrespecting’ the queen excluders too!)

Honey Robber

Well, my ‘flow’ definitely hit pretty hard the last part of May and it’s still coming in a bit today. I was wondering if it was going to hit at all this year!

Having learned my lesson last year, I was ready to go out last weekend and pull all of the capped supers. I ended up making two hauls and think this will be a pretty good honey year, but we’ll see. One of the best things to occur this year was an experiment with my first fume board(s) and a substance called Honey Robber. Basically, a fume board is simply a shallow box of the exact dimensions of my 10 frame hives. One end is open and the other end is closed with a kind of clear plastic (on the outside) and felt (on the inside.)

To use this tool, you take a foul smelling substance (I used something called Honey Robber) and sprinkle it onto the felt (I dribbled it in an X-pattern, twice quickly). Then, you place it directly onto the hive (after you remove the cover and inner cover), above your capped honey supers. The sun beats down on the clear plastic, heating up the felt and causing the liquid to vaporize into the hive.

The stuff stinks to high heaven, so it’s no wonder that the bees skedaddle away from it. After a few minutes (I waited 7), you can pull the honey super from the hive and not a bee will be on it! I was amazed – it worked like a charm with a couple of exceptions (see below.) Compare that to last year when I was taking one frame at a time from the super, shaking/brushing the bees off and then transferring it to a holding box in my truck. It definitely saved me hours of time and was quite seamless.

There were a couple of asterisks to this adventure, all of which I had read about online but had to learn myself (I’m stubborn that way…)

1. Don’t put that stuff in your car/truck. My cab still stinks, although it seems to be a bit less today. It smells exactly like puke, which I remember well from my college days…

2. It won’t chase bees off of brood. I could not figure out why some of the bees wouldn’t leave one of my supers and ignored it (like a fool) and ended up with capped brood back at home in my honey stack. Hopefully, I didn’t take the queen too….

3. It needs to be in the 80’s and it is really seamless when the sun is shining on the hive. In the shade, the sun doesn’t do its magic by heating the clear plastic top (and thus vaporizing the stinky stuff even more.) I got it to work in the shade, but there was always a rogue bee that didn’t seem to mind the smell. In the sun, none of them stuck around.

Unfortunately, I did not mark which supers came from which hives. I actually discovered a viable, capped queen cell on one (found the developing larva while uncapping.) I have no idea which hive was in swarm mode. None whatsoever.

Of final note, it is clear to me that some queen and blood lines need queen excluders more than others. The exact same hives that I had problems with the queen moving into the supers last year also had the problem this year (even though some were now lead by the daughter of last year’s miscreant.) On the other hand, those hives that didn’t go above the honey barrier last year repeated their performance this year. I am definitely going out to find queens and install excluders this weekend (unless it rains the whole time!) I’d like to remedy the problem that I had last year once and for all.

All in all, a pretty good first pass at extraction. The kitchen is still a mess, but I am hopeful of resolving that shortly!

What should I be looking for now?

At my daughter’s birthday party, a fellow beekeeper asked me what I was looking for in my beehives now. He immediately followed up with well, what should I be looking for now? In my opinion, we are now creeping into a really important time of the year for this question, so I thought I’d share my answer.

To begin with, I am only trying to go into each of my hives once this month. It is usually a really dry and hot month for me and the bees do not appreciate my poking around too much. Plus, I really only need one look to accomplish my goals.

For most of my inspections, the first thing that I do is spot check any honey supers that are still on the hives. I never take frames for harvesting unless they are capped. This basically means that most of my hives end up with one partially worked super after my last extraction in early July. I usually put a second super (a wet one – recently extracted with honey still along the edges of the comb) on top of this after the extraction weekend (or week, as it happened this year!) I am checking these supers with three possible outcomes in mind. One, I may have a September extraction day if there are enough capped supers out there. Two, any capped (or even uncapped) medium supers might offer me a ‘bank’ of honey for any late swarms or cut-outs, an overwintered nuc or simply a young hive that never got to finish drawing out and capping their top super. I am not looking for more honey, so it takes a lot of capped supers for me to extract again. I also use this time to pull any drawn supers that they have cleaned out (they were probably put on ‘wet’ back in July) to reduce the space my bees need to maintain going into the Fall months (I’ve beaten the space issue into the ground in previous posts, so I will not drone on about it again here!) I usually put these supers above the inner cover with a note to come back and get them within the week.

The second thing I do in the majority of the inspections is to pull 1 frame from the upper hive body (Medium for me, mostly) and 1 from the lower hive body (Deep for me, mostly). My ideal hive today is a hive that has capped off 7+ frames of honey in the upper hive body. Actually, some of the middle frames will have nearly full honey where they were laying eggs and raising brood, but they will not have capped it off yet. I might find a frame or two of capped brood up here too. The bees are just waiting for those last bees to hatch and they should fill up that space with honey too, giving me a full, capped upper hive body by Winter. When I pull the frame in the lower hive body, I am just checking for capped brood. If I find larva, eggs or even the queen on this one frame, it is a bonus. But, if I find capped brood, I am comfortable that the hive is doing just fine.

So, my primary goal right now is to check the honey stores for Winter (and for my bank) and make sure that they still have a queen and all seems right. That’s what I do on the majority of the inspections. For a few, I am looking to mark queens and will take a bit more time going through the hive to find her. For various reasons (swarms, I forgot, etc…), I have (or had) about a dozen hives with unmarked queens going into August. It’s very important to me to have marked queens in all of my hives right now, as I want to be able to find them when I create Nuc’s next Spring (or raise queens, as the case may be!) But, these hives are the exceptions. I am ‘in-and-out’ of most of my hives very quickly.

As a postscript, here are the things that I look for to demonstrate a healthy hive (outside of honey) with a quick inspection. One, if they are raising drones, it means they believe that times are good. Honey bees do not waste resources raising those lazy males unless times are good. Two, I like to find a lot of bees on my inner cover. All things being equal, it tells me they are managing their space well and I do not have to remove any supers unless I want to. Three, I am constantly scanning all of my bees for problems. One bee with deformed wing virus is just fine by me. If I see three or more in a quick inspection, I know the hive is at risk and may require more management.

Did Someone Turn the Spigot Off?

This past week was a bit weird. I caught some bug from my lovely daughter – it is very painful for a beekeeper to get sick in May… More importantly, I noticed a couple of big changes this weekend. To begin with, the rate of wax build-up dropped substantially in my outyards in both Henrico County and Charles City County. I really only checked 3 yards, but two of them were my two strongest yards. The rate of wax buildup/nectar storage dropped by a large margin this past week, compared to the three weeks before that. My guess is that we’re going through the temporary lull until the next set of blooms hit towards the end of the month. But, we’ll see.

Returning to my home yard (which contains immature hives and a ton of Nucs), I made another (clearly related) discovery. The Nucs had pulled much more syrup this past week. Clearly, the weather or the available blooms made the syrup more attractive. I have even heard of a couple of cases of robbing (from new beekeepers, so this is not confirmed and may just be orientation flights! I remember my days as a new beekeeper well!) Regardless, all signs point towards something different. We’ll see how they look next weekend.

The honey harvest has been good thus far. I have taken something between 20 and 25 gallons of honey off of two outyards (and I did not take all honey supers from each.) I now have a bunch of empty (although wet) supers to super any hives that need it. I should have done this before now! It’s nice finally feeling like you’ve caught up!

Finally, I’ve been getting really good feedback on the Nucs. All of the work and patience are paying off.

Early Extracting Adventures

This year has really been a banner year for honey in most of my outyard’s. As posted previously, I have been having a devil of a time keeping up with my hives. This weekend, I was already down to the last 4 Mediums from the 20 that I ordered a few weeks back. I also found a hive that had just swarmed because they had simply filled up 3 Mediums and a Shallow and were starting to fill the bottom two supers (the brood nest) – I simply dropped the ball on this one. It was time to take a new tactic. I decided to extract now, instead of waiting until late June. Taking honey from the oldest supers on my hive (capped only), I could return the next day and give them empty supers to refill (well, that’s the plan…)

Pulling 1 Medium and 4 shallows, I ended up with a little over 10 gallons of honey and a big mess in the kitchen (I’m still trying to get this process down to something that is more ‘wife friendly’…) In the process, I experimented with the ‘leaf blower’ tactic. Basically, you pull the full super off of the hive, set it up on its side and then hit it with a leaf blower to get all of the bees out of the super. I am somewhat neutral on this.

On the one hand, it was much quicker than my normal ‘take one frame at a time, brush off the bees and stick it into a sealed holding tank in my truck’. On the other hand, I did NOT get all of the bees out of the supers. When you blow them, a bunch of nurse bees (who really don’t fly) end up on the ground in the outyard. I hope they made it back to the hives. On the other hand, the bees that CAN fly simply fly back into the super as fast as you can blow them out. So, in the end, I took a bunch of bees from that yard and had to hand brush them off anyway, before I could take them into the house to extract. This would probably make more sense for someone who was extracting from a hundred supers.

The actual uncapping process probably took the longest. Since I have been in an ‘increase’ mode (this is where you split or create nuc’s from strong hives, before they can really store much honey, with the overall goal of increasing your hive count, not extracting honey), I really had mostly foundation at the start of this year. So, most of my supers required a fork to uncap, with is a bit of an arduous/tedious process. The good thing is that I put the wet supers back on with evenly spaced 9-frame setups. If they happen to fill them up again, I should be able to use my heated uncapping knife and make short work of it.

The other thing of interest was the temperature. Last year, I took honey in late-June/early-July (and again in the Fall.) It was much hotter. On the day that I extracted this weekend, the temps got into the low 50’s at night. I was worried that the honey wouldn’t come out well. Honey at lower temperatures has a higher viscosity and simply does not flow well. I could really amp up the extractor, but this was the first year that I had a bunch of frames without wires. I was already worried that they might ‘blow up’ in the extractor. It seemed a certainty if I had to really turn up the extractor to a high speed.

But, it all ended up simply being a bit of a longer process. I was able to get the honey out at lower spin speeds by simply letting it spin longer (I had plenty of time, as I had to uncap so many daggone frames with that accursed fork!!) All of the wax frames came out perfectly with no damage.

The real challenge comes later today, when the wife and daughter return from their Mother’s Day trip to her family. There seems to be wax and honey in a lot of places in this daggone kitchen and I have my doubts that I’ll get it up in time…this may be my last blog post…

Wild Times in September

Been really busy (bee-stuff and non-bee-stuff), so I have a bunch of updates regarding my Richmond, Virginia beekeeping adventures. To reduce boredom, I have tried to title each one separately below, so no one is forced to go through all of my dribble for the topic that really interests them!

Successful Swarm Trap!

This is hot on my mind and I couldn’t wait to post about it later. Anyone that has had the patience to actually read through my adventures for awhile knows that I put out swarm traps in the Spring. These are effectively homemade boxes the size of a Nuc that are screwed together tight and hang on a tree (some 8′ off of the ground.) In them, I put 1 frame of drawn wax (I use my old wax) and 4 or 5 frames of foundation (they were supposed to only hold a max of 5 frames, but my carpentry skills are nothing to write home about…)

In late March, I try to get my traps out within a quarter mile of my biggest outyards or known bee trees. The drawn wax is supposed to entice them and I put a drop of queen juice (simply a film canister with rubbing alcohol and the dead queens that I cull out of weak hives during the year.) By the end of June, I try to pull them to save any drawn wax that I can (sometimes the wax moths get in it and sometimes they don’t.) It’s not a loss, as the frames are my oldest frames that I culled from my hives, but I want to save the for the next year if I can.

Of the 6 that I put out this past April, I couldn’t get one of them (or, I wouldn’t) because it was covered in a thick patch of poison ivy that had grown up the tree (didn’t see that bit of nastiness when I put the thing up, because the leaves hadn’t come out!) I figured I’d either wait until Winter or get my pop to get it for me sometime (he’s immune to the ivy’s). With so little success, I had decided to start Nuc’s in each of my traps in the Spring of 2012 to get some good bee scent in them (and thus be more enticing to swarms.)

Well, the real point of this is that I went by that loner today (while doing some last minute checks on the hives) and found it FULL of bees! Ha! Success at last! I have no idea when the swarm came into the trap (well, I know it was after late June, when I last looked at it), so it will be interesting to see what they look like when I put them in a Nuc on Sunday. As long as the queen is laying well (and I’ll probably let them live even if she isn’t, as an experiment), they are golden. I have a ton of deep frames of honey to give them for the Winter (pollen is another subject – I do not have a lot of that to spare, so I hope they at least have that stored in the trap.)

Catching this one swarm has me pumped to build more of my traps this Winter!

July Nuc’s

Once July came around, I stopped selling Nuc’s (with the exception of one to an ERBA member who was interested in trying out a late Nuc – they are experienced beekeepers, so I sold it to them for a slight discount, even though I typically refuse to do so.) Most folks have always said that a July Nuc has next to no chance of growing to a full hive (and I have tended to believe them, because July and August are nightmares in central Virginia.)

This year, I purposefully tried to build up five early July Nuc’s using my simple techniques. One year does not a pattern make, but I was encourages. Each Nuc was fed with boardman feeders until they filled out their five frames fully. I then moved them to full deeps and dropped Maxant top feeders on them (I think this is the real key.) These feeders were easy to check and fill (pop the top, pour in the syrup) and I kept meticulous records of how much they got and how long it took them to eat it up – no hive went more then a day without syrup. These feeders can take nearly 3 gallons of feed, which makes it real easy.

Once they had drawn out at least 8 frames, they received a Medium of foundation, again with the feeder on top. Once they filled out 70% of the Medium, I moved them to an outyard. Of the 5 hives, 4 became full hives and were moved out before September 1. I would argue that the one that didn’t make it suffered from some bee problem (it may have been one of the paralysis viruses – the bees would flop out on the ground and not fly, or fly erratically at times.) They did not act right from nearly the start.

In conclusion, I think you can definitely build up a hive from a July Nuc (of course, I can only REALLY say this with confidence once I see them make it through the Winter.) I think the key is moving the big hives out of your Nuc yard once they fill out and using the top feeders (keeping them on syrup 24/7).

Irene Survivors

Irene gave me several hives, thanks to all of the trees that went down with bees in them in the Richmond area. I’m not happy that the trees went down, but (glass is half full) I am glad folks called me to cut them out. My last cut out was about 10 days after the hurricane. The tree had landed on its side and the comb had smooshed together. By the time that I got to them, most of the comb (literally 90% of it) was full of SHB and wax moth. I was surprised the bees had not absconded (the two hives I went to get the day before had both absconded because of the smashed wax.) I cut them out and hived them in less then 30 minutes, leaving about 4 lbs of bees with no resources (I mean NONE). The comb that I did get was empty – no brood, no honey, no pollen – they had been mostly robbed out after the tree crashed.

I took the poor lot home with me and gave them 3 frames of resources from my stash and left them alone for a week. I wasn’t sure if I had the queen (and figured she had died in the storm, which is why the bees had not absconded.) Amazingly enough, I spotted the little wench on the first inspection. She had actually laid eggs in every single open cell (I honestly do not know how the bees will be able to cover all of that brood, but will see how they did on Sunday.) I have given them two more frames of resources (deep frames partially full of nectar/honey with some pollen) and will be interested to see if they make it through the Winter.

Winterizing

I have Winterized all hives in Charles City County now, which comes to 23 hives. All have entrance reducers, a shim for ventilation and confirmed queens. I did not have to reverse any of them (all queens either were laying in the bottom deep or had just started to move down over the last month). I leveled several (some had definitely gotten off-kilter during the year) and checked stores one last time (well, I’m sure I’ll be back in each of them, to some degree, in October). That leaves 6 more hives in Henrico to do over the weekend and it’s Winter, here I come! My backyard is a mix of Nucs for overwintering, Nucs from swarms, Nucs from cut-outs and one full hive that I kept for fun (I’ll move her out next Spring, but I like to see what the bees are doing during the Winter when I go out into the yard.) It really comes down to 1 full hive, 1 partial hive (from the August cut-out) and 3 Nuc’s. I am only counting the 1 full hive for my Winter metrics (so, how many of 30 will I lose?)

Fall Honey Crop

I took a little under 10 gallons of honey off of the hives earlier this month! I’m sure this isn’t much to most beekeepers, but I am excited! For the first year that I actually took honey, I took between 20 and 25 gallons of honey! Wow! There still a fair amount left on the hives, but I won’t extract that. I have each of the ‘bank’ hives noted so that I can steal their resources come Jan/Feb in case my home yard experiments are struggling. All in all, I am feeling pretty good about the future…

Nuc List

My Nuc list is filling up, which is very cool. Folks are starting to see the value in local bees that are not medicated. My primary goal now is to make sure that I have enough Nuc’s built to produce the numbers that I need. I do not foresee a problem, but I like to be over-prepared. There is still a good bit of prime painting weather left in the season!

Master Beekeeper?

I took the Certified Level test last weekend. I must say that I am not confident about it, but am hopeful. The test wasn’t extremely hard, but some of the virus/disease questions were nothing more then educated guesses for me. Plus, they had an entire part based on chemicals, which I do not use. Fortunately, I had studied up on it. I am confident that I DID pass the field test, but will not know about the written test for some time.

So, that’s it. Another month gone and another month closer to Winter. Many more adventures to be had.

I’ll Definitely Be Selling Honey

Good lord. I mentioned in my last post that I had extracted two-thirds of a five gallon bucket off of one of my hives. In all honesty, I am certain that experienced beekeepers will see that and think it isn’t much. But, I can tell you folks out there who, like me, are just getting into this hobby, that it is a lot. I was amazed at how many jars I filled up, of varying sizes (and hope to get a picture of it tomorrow.) I have a lot of folks that I am giving honey away to, but even after that I will have more honey then my family can eat in a year (by a LONG shot.) The real kicker is that this was just one hive. I have 4 more hives with similar takes (one has a lot more, but the average on the rest is 3 shallows)!!!! Heh. I thought I might sell a bottle or two to recoup the costs of my glass jars. I can see now that I can recoup the cost of the extractor over a few years. I must say that I have not been this excited since I first got the bees. It’s been an amazing adventure. This honey is from last Fall and this Spring (on a Varina hive), so it is a mix but it is very dark. I look forward to my next extraction (Thursday) from a Charles City hive.

On a side note, I had taken the extracted supers and put them back on the original hive. A couple of notes about this. To begin with, I put them directly on top of the brood chamber (a Deep and a Medium, in my case), under the inner cover. Just like they were when I got them. The goal here is to let the bees clean up the remaining honey and, I assume, consolidate it back closer to the brood nest. They also will patrol the comb to keep the wax moths and small hive beetles out. Finally, they can use it if we get a Fall flow (hasn’t happened since the 90’s in my area, according to the old timers, but I’m ready for it if it does.) After doing this, I had some questions about my experience that I posted on a bee forum. While searching their archives, I found where lots of folks put the supers on above the inner cover. I had no idea and asked why (and if I had made a mistake putting them back on beneath the inner cover.) In the end, many folks responded that they do exactly like I do (for the same reasons posted above) and the only reason mentioned for putting it above the inner cover was to make sure the queen didn’t lay in them. At this point, I am not worried about that. The risk is that Wax Moths are attracted to pollen and brood comb. They don’t care for honey comb. So, keeping the queen out of your honey supers removes the wax moth risk. At the moment, I am not trying to keep her out (as always, this may change in the future.) To begin with, I doubt she’s going up there at this time of year. Secondly, I hope to use other methods to keep the wax moth at bay once I actually remove the supers in November.

The second note is that I definitely noticed a lot of increased activity around the hive that I harvested from when I put the extracted supers back on the hive. I cannot be sure, but I think the smell of the honey drew bees from the other two strong hives nearby. This hive can defend itself, but I am not partial to setting up mortal combat for no good reason (bees die when these would be robbers try to make a go of it.) The next time that I do this, I will put an entrance reducer on the hive before I drop the extracted supers back on. This will reduce the entrance, make it easier to defend and (hopefully) dissuade most of the combat from happening. We’ll see…

Lastly, I have started my Nuc list for 2012 (a lady in Charles City wanted to get on it.) I hope to get a page up on the site to help folks decide if they want to get on the list and how to do so soon. I’ll also need to get something up about ‘local honey for sale’!!! Bonzai! Beekeeping is a blast.

My First Honey Extraction

I finally did it. I harvested my first batch of honey! It was not nearly as messy as I had expected it to be and I did get a nice batch off of my one of my producer hives in Varina, Virginia. The worst part was cleaning up the equipment after the extraction. I am pretty sure that everything else went smoothly (it seemed that way to me, at any rate.)

Once we hit mid-March this year, I had identified the hives that I wanted to create Nuc’s and Splits with (these were the strongest hives) and the ones that I wanted to let accumulate honey (I don’t want to say ‘weakest’ hives, as they were all good hives, but let’s just say they were in the ‘second best’ group.) Then there were the two hives that I marked as my ‘weakest hives’. One ended up raising their own queen and is building up this year (with new genetics from Charles City) and I killed the queen of the other (replacing it with one of my Larry queens). But, the point is that I used my second class of hives to build up honey.

It was early April when I dropped the first supers of foundation on my honey hives. In several instances, I had 2 capped supers by early May and I averaged around 3 supers on my honey hives. I mostly use shallow supers for honey but Mosely, the super producer (it was actually one of my strongest hives that, due to timing and having too many Nuc’s already, I never split or cut into Nuc’s) ended up (as of yesterday) with 3 shallows and 2 mediums (although I am pretty sure that one medium is only drawn and being used to cure honey right now – very little capped.) In a future post (soon), I will go into how I definitely noticed a marked difference in honey production at a couple of spots. The flow was stronger at some spots and, in the outyard near Shirley Plantation in Charles City County, still going on right now (the flow has dried up in Varina.)

I super from below, meaning that I put a honey super on the brood chambers (typically 1 Deep and 1 Medium in my case) and let them work on it. Once they have capped off at least 80% of the frames, I drop another super BENEATH the super they are currently working on and directly above the brood chambers. It seemed to work pretty well this year, but I am sure that I will experiment with other methods in the future (next year, assuming the wax moths don’t get all of my drawn frames, I will have drawn supers to play with as well!)

When I pulled the 3 supers off of my one honey producer in Varina, they all seemed pretty heavy and appeared capped from above. So, that was 30 frames to extract and my Ranger Extractor only takes 6 per go of it – that was perfect! I would run it 5 times (or so I thought…). I used two telescoping covers, one for the bottom and one for the top, to hold the supers while I finished up my inspection. The bees definitely smelled it, as they were crawling all over the outside of the supers trying to get in when I got back to the Trailblazer. Regardless, none did get in and we were off to my garage to begin the extraction.

Once in the garage, I used a regular uncapping knife (not heated) and it worked great. I did have to use one of the scratchers to get a few areas that the knife missed on each frame, but I ended up with 23 frames (not 30) to extract. Several simply had too much honey still in the curing phase. This seemed to leave me with 1 too few frames for 4 full runs. But, I accidentally missed a side of one frame with the uncapping knife, so that one was run twice (and it worked great in the extractor with 6 frames on each run.)

Twice, I had to let some honey out of the extractor and pour it through a double-strainer and into my honey bucket. In the end, I had a bit over 2/3’s of a 5 gallon bucket full of honey. Not a ton, but a nice haul for my first run.

It was pretty much trial and error and I am sure I will have more ‘lessons learned’ over the next couple of weeks as I go out to the other honey producing hives.

2011 : Banner Year for the Ladies

It feels like I start every post with this but : everything continues to hit on all cylinders for honey bees in central Virginia. A long time beekeeper in our bee club (the East Richmond Beekeeper’s Club) mentioned that this was the best flow since 1993 for our area! The ‘flow’ simply refers to the time of the year when the most nectar is available in the flowers. For us, it is really the Spring. The state apiarist indicated that we used to get a Fall flow, but haven’t had one since the 90’s. The bottom line is that your bees have the best opportunity to build up some honey for the beekeeper at this time of year.

I’m not sure about how good it is compared to previous years (this is the first time that I have really collected honey off of my hives), but the hives appear to be doing well. As mentioned previously, those hives that successfully lived through the Winter, but had no other outstanding quality, were targeted for honey production (those with other qualities were used for Nucs and increase.) All of these hives have finished a Shallow, a few have finished a Medium and one is finishing its second Shallow. The fellow near Hopewell (old-timer who indicated it was the best flow in many years) mentioned something about 150# honey on his hives. I can pretty much guarantee that I do not have that much honey on my hives. Regardless, I should definitely have enough honey for personal consumption and for gifts, which is my main goal.

I am really interested in seeing how long ‘the flow’ lasts this year. I have heard folks say that it pretty much dribbles out by early to mid-June. July 1 is the target day for removing honey (I purchased my first extractor a few weeks back – hope I didn’t jinx myself!)

This coming week, I will have my first ‘inspection of the apiary’. Due to the extra increase, I have decided to sell at least one Nuc this year (I am thinking I will sell 5 before it is all over). You have to have the state apiarist come check out your gig when you sell bees, so I contacted Keith Tignor on Thursday and he tentatively agreed to come out during the coming week. It should be interesting to see how this goes.

The Richmond Beekeeper’s Association had their meeting last night, focusing on supering your bee hives and extracting the honey that your bees build out. An experienced beekeeper named Bob gave most of the presentation, however Kenny from ERBA also contributed. It was a very good discussion, although I almost passed out due to allergies or something. I honestly do not know what the heck was going on with me. I played 11 holes of golf prior to the meeting and thought I was coming down with the plague. Fortunately, I seemed to have lived through last night and feel ok this morning (I took an allergy pill last night.) The older I get, the more my body acts up on me.

At any rate, I forced myself to take a few notes for future reference. There was a general discussion of equipment, starting with the Honey Extractor (I had hoped that there would be a discussion of ‘How to Harvest Honey without an Extractor‘, as I am not in the mood to make that investment right now.) The primary tidbits that I picked up on the Extractor were to always purchase Stainless Steel and it doesn’t take long to need more then a 2 Frame Extractor.

The talk then went on to Capping Knife. Bob was an advocate of an electric knife that could be operated (tuned on/off) with a foot petal. Issues apparently arise when you use one of these things as they can burn the honey when they get too hot. Bob dealt with this via a foot pedal, which he would use judiciously (only turning it on for brief periods while working, instead of keeping it on all of the time.) As to this, Kenny advised he never used the knife and just used the scratcher (or some thing that looks like one of those metal combs that kids put in their back pockets.)

Regardless of the tools, the first step in the process is to get the Honey Super on your hive. In the Richmond, Virginia area, you want to make sure that you have at least one honey super on your hives by April 15 (although some of the folks claimed April 1 was the day this year, due to the unseasonably warm weather this year.) The primary flow, as mentioned in a previous post, starts in early May.

Once the bees have filled the super up with honey (you want to have a frame that is mostly capped), you remove it from the hive (probably replacing it with another super). I have definitely written on this blog about possibly leaving the supers on until the Fall. Folks at the Richmond Beekeeper’s meeting were not in favor of this for two reasons. One, you want to extract honey when it is hot. July and August are perfect. Honey runs/drips well in this temperature. Two, if we have a dearth (or maybe they were saying that anytime this can happen), the bees will start to eat into their stores, removing the honey from the supers. This second problem is a bit of a mystery. If you take their food that they would have otherwise eaten, won’t they go hungry? I guess those people just feed the bees sugar syrup for the rest of the Summer/Fall. At any rate, if you subscribe to this view, you want to get those supers off by the end of June (when the nectar flow in the Richmond, Va area will be over.)

When you go to get the honey supers, it is important to get the bees out of the supers. Bob mentioned things like ‘Bee Off’ or ‘Bee Away’ or something like that. Basically, these items smell so badly that the bees leave the honey. Heh. I am pretty sure you will not catch me using something like that. Fortunately, Kenny mentioned that he just smokes the padoodle out of his honey supers (sending most bees back into the main hive), then he shakes his frames (shaking the bees back into main hive) and uses a brush for the last few still there. Someone mentioned a blower, which I may investigate down the road (in that distant future when I actually get some harvested honey…)

Once the bees are out of the Super, you need to store it somewhere while you finish working the bees or getting other supers. The key is to have a top and bottom that are bee tight. Otherwise, a bunch of bees will run over and steal the honey out of your super while it is on the truck.

Now that you have your honey, you return to the honey extracting setup and go to work. The first thing is to decap the honey (using the electric knife or hippie comb) over a plastic tub which can catch the stray honey and cappings. Once all of the caps are off, place the frame into the extractor and give her a whirl. The honey will drip out and flow into a bucket (that you need to have setup with a double strainer (rough, then fine). This is the Stage 1 honey. Folks like Kenny (and probably like me, once I get some honey to try) will let this honey sit for a day or two before pouring it into bottles. This lets the last of the wax and bee particles float to the top. But, Bob actually strains it one last time, through a terry cloth or something. This really pulls out all of the tidbits.

Once you are done bottling, you want to clean up very well. Otherwise, according to the folks at the meeting, you will have a Small Hive Beetle paradise and a real mess the next time you extract.

That pretty much sums up the notes on Honey Extraction. The final tidbit that I picked up (by picked up, I mean noted to consider later, as I do not know very much about bees – not even enough to accurately judge the information (usually conflicting!) that I hear from various beekeepers around the area and on the net!), was that a lot of those beekeepers use an ‘Illinois Super’ (this is what I call a honey super) and a Deep for their hives. Basically, I would have already filled that up on both of my hives (I use two Deep’s.) I am a bit leary of this approach, as I think that Tom advised two Deep’s. I might try this setup on one of my new Nuc’s and watch it over the next few years.