Knock Test: 01-26-2013

After a very cold week here in Michigan (temps around 0 degrees all week), I trudged out to the hives just to do a quick check of the sticky boards and knock on the front door to see if anyone answers  =)

I pulled the sticky board on Green Hive and there was no new debris at all.  I think at this point, their fate is sealed.  The few remaining bees probably did not have enough bodies to keep warm.  I'll probably open them up the next time we have a warm spell and give them a final <ugh> check.

The sticky board on White Hive still looks promising!  Here it is:

Debris on sticky board

The lines aren't really distinct but to me it looks like there are about four solid frames of bees here.  It actually took quite a bit of prying to get the sticky board to come out.  I think I must have ruptured a few honey cells the last time I opened this hive and some of the honey dripped down onto the board causing it to stick to the grooves in the bottom board.  Based on where the debris was I knew the cluster was on the left side of the hive and as I leaned down to put my ear to that side of the hive, I heard a nice solid buzzzzzzz!  It took so much prying to get this sticky board out that I didn't even need to knock.  Keep your fingers crossed for White Hive to make it!  Temps are suppose to come up into the 30's for a while this week.  Go White Hive!!

Hive Inspection: 01-12-2013

With another veritable heat wave (just above 50 degrees) here in Michigan back on January 12, I had to go and see how "my girls" were doing!  Doing an inspection would also give me a chance to try out my new "J-Hook" hive tool that I received as a Christmas gift.  Exciting stuff for a beekeeper that just sits around the house in the Winter wondering how cold his bees are  =)

Flash back to previous hive status reports and you'll see that Green Hive was going strong with plenty of stores (honey) and White Hive had much fewer bees and no stores other than the sugar feed I had placed in the hive and what I had stolen from Green Hive (1 frame of honey).  What I found when I opened the hives was not what I was expecting.

Green Hive:
I opened the lid and did not see any bees in the honey super.  Still lots of honey there with almost every frame full of capped honey or nectar.  Removed that box and proceeded to look at the top box.  Strange, no bees moving around and none flying.

Top Box with new hive tool

I pried the box off with my new hive tool and after cracking through a lot of propolis (I haven't removed this box is quite some time), I removed the top box and began to look at the bottom box.  Sitting on top of the frames was a small cluster of dead bees around some areas of dark "stuff".  After brushing off the dead bees and removing some burr comb, this is what it looked like.

I believe this is a sign of bee dysentery.  One possible cause of this is too much liquid in the bees diet when they don't have the ability (because of cold temps) to fly outside and "relieve" themselves.  Another possibility is a disease called Nosema.  During warmer temps you usually see signs of this by seeing brownish streaks on the outside front of the hive.  The bees have runny stools and aren't as in control as they normally would be.  I'm sure you all are fascinated by this talk of bee poo, but I guess it is an important symptom to pay attention to!

Anyway, I pried apart a number of these frames to find another small cluster of dead bees (golf ball size).  This is nothing to really be concerned about as you do expect to loose some bees during the Winter.  The next thing that concerned me was looking through the frames to find this:

I had no idea what these little white granules were sitting inside these honey cells.  Weird.  At first I thought maybe they were some sort of insect larvae (yuck).  Upon closer inspection I quickly dismissed that possibility.  Since they all appeared to be wet with nectar, I was hoping that perhaps it was just crystalized honey.  I posted this picture on some bee blogs and everyone was in agreement that this was just crystalized honey.  Whew!  I guess everything unexpected is enough to freak out a new beekeeper!

At this point I decided to put the box back together and right off this hive as a Winter kill for some unknown reason.  I put the heavy bottom box back on the stand (there is still a lot of stores in the boxes!), and I reached for the second box just in time to see that I was being observed...

A small cluster of bees with their heads peeking up at me!  Hmm, looks like they aren't dead after all.  Sadly, this cluster is still very small and at this point I do not hold out much hope that they will survive the Winter, despite all the honey still in the hive!  Since I did not break apart the frames in this box, I can hope that there were a lot more bees that just did not want to come up and say Hi.

White Hive:
As I opened this hive, I was expecting to see very little activity since this has been the weaker hive all season.  Upon removing the lid, I was met with two annoyed bees.  They loudly buzzed around my veil and continued to fly around me.  They were probably trying to tell me to shut the lid because it was still pretty flippin' cold out!  =)  I removed the inner cover to check on the top honey super that is holding four empty frames, one frame of honey and an empty space where I put down a bunch of sugar feed.  Here it is:

 

To my happy surprise there were a handful of bees merrily crawling over the pile of sugar.  Now that's good eats!  Looking down past the sugar into the box below, it looks like there is still some stored honey there as well.

 

Although I would like to have seen a bigger cluster of bees for this hive, I am pleased to see the amount of activity that this hive is showing.  As a little extra insurance policy, I decided to take a few of the honey frames from Green Hive and move them over into White Hive.  It is possible that I moved Green Hive's problem into White Hive by doing this but if White Hive starved to death from lack of honey, they would be equally as dead, so I decided to risk it.

All in all, it looks like I might still get one hive through the Winter.  At least another two months to go before we are close to Spring, so keep your fingers crossed!

As always, thanks for reading!

BEEginnings New Year's Resolutions: 01-03-2013

Happy New Year All!

Generally speaking I never make a New Year's resolution.  But I suppose it would be wise of me to start thinking ahead and setting some goals for my beekeeping in 2013.  2012 was a good year and I certainly desire to learn from my mistakes and improve things this year!

To start at the start, I have to get the two existing hives through the Winter alive!  Green Hive is in good shape with stored honey (last time I checked) and I have put supplemental feed into White Hive.  It consists of a honey super (medium) with five frames removed.  One of the remaining five frames still in the box is a mostly capped frame of honey that I did not harvest from Green Hive.  The empty space normally used by the five frames left out is now occupied by a sheet of newspaper laid on top of the frames in the box below and a bunch of raw cane sugar poured on top of the newspaper.  I misted the sugar with some water to make a small crust on the surface of the sugar pile.  Otherwise the bees can start removing the sugar thinking it is trash.  Ideally, this serves a number of functions: It is a source of emergency food if the bees consume all the remaining honey and the sugar and newspaper help to absorb some of the excess moisture in the hive.

I hope to have at least one "warm" day for the next three months that I will have a chance to quickly check the hives.  I think a day in the low 50's would be warm enough to pop the cover really quick to check them.

My second goal is to expand my operation to three hives!  If both my hives survive the winter, I plan on doing a split of whichever hive is stronger.  As a part of this split, I plan to let the bees raise a new queen of their own.  This will be sort of a foray into queen rearing or at least observing the bees as they do it.  An additional part of expansion is of course building a new hive, which I have already begun.  One of the lessons I learned this past year is that I shouldn't have ignored the comments I have read in numerous books that talked about standardizing box sizes.  I didn't think it would be that big of a deal to use all medium boxes until I wanted to move a medium sized frame into a deep sized box.

My third goal is to keep better records.  Of course I did inspection and I took a lot of pictures which did help, but having a standardized method of recording what was on each frame seems to be a good idea.  A clipboard with some paper would work, but I think I could create a nice little form that would make it easy.  Ten boxes on the form where I could write down the percentage of brood, honey and pollen on a given frame should work, right?

My last goal is to do a better job of IPM (Integrated Pest Management).  To be specific, I want to make sure I am doing a monthly sugar shake and mite count.  I am still resolved to be chemical free in my hives, but I at least want a baseline on how many mites are in there.  If they get too bad I could at least take some action such as doing a sugar shake on the entire hive, break the brood cycle by removing the queen or using drone comb to trap and freeze the mites.

Well, that is all for now.  Hope you all have a great year.  What are your bee related resolutions?  =)

Quick Peek: 12-03-2012

We have started the month of December with a veritable HEAT WAVE here in Michigan!  It was about 60 degrees on Monday and today it is suppose to be 50.  So I figured it would be a good time to check on White Hive without chilling the bees.  Since I know the only surplus food the bees have is the honey super that has 9 empty frames and 1 frame of honey.  My plan was to remove the super so they didn't have all that extra space to heat during the winter.  I put on my veil, grabbed my hive tool and a small zip lock bag with some honey in it to feed back to the bees.  I cracked the top open and the girls were instantly PISSED!  I had two fly out onto my veil as soon as I lifted the lid.  Once I opened the inner cover I had about four more flying around my head.  Dang!  I have never had them come after me that way before.  The last time I opened the hive it was much colder so maybe that motivated them to stay put.  I also did not use any smoke.....kinda thought I wouldn't need to, they have always been calm before.  Hmmm, hope nothing else is going on.  Anyway, I checked the 90% empty honey super and there were quite a few bees sitting on the one honey frame, so my plan to remove the box went out the window.  Guess I'll come back when it gets colder and hopefully they won't be in there.  I put the inner cover back on, laid my zip lock bag of honey next to the hole in the cover and cut a few holes in the bag and squeezed a bit of the honey out to ring the dinner bell for them  =).  The outer cover went back on and it was all closed up.  I pulled the sticky boards on both hives to see how many mites had dropped and there weren't as many as I'd seen previously but there were a few.  I wonder if grooming habits increase when the bees are more tightly clustered? 

Sorry, no pictures this time.  I did have my camera with me during the inspection, but I ended up being a bit stressed by their reaction and wanted to close them up ASAP!  I'll check on them again around the new year probably.  Until then, thanks for reading.

Honey Harvest 2012!! 09-16-2012

I wasn't sure this day was going to come (at least not this year) but we did have a honey harvest this year!!  Green Hive produced enough of a surplus that I felt comfortable stealing it from the bees.  The reason bees make honey is so they have something to eat during the long cold Winter months.  This gives them the energy they need to flex their wing muscles and generate enough heat to keep warm.  Bees do not hibernate, rather they huddle together to keep warm waiting for the first sources of food to emerge in the Spring.  Typically their first sources of food are Dandelions for nectar and Maple and Willow trees for pollen.  So don't kill those Dandelions in your yard!!  =)

Here is what is typically involved in getting the honey:

Solid Honey

Step One: Remove The Bees
Hey bees!  Look at those flowers over there! <<steals honey before they notice>>  Since my ninja
suit is at the cleaners, I decided to try a different method.  First I removed a honey frame and checked to make sure it was 80-90% capped. 

That's a good one!

Nectar becomes honey only after the bees have reduced the moisture content of the nectar to below 18%.  Then they seal the cell with a thin wax cap to
prevent the honey from absorbing any additional moisture.  If you take uncapped honey, you run the risk of elevating the moisture level in the honey to the point where it can actually ferment.  Not good eats!  Next I held a solid grip on the frame and then jerked it quickly downward.  This dislodged most of the bees clinging to the frame.  I then followed up with the bee brush to remove the remaining bees.  Lastly, I brought the frame to an empty hive body, placed it inside and then covered it with a bed sheet to prevent the bees from going back onto the honey frames (which they really want to do). 

Not ready yet

 With my friend Keith helping, we quickly got into a rhythm.  He would pry apart the frames.  I would pick them up, shake and brush the bees off them and hand the frame off.  Keith would walk the frame over to the empty box and cover it up.  Rinse and repeat 10 times!  As you can see, this is a bit labor intensive because you have to touch each frame in the box.  Since I had only one box, it was no big deal.  If you had 10 boxes.......

Here are a few other methods I have read about:
Fume Board - You put a special felt lined board soaked in "bee repellent" on top of your hive.  The smell drives the bees down into the hive and out of the honey supers.  Wait five minutes and remove the now empty honey super.  Seems like this would work well but I didn't want to risk having the chemicals in my hive (even briefly). 

Escape Board - This is a special box that has a one-way wire mesh maze built into it.  When the bees navigate their way out, they cannot find their way back in.  You put this underneath your honey super and after a few days there are no more bees in the honey super.  I might buy some of these and give them a try next year. 

Bees shaken off the frames onto this box

Leaf Blower - Just like it sounds.  You take the honey super off the hive, set it on it's side and then blast it with the leaf blower expelling the bees from the box.  Seems like this would really piss the bees off and maybe injure a number of them as well.  Not to mention, I don't think I have a long enough extension cord to reach my hives!



Step Two: Uncap the honey frames
I bought a special "cold knife" made to cut the wax cappings off.  It is a long serrated blade that you lay onto the frame and saw back and forth removing the caps.  They also make a "hot knife" which is the same blade but with a heating element in it.  It melts and cuts at the same time and also costs $100.  Did I mention I'm cheap??  The cold knife worked fine but as the knife became more and more sticky with honey and wax, it became more tedious since you needed to clean the knife every few minutes.  Again, with only one box of frames it wasn't that big of a deal but if I have a few more boxes to do next year, I may have to spring for the hot knife. By the way, there is no way short of a biohazard suit that you can do this job without being covered in honey!!  It is hard not to get a taste of honey when your hands are covered in it!

Cutting the caps

One side done

Step Three: Extract the honey
If you spin the frames fast enough, the honey flies right out of them.  My friend Keith is a world renowned master tinkerer, so he decided to try his hands at building an extractor.  With some slight sizing adjustments, it worked perfectly!  Using a hand drill, we spun each set of frames for a few minutes, flipped them over spun them again and they were done.  I'm still very impressed at how nicely and easily it worked.  AND I didn't have to pay $300-$400+ for a commercial extractor!

Spin!  Spin!

Step Four: Bottle the honey
With all the honey removed from the frames, we poured the honey through a 600 micron filter that sits on the top of the bottling bucket.  The bucket has a special honey gate built into the bottom so that it is easy to start and stop the honey flow as you fill the bottles.  We let the honey filter and settle over night and began bottling the next day.  I controlled the honey gate and my wife told me when to start and stop.  We had our 12 oz jars processed lickety split.

Into the filter

Step Five: Labeling and packaging
My wife and I worked on designing a label and I think it turned out very well.  She really likes the name of the blog so we decided to call the honey "Martin's BEEginnings".  I also wanted some text on the label about how to reliquefy honey if it crystalizes and some text about not feeding honey to infants under one year of age.  Finally, we put the net weight, year and a scripture on the label.  Proverbs 16:24 - Pleasant words are as an honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.  To finish off the jars, I bought some labels from Dadant that you put on the lid.  They say "How do you know if it is real honey if you don't know the beekeeper?".  No Chinese funny honey here folks!  My wife added her finishing touch with a ribbon and a little bee charm.  Ain't they purty?!?!

Followup and Winter Prep:
After the extraction was complete, I placed the "wet" frames back on the hive for the bees to clean up.  They eagerly licked up any residual honey that was not extracted and moved it back into their hive.  Since I only extracted 9 out of the 10 frames in the box (the last one was only partially capped) I had to decide what to do with frame #10.  Green Hive has another super almost filled with honey, so I'm not too worried about them.  So, I checked White Hive and I was horrified to see that the honey super I placed there had not been touched.  The bees have drawn no wax and stored no honey in it!  In a Northern climate it is recommended to have two deep boxes PLUS a super of honey to make it through the Winter.  These bees have no super and I have no idea how much is stored up in the deep boxes.  So, I took the unextracted frame from Green Hive and swapped it with an empty frame in White Hive.  Hopefully they will take the honey.  If they haven't removed it within a week or so, I think I will place it above the inner cover and maybe scratch open the cells.  This should provoke the bees to remove the honey.  At this point in the year I don't think they have a chance of filling the empty honey super so I think I will just remove that empty box and hope they can survive with the stores they currently have.

As a final bit of Winter prep, I placed mouse guards on the hives.  When it gets cold mice like to move into the heated apartment in the yard called a beehive.  The mouse guard is a strip of metal that has holes large enough for the bees to get through, but a mouse can't get through or chew through.

Mouse Guard

As always, thanks for reading and questions are always welcome!

Hive Inspection: 08-21-2012

TBH:

Let us all bow our heads in silent prayer as we fondly remember the Top Bar Hive.  It was a good hive, filled with the expectant hope of new life and a bountiful harvest.  Alas, it twas not to be.  Let us not focus on how it died, but on how it lived.  <end sermon>

Well, as you can surmise, the TBH is kaput.  Deceased.  Passed on.  Gone to join the choir invisible.  Pushin up the Daisies.  It is an EX-TBH.  Sorry, bad mimicry of Monty Python's dead parrot sketch.  Anyway, I'm not 100% certain on the prelude to its demise, but something happened to weaken the hive and that allowed a bunch of wasps of various sorts to raid the hive, killing most of the defenders and the queen.

So, lets look on the bright siiiiide of life <whistle>:

• The bees were "free", since they were won at the Spring MBA conference.
• They added to the learning experience of the beekeepers
• I was able to purchase and apply a disease test kit for both American Foulbrood and European Foulbrood which both came up negative  <whew!>
• Since the bees will no longer be needing their honey, it was liberated

Opening the Foulbrood test kit

Removing a dead bee larvae

Test results.  If a line shows under the "T" it is postitive

Green Hive:

Thankfully, this hive is still going bonkers.  The bees have only barely started to draw out the wax on the second honey super I added, so at this point in the year I won't be expecting to harvest anything from this super.  Anything the bees store here before Winter, they will keep.

The first honey super I placed on this hive has almost every frame 80-90% of glorious honey capped!!  I was ecstatic to see this!  I have heard that you don't often get a harvest during your first year but it appears I will at least get a little bit from this hive!  Not really sure how much honey to expect from one super but I ordered two cases (12 each) of 9oz glass Hex Jars.  I guess if I fill them all I can always use Mason jars or some other container.

Lots of capped honey

I have also been surprised at the vast amounts of propolis the bees on this hive seem to make.  I guess I'm not familiar with the different varieties of honey bees, but the ones I have seem to make a lot!

Lots of sticky propolis

White Hive:

I am still surprised at how hot it can get in a bee suit even when the temperature is "only" in the 70s.  Since at this point in my inspection I had sweated off most of my body weight, I made this one quick.  My friend Keith was also helping me and I'm sure he appreciated the expedited inspection.  I pulled a few frames finding the first still empty of comb, but the next two were increasingly built up.  Frame 9 had about 50% comb and Frame 8 had about 80% and Frame 7 had about 95%.......and the Queen!  I've gotten fairly decent at spotting her finally!  Can you see her in the photo?

White Queen

After a short debate we decided we might as well add a honey super.  I don't really expect them to do much with it at this point in the year so any honey they store will be for the bees to eat over the Winter.

Wow, I can't believe we are hitting September at the end of this week.  Fall is quickly approaching, as is the close of my first year of beekeeping.  What a ride!

As always, thanks for reading...

07-31-2012: Quick Inspection

I haven't had the time, help or ambition to attempt fixing all the cross comb that I discovered during the last inspection of Green Hive, but I thought I would at least give them all a quick peek.  I also needed to remove the feeder from the Top Bar Hive.  Well, nothing is ever as easy as you think it will be!

TBH:

Upon removing the first few bars from the TBH I was disappointed (but not surprised) to see no real progress in comb building.  There were not many bees present, although the feeder was empty.  I picked up the empty jar and this is what I discovered.

Oh crap.  I instantly thought I discovered why the hive was so weak, Small Hive Beetles!  Well, come to find out after a little research, these are NOT SHB.  These are common "Sap Beetles" or "Picnic Beetles".  They are drawn to rotting fruit or fermenting liquids.  In this case, it was the sugar syrup from the feeder.

Sadly, after dodging one bullet, I was struck with another.  I removed a few more bars to open the hive up and I noticed quite a few yellow jackets and other types of wasps flying around my hive tool and inside the hive.  As I looked deeper into the hive I saw a lot of wasps and few bees.  I worked my way up to the front of the hive to see signs of a recent battle.

You can see many corpses littering the floor of the hive near the entrance.  The hive floor was also very wet looking.  After crushing a few wasps with my hive tool, I noticed that most of critters sticking their heads into the cells were wasps, helping themselves to the undefended honey.  This hive was being robbed.  Crap.  I did the only thing I could think of at the time.  I plugged up most of the entrance holes so that the remaining bees might have a chance to defend the hive.

There were so many wasps flying around, I did not proceed to inspect the last few frames.  So, I don't know if the queen is dead or not.  Not sure what to do at this point.  I don't think much can be done to save this hive since it is so late in the year.  Especially not knowing if the hive had any sort of brood disease that weakened them in the first place.  I had not spotted any eggs either so there is no chance of them raising their own queen.  Not good.

I ordered an American Foulbrood and a European Foulbrood test kit from Dadant and the results of those tests will likely determine if I need to burn the hive (with AFB) or attempt to save the hive in some manner if the tests come back negative.

Green Hive:

This hive is going bonkers.  I wanted to just take a quick look to see if they had made any progress on the medium super I added during the last inspection and a FULL box of bees were looking up at me when I opened the lid!  I did not pull the frames but seeing bees looking up from between EVERY frame gave me a great boost after the TBH.  I wasn't prepared for this and I had to run back into the pole barn to grab another super!  Two honey supers on now and I'm thinking I have a chance of taking some honey from this hive this year!

I finished this hive by placing some bottle caps onto the top cover to prop it up a bit.  This is suppose to allow for additional ventilation in the hive.  I really should have done this back in July when the weather was in the high 90's but I kept forgetting.

I also keep forgetting to remove the entrance reducer.  It is now stuck down really well with propolis and I have four heavy boxes piled on top if it!  Hmmm, maybe I can take it off during the NEXT inspection.  If I don't forget again  =)

White Hive:

Although this hive is behind Green Hive, I am pleased with their progress.  It looks like they have drawn out about 50% of the new box I put on during the last inspection.  I am not expecting to harvest any honey from this hive this year.  I'll end this report with a nice close up of the bees.  Smile girls!!