Beekeeping in Richmond, Virginia

Michael Bush Agrees With Me…but!

Last month, Michael Bush came to Richmond, Va. Unfortunately, a last minute disaster in my personal life caused me to miss the presentation=( Regardless, I had several folks report to me about his discussion and I was pleased to hear that he mirrored my constant droning on about about don’t feed your bees! It just encourages the weak! Not to be arrogant, but this mirrors the ‘always have a Nuc’ philosophy of mine being mirrored by another prominent beekeeper a few months back. In all honesty, this is not some reflection of my ‘great beekeeping skills’. It is simply a reflection of realizing that keeping bees is like managing a heard of deer on your property. It in no way, or in any way, is similar to keeping cows or chickens. Treating bees like a domesticated animal (in my opinion) is a surefire way to disaster. Don’t medicate. Don’t feed. Don’t requeen. Sure, plant some foraging plants (as you do with any wild heard of deer or maybe some geese), but take it no further. In my opinion, a domesticated bee is an extinct bee.

BUT, it just so happens that there is a caveat to this. Last week, I had a free evening and was able to read a recent ezine from Brushy Mountain and browse some sites from a few of the other beekeepers in the area (at least the ones that I respect.) In both cases, I found articles on feeding bees. I can’t speak for Brushy Mountain (they are, obviously, trying to sell feeders), but I do know that several of the local beekeepers that feed are very successful in their beekeeping endeavors. Although I do not agree with many of the reasons that they feed (and they probably don’t agree with the reasons that I don’t feed), it does make good sense to feed a young colony (or Nuc you plan to overwinter) or a colony that is otherwise strong, but is currently suffering from a big drought. Why?

Feeding now will encourage the queen to start laying a bunch of eggs. I have come to believe that most of your Fat Bees (those are the ones that are born with more ‘fat’ and live through most of the Winter – critical to the survival of any colony) are actually raised in early October (some would say late September, but I no longer believe that, due to things I have seen over the past few years.) When that laying starts (and it ends in November or sooner), you want to have a healthy population of nurse bees ready to help these juggernaut bees get their start in this world. The best way to ensure that you have a healthy population of nurse bees is to feed in late August and into September – but ONLY for the younger hives (my opinion).

Your younger hives (the Nucs for Overwintering) have a queen that was only born in the last month or so. With very little nectar coming in, she is unlikely to be raising many bees. I have actually tested this and it is true. I have two Nucs for Overwintering (out of 12) that I decided NOT to feed just to see. They are not raising near the number of nurse bees that the fed Nucs are raising (and, I only feed them a mix that equals 2 gallons of water to 10 pounds of sugar.) The fed Nucs are raising tons of bees and even drawing wax. I’m not sure if this will mean my ‘unfed’ Nucs will perish or not, but the experiment has started. I vote that they won’t make it, but the daggone bees have surprised me in the past.

What about the mature hives? If you have to feed a mature hive, it is definitely one to consider whacking. Every one of my mature hives (well, every one that I have checked in the last week) has ramped up egg laying. I have not fed them one drop of anything, but they know it is time to prepare. I believe this is part of how the bees with good genes make it – store enough honey to both raise a bunch of bees for the winter AND to eat on through the Winter. If your bees aren’t doing that, I’d whack them unless they were my only hive. If they are the only (or maybe 1 of 2) hive, then I’d simply feed them and whack the queen in late March. You don’t want those genes around, period. It not only will make your beekeeping more labor intensive (and risky), but you are propogating terrible genetics into the area around where you keep your bees – and that’s where your future queens will mate!!!

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.

Feeding Recommendations

I just read an e-zine from Brushy Mountain that encourages everyone to be feeding their bees right now, thanks to the lack of rain and dearth of nectar. If you’re in an area of the country that is experiencing a multi-year, devastating drought (mostly the corn belt, like Iowa), this may be necessary (I have no experience with this kind of scenario in my beekeeping travails), but I do not believe it is necessary in our area (which may experience a month or two of drought in a given Summer.)

Bees are biological organisms, just like deer, birds and other insects. You don’t have to feed those organisms in our droughts and you shouldn’t have to feed your bees, unless you somehow have a genetic derelict in your apiaries. If you do have such a bee, one that cannot survive in our environment without external, man-driven measures, I would argue that you SHOULD let them perish. We do not need that kind of genetics in our area.

This discussion is particularly relevant today, based on the large number of queries that I have received about ‘should I be feeding my bees’ from local beekeepers. Based on my comments above, you might conclude that I never feed my bees. In fact, I do feed some of my bees, but very rarely in August (or July). I am a firm believer in feeding any new colony (caught by a swarm or purchased) until it has drawn out (drawn out refers to the frames of foundation and drawing each out with wax) whatever you consider to be the hive bodies. Drawing out wax takes a tremendous amount of resources and you sometimes get a new hive so late in the nectar flow that they have little chance of drawing out their living quarters before the flow is over (usually in June). To help them over this obstacle, feeding is a good thing. Once they have drawn out their living quarters, there is no natural reason to feed them again (but, I might change my tune if I ever experience a multi-year drought…)

But, do I feed my young hives in July and August? Unfortunately, there is no black-and-white answer to this. In my experience, if I have a young hive that has drawn out the lower hive body (for me, this is usually a Deep super), I will continue to feed in July/August as they finish drawing out the upper hive body (for me, this is typically a Medium super.) As long as I feed late in the day (when most troublesome foragers from other hives are already back home for the day and less likely to smell this new treat as I pour it into the hive), hives of this size have no problems keeping out potential robbers and benefit well from the feed. But, I also have brand new, queenless Nuc’s in my home yard at this time of year. These Nuc’s (for Overwintering) are not expected to fill out a full hive body. Instead, they only need to fill out 10 frames (5 in the lower Nuc and 5 in the upper Nuc.) In addition, in July and August, many of these Nuc’s experience a queenless period as they raise their new queens. I never feed a brand new Nuc that is queenless in July or August. Absolutely never. It seems to me that queenless nuc’s are at the greatest risk of being robbed out during this time of year. In fact, any Nuc has a high chance of being robbed out this time of year, but queenless Nuc’s seem to really be at risk. My goal with these hives is to get a laying queen before I feed and I try to hold off feeding until late August at the earliest.

Finally, I suppose it is possible that you could take too much honey from your hives during the honey harvest and then have to feed to make up for that mistake. I have never done this, so cannot really comment on it. In truth, I checked 3 outyards today and have lots of extra honey, including 1 fully drawn and capped Medium honey super (many of my spare supers are partially drawn and filled, but not capped.) As stated many times before, I definitely believe that you will end up with stronger bees if they are eating nectar-based honey over the Winter, as opposed to syrup-based. It may be the reason why I simply do not have Winter losses.

It should also be noted that:

1. I only use top feeders (see insert) for my full hives. In my opinion, this is the best kind of feeder for a full hive. So, when I am feeding my younger hives in July/August, it is with this kind of feeder. I would never use a boardman-style (or other external) feeder. Having feed hanging off the side of a hive is a big advertisement to other bees in the area.

2. I pretty much feed the same mixture all year. For me, it is basically 10 lbs of sugar mixed with 2 gallons of water. If you go by a ‘pint is a pound the world around’, this comes out to something like a 1.6 parts water to 1 part sugar.

Ain’t Worth a Fly!

A swarm in May is worth a bale of hay, a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon and a swarm in July ain’t worth a fly! I’ve repeated these wise words from my father and grandfather many times on this blog and it has always been proven out. But, I think I may have finally found an exception.

Although I have received more swarm calls this year, I have retrieved far fewer swarms. Basically, once you attain a certain ‘mass’ of bee hives, it is simply easier to create your own hives from Nuc’s and Splits than it is to go get a swarm (unless it is just down the road.) Plus, now that I have a sustainable ‘mass’, I like to build my hives off of either my best queens or the exceptions that will give me experience. An example of the latter case exists today in a really strong hive. As a Nuc, the queen was laying so poorly that I was about to pinch it as I do all of the queens that I do not believe are ‘good enough’ for sale. This time, I decided to let it roll and see what happened. Would this hive peter out and succumb to wax moth or SHB? As it turned out, this queen started to really pour it on about 6 weeks after she started laying. It makes me really wonder about my queen judging ability at the early stages.

But, I have really digressed… I received a call on July 9 for a swarm that was outside of my normal range these days. But, the picture had my interest peaked – it really looked strong. I actually thought that it might have been an ‘abscond’ from the wild storm that had come through the week before (maybe their tree had been toppled?)

So, I went out to get the swarm and had to actually climb a ladder, snip off the limb with the bees and walk them back down the ladder to hive them. A lady filmed the experience and said she would email me a copy, but I have not heard from her yet. Regardless, the hive pulled down 2 gallons of syrup very fast. This typically only happens with a strong swarm. I gave them 3 more gallons the other day and will check them again on Thur. The next time they go empty, I plan to check the hive for temperament, a laying queen and other things. I could be wrong, but I am betting that I’ll have most of the initial Deep drawn by the weekend. We shall see.

Wired Frames

Last year, I made a decision that I would not extract from Deep frames. Based on my strategy and set-up, Deep frames would always be for my bees. From that point forth, I stopped wiring my frames. It is important to note that I still used ‘wired foundation’, so they still had some fortification. Through hundreds of expections since then, I have not had one single incident where the drawn wax in a Deep frame fell out or otherwise came ‘unglued’ from the frame.

Towards the end of last year, I stopped wiring all of my frames. I wondered (on more than one occasion) if I was making a mistake. Perhaps I should do it on only one super and test it (in a honey extraction) first? But, removing the ‘wire step’ from my frame creation process increased the throughput so much that I took the risk. I have now extracted around 120 gallons of honey and no wax has blown out of any of my unwired frames. So, for this year, it is clear to me that I do not need to wire my honey super frames either. Again, all of these frames did have ‘wired foundation’, so perhaps (I thought) this was the real key.

Towards the end of last Winter (maybe Feb or so), I began to put simple strips of wax (unwired) foundation (maybe an inch deep) in my Deep frames. The benefit most folks talk about is ‘natural comb’. Without a sheet of foundation, they build purely natural comb with no chance of any foreign substances making it into the wax from the foundation (even foundation cannot be pure – it’s from beeswax, afterall.) The benefit for me was cost – foundation can be expensive. Using these little strips reduced the cost to a fraction of the original and was pretty quick to do. The main cost was that I would need to be extra careful with these frames during the initial draw (before the wax was drawn across the frame.) It would easily ‘plop’ out. So, I marked each one. Although I did have a ‘near miss’ when I was inspecting and not paying attention to the frames, it all ended ok. The wax turned out of the frame like a page in a book and I uttered a curse word as I corrected it quickly. The wax hung nicely and I carefully put it back into the super. In the end, I was happy. This is working out well.

Finally, I had one last test. Michael Palmer, a beekeeper I really respect in the Northeast, frequently says he actually extracts from frames that never had foundation. No wiring, no wired foundation – nothing. I was skeptical, but this was the next logical test in my experiment. I put simple, 1 inch deep, strips of wax in a handful (maybe 30) of honey super frames (all Mediums, as I am no longer really building many Shallow frames.) This last weekend, I extracted from nearly all 30 of them. Not ONE SINGLE blow out! No wire at all! It could be my extractor (I have a simple 6 frame, radial extractor that I picked up from Dadant), but it doesn’t matter to me! I probably have a couple of hundred pounds of wired foundation in my basement, but once I get through that, I am unlikely to purchase much more of it (until or unless I have a negative experience with it, of course.)

The conclusion here is that you do not always have to use wired foundation and wire your frames. I think there are some kinds of extractors that are tougher on the frames (the ones that you have to turn the frames after a spin), but my frames are placed in the extractor with the top bar on the outside and the bottom bar on the inside. I do not have to turn them. Clearly, in this kind of setup, wiring is not a good use of time.

Do You Have a Nuc?

I am a firm believer that every beekeeper who has had a hive live through one Winter should have a Nuc – 12 months out of the year. Over the past 6 weeks, I have run into maybe a dozen or more beekeepers (personally) that could have used one, but didn’t have one available.

Everyone is familiar with the early Spring Nuc’s. Many folks start their beekeeping career by purchasing one from another Nuc. I sell many Nuc’s for this exact purpose. So, if you have no inclination to ‘sell Spring Nuc’s’, why would you need the daggone thing?! Because ‘selling Nuc’s’ is not the real reason that folks raise Nuc’s. The real reason is to create a Sustainable Beekeeping program.

If you are in your first year as a beekeeper, you will hopefully have little need of a Nuc. In addition, your main goal is to get your new hives built up – taking a few frames from this new, growing hive is not a good idea. Your goal is to get your hives through the Winter. If you do that successfully, you’ll begin a part of your beekeeping career that will be rivaled by little else. The last thing you want to do is to put this wonderful experience at risk. So, this post does not apply to the first year beekeepers.

So, what’s this stuff about ‘sustainable beekeeping’? It focuses on one simple fact – using your own resources (bees) you build an apiary (or multiple apiaries) that enable you to meet all ‘bee’ needs that you have with your own bees. If you want to add a few hives, you build them from your own hives. If something goes wrong, you fix it with resources from your own hives. Many folks believe that the only way to do this is if you have a few dozen hives. But, that is wrong. You only need 2 hives and one Nuc.

So, how is it that you would have a Nuc on every day of the year and why?

It all begins with the Spring Nuc. As your bees come out of Winter, you will have at least one hive that is doing well. They have moved up into the top box (by that, I mean that the queen has started laying up there) and the bottom box is full of brood coming on. At this time, you take 2 frames of brood and 1 of honey. The brood frames need to have pollen in them, otherwise you’ll need to add a frame with pollen. One of the brood frames must have forager eggs. When you transfer the bees, a bunch will come with them, but you still need to shake a frame or two of bees into the Nuc box. Nurse bees have never flown before and will simply call the new Nuc their home. Nurse bees are also critical in the raising of a new queen, so you want to take frames with brood (uncapped is best) and shake them hard into your Nuc, getting as many bees as you can into it. Of course, you must identify and set your queen (the frame she is on) asside (yet another good reason to mark you queens) first, as you do not want to shake her into the Nuc. I put foundation for the rest of the frames. I always do this with March/April Nucs, as it gives the bees something to do as they wait for the new queen to hatch, mate and finally start laying.

At this point, you have created your Bank. You put bees in and can take them out in the future, if you need them. The bees will create a new queen that will hatch in around 16 days. I typically go into the hive on Day 21 (it’s always a factor of 7 because I have to do my day job during the weekdays!) and make sure I find an open queen cell. Once found, I leave them alone (I am not looking for the queen, yet…) for another 2 weeks. At that point, I expect to find eggs and larvae. If I don’t, I give the Nuc ANOTHER frame with capped brood and eggs (eggs being the key.) This time, I shake the bees off into the parent hive – I am not trying to bring more bees to my Nuc. If they have a queen that is simply taking a while to lay or maybe I missed the eggs with my old eyes, they’ll raise the brood and simply add it to their force. BUT, if the queen was eaten by a dragon fly or otherwise perished, they’ll raise a new queen from these eggs. I start the process over again (wait 3, and then 2, weeks). If you miss these checks and the queen didn’t make it, you’ll end up with a Nuc that has laying workers, an entirely other problem.

So, now you have your Spring Nuc. Since you’re not raising them to sell, you do not feed them and let them build on their own. They’ll do just fine. They may even swarm, which is not a problem (they’re just your bank). The main thing you need to do with them is to check them for a queen every 3 to 4 weeks. That’s it. In truth, just look for capped brood. The second you don’t see capped brood, drop a frame of eggs in her! Done!

So, why do this? It’s not a lot of work, but why do it at all? For one, you have a mated queen (local, to boot) ready to go if one of your main hives has a problem. Queenless? You have an answer with your mated Nuc queen. Did a main hive swarm and you aren’t sure if the new queen made it back? Give them a frame of eggs from the Bank Nuc. Do you need to bolster a colony because of some mishap? Give them a frame of capped brood from the Bank Nuc. You have now taken the first step towards ‘sustainability’. You need no outside resources to keep your hives going during the Summer.

So, July comes along and you have this Nuc on your hands. You can sell the thing (a little to offset the cost of beekeeping), let them have a go of it through the Winter or you can start an Overwintered Nuc. An overwintered Nuc for me is a way to cull my hives of underperformers and its an insurance policy against Winter loss. The Overwintered Nuc is an Insurance Policy (not a bank). Strictly speaking, you want a Nuc that is lead by a Queen that was born in late July (in our area – around Richmond, Virginia). I break up my weak hives to create them, but if you have your Bank going, you can simply pinch your current queen and turn the Bank into an Insurance Policy. I am a firm believer in Overwintered Nucs. They have a brand new queen that really never gets to pour it on before Winter Prep starts. She has to downshift almost immediately and stay mostly idle through the Winter. I can assure you that queens like this come out of Winter like no other. One of my best Overwintered Nucs from last Winter has two drawn deeps, 2 mediums of capped honey and a 3rd medium that they just started to draw before the Nectar flow became a dribble. By creating an Overwintering Nuc, you have an insurance policy against the loss of a main hive over the Winter. If things go well, you can sell it for a premium to a new beekeeper (I think that 150% normal Nuc rates is very reasonable – Overwintered Nucs have huge value) and then start your Bank the next day (the Spring Nuc.)

So, that’s my rant on Nucs. Every beekeeper should have two hives and a Nuc. That’s how to be successful and it also is a great way to help the bees by having local bees as your bank/insurance policy.

New URL!

For some time now, I have been meaning to change the domain of the site. When I first started this blog, I was doing a ton of gardening (veggies & landscaping) and beekeeping was just an extension of that hobby. Now, beekeeping has become the primary hobby for sure (although I still do a ton of gardening!)

So, I wanted to change the domain name to more reflect what the site was about. I have finally done so. I hope all of the folks out there find their way to the new location with ease.

I have serious doubts that I will ever change it again, so I’ve finally home!

And so the tough season begins…

Based on the last two weeks, the nectar flow has dropped substantially in my areas (eastern Henrico and Charles City County.) I have seen a slight increase happen towards the middle of June in the past, but who knows what this Summer has in store. As I write this, we are finally getting some rain, although not the real soakers that I like. Still, hopefully this will prompt the Summer bloomers to be a bit more productive then normal. The clover has gone crazy and continues to bloom everywhere. Queen Anne’s Lace is also going to town now. Hopefully, this will provide a last shot of honey before the real tough season begins.

On the negative experience front, I lost a ton of honey in a robbing situation. I found 4 hives over the last couple of weeks with queen problems. Two of them had gone so long that the foragers had started laying, which is always a nightmare. I have been really lucky with placing a Nuc on the spot where the hive was and moving the main hive 15 feet away (or more). This has allowed me to save the primary force of bees and then, about 5 days later, combining them back with the main hive. This has worked very successfully 3 times already (I’ve had a few queen problems this year, due to all of the daggone swarming!) In my opinion, the foragers for the main hive end up coming back to the queenright Nuc and they combine naturally. Then, after a few days, the Nuc is so strong that combining them with the (now much reduced, since the foragers have moved to the Nuc) original hive is easy.

This past weekend, I did it on two hive and it cost me a ton of honey. Both of the main hives ended up being robbed substantially. I didn’t care so much about the bees (they were laying workers and only a very few nurse bees), but both hives had a lot of frames of honey that I had planned to use for the Winter Nucs. Clearly, with the flow dropping, more bees are testing the defenses of neighboring hives. This strategy is still a good one, as I did save the foragers and ended up with a fine hive building up as it should. But, I need to take the frames of honey in the future, once we get towards the end of May. Live and learn.

The other two hives I caught in time to drop a frame of eggs from one of my better hives into them and are (hopefully) now building new queens.

There are a couple of things that I have come away with from all of this. For one, my feeding will now take the conservative approach. No more feeding outside of the hives. Only feed late in the evening and only open young/weak hives late in the evening. This also means that most of my inspections now start to happen on a monthly basis, as opposed to every other week. I’ll pretty much just check supers and pull a middle frame from the brood nest to insure there is (or at least was recently) a queen. In all honesty, I have so many hives that capped brood is good enough for me. Plus, I don’t like to do full inspections when the nectar flow drops. Too much fighting when other bees are attracted by the smell of honey!

I have also decided that I will buy a voice recorder for my inspections. Most of my queen problems were easily prevented, but I simply neglected to either note it in my journal or, if I did note it (such as, hive swarmed – check for laying queen in 3 weeks), to come back and check at the right time. I have great notes from the last few years, but not as good this year. My Nuc program and trying to keep up with the honey production (as well as wife and 20 month old) have kept me so busy that I have slacked off of this important task. Again, live and learn!

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…