Honey this year!

Well it looks like we are going to get honey this year.  Usually a new hive that is started from a 'package' (a 3 pound box of bees and a queen) will just get going enough to survive the winter.  We were fortunate enough to get a swarm from a new bee friend and it has been going gang busters!  This is the hive we names Daphne.  We checked it last weekend and the honey super is about 2/3rds full after only 3 weeks!

Here is a picture of one of the frames almost full of honey.

This frame has about 7 to 8 pounds of honey in it right now and there are 10 frames in each 'super'.  This one is almost completely full.  We are going to add another super since the bees are doing so well.

Smoke and Sugar

Bees in general are pretty laid back.  They just want to make honey.  If you don't get in the way of this process you can live in harmony with them.  As a beekeeper you do need to see how things are going on in the hive and during the summer you have to open the hive about once a week to see how things are progressing.   This pretty much pisses them off and they want to sting  you.  To settle them down you 'smoke them'.  We use a smoker to do this.  When they smell or sense smoke nearby they think forest fire and they gorge themselves on honey ready to take flight or something like that.  It reminds me of my dad after a big meal and he is sitting in his recliner relaxing and digesting.  It's a great time to ask for money or the car or tell him of the new dent in the fender.  In any case the bees are more concerned about eating than us invading the hive.

So the following is a video on the smoker and smoking the bees.

Bees have a common problem in the US and that is the varroa mite.  This little blood sucker comes into a hive and attaches to bees and starts to recreate.  Not a great thing for the bee or the hive.  The way to reduce the infestation is to 'sugar' the bees.  We take powered sugar and dust the bees.   They get really angry when you do this but this helps them to reduce the mite problem.

When the bees are covered with sugar they start to clean each other off by eating the sugar.  Any mites that are on the bees are then pushed off or slip off most of the bees.  They fall to the bottom of the hive and die in a heap of sucrose.  Here is a short video of sugaring the bees.

Honeybee wrestling

We have named the hives. 

The one on the left is Athena,  the one in the middle is Persephone,  the one on the right is Daphne.  Not sure why but Isaac and I thought it would be fun to name them after Greek or Roman goddesses.

In any case we have been inspecting them each weekend to see how they are doing and it seems they are doing ok.  We noticed that Persephone is not doing as well at the other two.  It just was not growing at the same rate as Athena and they were started at the same time.

I went out and watched them for awhile and noticed a strange occurrence.  I watched as one bee grabbed another bee trying to enter the hive and started to wrestle with it.  Odd.  Do bees wrestle? Hmmmmm....

Later in the week Isaac came in after watching the hives and noticed a number of dead bees at the entrance of Persephone.  After some research we came to the conclusion that there was honey robbing going on!! Oh no..what do we do???

Okay, so here is what is going on.  It seems that Persephone is a little on the weak side as hives go.  Some feral hive has found them and has been going in and stealing honey.  Which seems to be easier than going out and just gathering nectar. (lazy jerks).  Well each hive has a set of guard bees at the entrance of the hive to inspect each bee to make sure it belongs to the hive.  It if is not, then the guard bees wrestle with it and eventually kill it.  This is the reason for the dead bees on the ground in front of P.  (Spelling out Persephone is a pain)  We were not sure what to do but we found a solution and may have stopped the robbing.

 What we need to do is make the entrance a little smaller to allow the guard bees to inspect each bee as it comes in.  So we stuffed some paper towels in the entrance to reduce the size to about half.  Here is a photo of P with a stuffed entrance.




























It seems to have cured the problem.  We are going to do an inspection soon and we'll see how everybody is doing.

Couple of weeks in

We inspected the Daphne hive and they seem to be doing very well.  Here is a frame with brood on it.

The center area is capped brood.  Each cell will produce a new worker this coming week.  There are about 1000 in this picture.  The worker will emerge and start working immediately.  The queen will lay about 1500 eggs each day which will turn into worker bees 21 days later.  So our hive will increase from about 25K bees to about 60K in the next 6 weeks.  So we may get honey from this hive this year!

Picking up bees and installing them

Isaac and I picked up our new packages this weekend and installed the bees in their hives.  Each package is 3 pounds of bees and a queen.  The bee breeders had about 2.5 million bees in 280 packages.

  This photo is just a portion of the boxes at the pickup point.

Here we are ready to start putting the bees in the hives.

Two Package of bees.

Dumping the bees

More Dumping

Finished dumping

Putting in the last frame

All Done

First Inspection of the new hive

Isaac could not contain himself until he took a look into the new hive.  He went out today and did the first inspection of the hive.  It's good to find a lot of comb being built, eggs, and larvae.  It's also good to find the queen so we know everything is going well.

Here are a couple of photos of the queen that he found on the first frame he pulled out of the hive.  The queen is twice as large as the worker bees and will lay over 2 million eggs in her lifetime (2 to 3 years).

Here is small video of him showing a frame with a bunch of stuff.

He is very excited!

Surprise, surprise!

We are expecting to get our 2 packages of bees next week on May 5th.  Today we got a call from Bill and he said he had captured a swarm somewhere north of us and did we want it?  At first we said no because we have no experience with a swarm.  But after a little discussion we decided we wanted it and called Bill back.  He did not have a taker yet so we went over and got the swarm.  We set up the hive and installed the bees!  It only takes a couple of minutes.

The swarm was in a 20 gallon tub with a hole cut in it for ventilation.  We have a video that shows the installation.  We estimated that there are about 20,000 bees.

The bees did make it their home.

What the heck is in the hive.

We have 2 basic hives.  They are Langstroth hives.  This design was created by the Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth in 1851, and was actually patented by him in 1852.  See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langstroth_hive for more history.
The basic parts are:
The bottom board
The deep body with the frames
Later we add another deep and also supers for more honey production
The top board and
The telescoping lid.

Here is the bottom board.  It's made with a screen on it and a removable white card.  This allows us to have better ventilation for the hive and to check for problems like mites.  The front of it is the landing area for the bees.

 

 The deep is the main living area for the bees.  It has ten frames in it for the bees to build the comb.

This is what a frame looks like.  The foundation is made of a sheet of plastic with the bees wax comb already laid out for the bees to start building on.

The foundation already has the comb design on it.  The bees will start with this to build the comb and it ends up much more organized later for harvest.

The top board is added to the top so the bees don't glue shut the lid and make it almost impossible to open up the hive for inspection and later harvest.

This is the lid for the hive.  It makes it much more private for the bees, and warmer.

Beginning our beekeeping adventure

A few months ago my son Isaac and I decided to start keeping bees.  Part of this was my interest in Colony Collapse Disorder(CCD).  More on this in a later post.  We started planning this back in January and February and will get our 2 packages of bees on April 21st.

We have an area in the backyard all set for the bee hives.

This is in the North west corner of the yard.



















We built foundations of concrete
block to put the hives on.

Kanga inspecting the area and making sure all is right.

 So both foundations are set and ready to go.  I couldn't wait to see how the hives look so I brought one out to set it up.

 

Arvada (our home town) allows anyone to have up to 2 hives in their backyard but you must have a water source available close by.  Sandi and I bought a large ceramic pot at a garden store and I sealed the hole in the bottom.  I then added a solar powered pump so the water wouldn't become stagnant.  It works great and we see bees getting drinks already.