Honey Harvest

So.  Honey harvest.  Let's get to it.

the robbing commences

Since we're all starting at different places in learning about bees, let's start at the beginning.  Honey is the dehydrated nectar of flowers. As bees forage, they store it in their honey stomachs to transport back to the hive, and as they regurgitate it into the honeycomb, they value-add some enzymes that help preserve it. Then they beat their little wings to circulate air and encourage evaporation in the nectar, thus slowly reducing the water content. Nectar is roughly 80% water; honey is roughly18%.  That's a lot of little wing beats. And it is important to wait til the nectar is truly honey, because the additional water could cause it to ferment/spoil. But fortunately, it doesn't take much figuring to determine if its right.  Bees won't cap honey til its correct, so if you wait til the comb in a frame is capped, and you know that you have honey.

So, here we are in the hives, searching for frames of capped honey.  Let's be clear that a frame of capped honey is a beautiful sight. The wax is buttery and opaque, hinting at the wealth beneath. 

It is also heavy--an early indication when you reach for a frame that its full of the good stuff.  The first thing to do is get the bees off the frame.  As a general rule, there are usually fewer bees on capped honey to begin with because they aren't using that frame (if it is capped, they aren't eating it, and otherwise, they are tending to the frames with brood).  But there will always be some bees, and there are a variety of ways to remove them.  For brevity's sake we'll skim over the others and just note that we use the old fashion brush (see picture above).  Admittedly, they hate it. But you are robbing them after all, so you've kinda already accepted a certain imbalance of justice.


Once you've gathered all your frames, you contain your excitement and move inside (don't want to tempt the bees by extracting near them).  Be sure that you have thoroughly cleaned your workspace and all tools and equipment.


The next step is to cut the wax cappings from the comb.  The cappings are literally wax that bees cover ripe honey with to contain and protect it, designating it as storage.  This is really the only wax that should be used for cosmetics (and is what we use for our lip balms & salves), because it is by nature clean and fresh.

Once you've cut away the cappings, take a moment to stop and admire the unique color of whatever-season honey you're extracting.  Hold it against the light, squint, smile, whatever.  Just notice it.  Then, place it your extractor.

homemade extractor

Our extractor is a little different, just like our bee suits are different (costumes we call them), because it is homemade.  Such are the perks of having a carpenter/tinkerer/seamster on your team.  Our extractor works the way commercial ones do, for the most part.  That is, it spins the frames--which are placed like spokes in a wheel--utilizing centrifugal force to push the honey out of the comb.  The honey flies out, hits the side of the extractor, and collects at its base, where you have a spigot for easy release.  As you pour the honey from the extractor to your storage container, you filter out

filtering

any wax
or other remnants.

And that, my friends, is all.  Pure, raw, filtered honey.  And it is soooo good!

After we harvested some honey from each of our city and country hives, we compared them.  Woo hoo! Just like last year, we were super impressed with how bright, citrusy, floral, and generally fun the city honey was.  Whatever you are doing, neighbor friends, please keep it up!

If you are interested in trying some of our honey, we are finally ready for sale!  We sold some of our honey and lip balm at the Gear Up for Good event last week and had a great time, hanging out with our good friends (and family) at Al's, Broke Spoke, and more.  We will also be selling honey at the East End Community Market on Saturday mornings from 9am-2pm.  That market (on 3rd Street and Midland Ave), opened last week, but we won't arrive there til next week (July 23rd).  Alternatively, you can always email us at 5thstapiary@gmail.com and we'll work something out.

Gear Up for Good: Life on the North End

Whew, it has been a busy month!  We promise we'll describe the process of the honey harvest soon, but in the meantime, we are preparing for an event that we're pretty excited about...and is time sensitive (as in, tomorrow).  So, we'll talk about that for a minute.

As proud members of the dynamic North Side community, we'll be participating in the upcoming Gearing Up for Good: Life on the North End, which is a Debra's Social $timulus event. What that means is this Friday evening (July 8th, 5:30-9pm), we'll be hanging out on 6th Street and Limestone with our buddies at Broke Spoke Community Bike Shop, Al's Bar, Bullhorn, Homegrown Press, SideCar, Supreme Service, Sprocket Jockeys, etc., to celebrate the cool stuff going on in our neck of the woods.  Food, music, and great company are free.

We'll also be selling our spring honey crop (so you can see what Lexington really tastes like) and giving tours of the apiary (via a brief ride from the Sprocket Jockeys or a 4-block walk).  Debra Hensley's done a lot of amazing work pulling this event together and we'd like to offer a big thanks to her and Melissa Watt (who filmed these videos).  They both came by the apiary last month to video the two of us in our native habitat (below).

In other neighborhood news, we are also proud members of the East End community and will be participating in the East End Community Farmers Market at the corner of Third Street and Midland Ave (at the brick Community Ventures Corporation pavilion).  Though we won't be starting our run there until July 23rd, it is celebrating its Grand Opening this Saturday, July 9th (9am-2pm this and every week).  Check it out!

If you are unable to make either location, but are interested in some urban honey, shoot us an email at 5thstapiary@gmail.com and we'll see what we can do.  

Epilogue

This post begins with us sitting in the backyard with our gin & tonics, watching little flags of white darting past through the sky. The white doesn't show on the video, but it's a pretty fun scene. It's our bees, of course, cleaning out their hives. We'll get into the whole white thing a little later.



Last time we wrote about our efforts at requeening, and have been told that it was quite the soap opera. Sorry to leave you hanging if you happen to be as interested in this stuff as we are. It has been a busy couple of weeks! In a really great way though.

see the marked queen?

As we discussed in our last post, we purchased 6 hygienic queens to either requeen poor performing queens or make splits to ultimately increase our beeyard (we made the decision that this year we would focus on colony expansion and try to create many small hives that could grow into solid production hives next spring; this is our attempt to move away from buying packaged bees from more southern climes and really start to develop a local population of bees that are adjusted to our conditions). This is why we've jumped from 4 hives to 19...and is part of why we're back down to 17.  In any case, to provide an epilogue to our queening adventures, a couple of the queens we tried to introduce into hives were killed by the workers. Boo.

However, the most important one, Quinn (who subbed for Doris), was accepted! I can't tell you how excited to learn this. She was the only hive that we REALLY needed to introduce new genetics to, and the very reason why we needed them requeened was the same reason that made us fear it would be difficult: they're just so mean! In fact, not long after they heard us celebrating Quinn's acceptance, one crawled up my pant leg--finding the one chink in my armor--down my big rubber boot and stung me on the ankle. I didn't even care. In two months (it should take that long for Quinn's bees to really become the hive), that colony will be a completely different animal.

bees!

Without going into too much detail, we'll try to offer a condensed version of why we think the cards fell where they did for each new queen. One reason has to do with the bees' natural reproduction cycle. Doris, the aggressive hive that accepted her queen, has been gearing up to swarm all spring. However, due to the perpetual inclement weather, she never actually did. Because--we hypothesize--we requeened her before she achieved a swarm, maybe we caught the workers at a point where they were expecting a new queen soon (remember that the old queen leaves with the swarm and a new queen--reared by the worker--stays at the current location) and may have been more inclined to trust a new queen. The hives that killed the new queens all had something in common...they were our packaged hives that we were using the new queens to split. So basically, they'd already gone through a requeening process about a month ago. They weren't at a natural swarming point, and may have felt less inclined to trust a new queen when they could just raise their own. Who knows. It's a possibility.

hive skirt

In any case, I think it's easy to relate to the plight of a colony in that situation. Here you are, queenless, with a window of only three days before the old queen's eggs hatch and it will be too late to raise your own (to make a queen workers feed any egg an excess amount of royal jelly).  Then here comes this queen in a cage.   She's fully grown, yes, but how can you really trust her if you've never seen her lay an egg, knowing that her ovaries are wholly responsible for the survival of your colony? It's crazy! If you take the chance to rear one yourselves, you at least know that she's going to be made of the same stuff that you are. Makes sense.

So here's the fun part, the part that brings us sitting in the back yard with our gin & tonics watching little flags of white dashing through the sky. In order to merge the now-queenless splits we'd made from our package hives, we would have to recombine them with the colonies they came from. We were hoping this wouldn't be too problematic, since the week prior they were all one colony, but there is a little trick you can do when combining a group of bees (queenless) with another group of bees (queenright) to ease

tissue between bodies

the transition. You stack the queenless hive body on the queenright hive body, separated by newspaper (we used the paper that wax foundation comes wrapped in). The bees are separated at first, but by a pervious paper layer that allows their phermones to mingle. As the bees pick through the paper, the queenless bees can sense the presence of the queen, and the queenright bees can get used to the notion of a few thousand more bees joining their ranks. Because bees are usually pretty clean by nature, they should ultimately remove the paper barrier (thus leading to the flying paper scraps zig-zagging across the sky). By the time they've opened the space up between the two hive bodies, hopefully, you'll have one harmonious colony.

That's all for now. Next time, honey extraction!!

Queens

better than a singing telegram

Ahh. What a weekend.  After weeks of slimy weather, we had a weekend that was both mostly sunny AND mostly warm!  We hit some personal beekeeping milestones: we harvested the season's first honey from one of our country hives, we killed our first queen (not to make this light, we'll revisit our reasons for doing so later), and we received a package of six queen bees in the mail and then requeened or split several hives (tally's up to 19 now!!).

Because so many of our milestones included queens, let's focus there.  First off, we have a hive with a temperment that--we've slowly noticed--is terrible.  Her name is Doris. When you smoke them, half fly off to attack the smoke (the "normal reaction"* is to retreat between the frames and gorge on honey). When you gently blow on them, entreating them to disperse so you can see the comb beneath, they bristle and buzz and half fly off to attack the wind

our new hive labels

(the "normal reaction"* is to simply disperse).  When they were a smaller hive, we'd noticed this spastic behavior, but it wasn't yet a problem.  Their enlarged size seems to have emboldened them more (or maybe they just have a larger population of guard bees, whose job is to protect the hive).  In any case, now that they are grown up (like the 6-hive-bodies-tall that they are right now), it takes longer to work them, which has proven a dangerous proposition.  Even though they are doing a bang up job of bringing in the nectar (we just harvested 5 frames of light-colored honey from them), we can't afford to have bees that nasty, so we've decided to requeen (as the queen is the mother of every bee in the colony).

To this end, we ordered several queens from a genetic line that is known for its gentleness, acclimation to Northern climes, and its cleanliness (this can help in the management of pests and pathogens).  That was the easy part.  The hard part was just FINDING Doris's queen.  When you must meticulously analyze each frame in a 6 body-tall hive (that's 60 frames) looking for one specific bee among tens of thousands of them, well, let's just say it takes a while.  Over the past few weeks, we'd been through every frame at least twice and hadn't seen her.  

attending their dead queen

But this weekend, we were motivated.  We'd invested in a queen that was going in that hive. So, new queen in hand, we changed our strategy and both inspected each frame so there would be two sets of eyes checking for her.  Gratefully, this method unveiled her early... and Grant squished her on the spot.

It was an inglorious way to end a dynasty--really, one that we resented but also really really respected (many say that aggressive bees can be the better honey collectors and survivors).  We just didn't want to spend our lives with her.  It seemed dangerous to us to have bees that pose a threat to people in the area.  Even her drones would affect the genetics of other hives we'd keep out there.  No, she had to go.  Sorry, Doris.

We're not really sure how long it takes the bees to communicate to one another that they're queenless.  We do know that when you take a queen from the hive, the nearby bees know it and may start fanning (releasing a certain phermone from their nasanov gland) to indicate to her where her hive is (see the video below for a shot of some bees in another hive doing this).   After we killed Doris, we temporarily placed her on a board near the hive.  Several bees attended her.  We let them, thinking they could be the messengers.  After a while, we moved the queen to the car and found that bees continued to linger in the spot where she'd lain.

We also know that a hive will not remain queenless for too long before they start the business of rearing a new queen.  We've read accounts from varying beekeepers citing that this can happen within an hour, or could be as long as a day.  Our experience last year was that a day was too long to wait before introducing a foreign queen. The bees were already committed to rearing their own and killed the queen we introduced.  We didn't have an hour to wait with Doris, so we crossed our fingers and inserted the new queen almost immediately.  Let's hope they like Quinn and decide to keep her.  Though,  to quote Winnie-the-Pooh, "you can never tell with bees."  The video below shows the first reaction of Doris's bees to their new queen in her cage.  We discuss this process a bit in an earlier post if you'd like some insight into what's actually happening here.

On a different note, we'll end on a treat that also involves queens.  While working one of our favorite hives (and also our first) this weekend, we caught sight of the queen in the process of laying eggs (this was the first time we'd witnessed this process) and got a brief video.  Enjoy.

*I will qualify "normal" as being normal to an Italian stock of bees that are the most popular in beekeeping due to their more docile personality.  Of course one should not really refer to genetic traits of one type of bee as 'normal' and genetic traits of another type of bee as 'abnormal', but we're allowing ourselves some liberties.

Shapes

In under two months, the number of hives in our backyard has more than quadrupled. From 3 to 13 hives in five weeks...whew.  It is a lot of hives to host in town, and really, once they are full grown, it will be too much and we'll have to move several of them to other locations.

In the short term, the populations are low and we like the convenience for monitoring their progress.  We've expanded in three different ways this year: bought packages, caught swarms, and made splits.  All of these methods begin humbly with small populations of bees trying to build up a new colony.  Specifically, these bees must first draw the wax into the honeycomb form they use for storing food and raising brood*.  For packages, where you introduce a population of bees to a foreign queen, it is particularly important to be able to monitor whether or not the queen has been accepted by the workers.

So while the populations are small and somewhat "needy" (note that we say this strictly from a management perspective), it is ok to keep 13 in a city plot. But that's why we've started calling our

three new hives

backyard apiary a "nursery"--most of the hives we keep here will always be young and may need extra management.

But one potential problem of this high density approach is the bees' ability to distinguish their hive from the others.  Bees have quite a sophisticated sense of navigation, but it is also unusual in a natural setting for so many similar looking hives to be in such close proximity.  Because they recognize colors and shapes, one technique to help them find their home is to tack different shapes above each hive's entrance. I won't lie, it also

branding helps us feel special

serves as a mnemonic device for the beekeepers as we try to keep Hyssop straight from BeeBee or Cay, or Jonquil or.....

Now, the little 5 branding...that's strictly for us :)

*Wax is secreted by glands on the underside of a honeybee's abdomen.   But it requires a lot of energy.  For every 1lb of wax secreted,  it takes approximately 6 lbs of honey.

On Swarming

our swarm catching box!

There's a lot to talk about this time of year. But we'll restrain ourselves for now and get this post started with some pretty exciting news.  We caught a swarm!  And not just extracted one like Grant did last week--where he propped a ladder up to a tree and shook a bunch of bees from a branch into a box (not to downplay how much fun that was...) No, this one came to us.

But first, let's talk a minute about what a swarm is.  It is the time of year where bees are wont to do this sort of thing, so as our neighbors, it is important that you understand it a bit.  Swarming is a natural part of bees' life cycle:  it's how they, as a colony, reproduce (it doesn't take long to realize that the real organism with honeybees is the colony, not the bee).  And just like any living thing, bees are strongly motivated to do so.  As a beekeeper, you want other hives to swarm (so you can harvest them) and you try your damnedest to prevent yours from doing so.  That's a lot of bees to gain or lose.

capped queen cell

So this is the process.   The influx of pollen and nectar in the early spring flow gives the bees confidence that an offshoot colony could survive, so they go for it.   The queen pushes into overdrive egg-laying and the workers, when the time is right, rear a new queen.  Yup, the workers make a queen.  First, they build 'queen cups,' or slightly larger cells that extend beyond the normal profile of the comb.  When a queen lays an egg in this cup, the workers feed it royal jelly (which they make).  All larva receive some royal jelly as they develop, but queens receive continuous and copious amounts of it through their entire larval and pupating life.  It's what makes a queen a queen.

Several cells will get this treatment, as insurance.  The eggs destined to be queens hatch, eat the royal jelly as larvae, pupate, get sealed into their cell by the workers, and eat more royal jelly.  Despite the fact that the queen is a significantly larger bee, with a much longer lifespan, her adolescence lasts a significantly shorter time than either workers or drones (16ish days vs. 21ish days for workers and 24ish days for drones).  This is most assuredly because when a queen is needed, she's NEEDED; she's the sole egg-layer for the entire colony.  Yup, that royal jelly is really something.

subbed a proper medium  hive body

Once one or a few queen cells are capped, theoretically, the old queen will swarm with a sizable chunk of the bees in the colony, leaving the first pupating queen to emerge as the new matriarch (the first one will sting the remaining cells, killing them; if two emerge simultaneously, they duke it out).  The old queen and the group of bees that leave with her...that's a swarm.  They are looking for a new home.  Because they don't have one yet, they have nothing to defend.  Without a home, they are docile.  This is important for folks to remember about swarms and  the nature of bees.  They don't want to sting you unless they really think you pose a threat to the colony.  The act of stinging kills the bee, so it is therefore an act of hive defense, not self defense.

we marked the swarm's queen

A swarm doesn't know where its new home will be when it leaves, so it will often camp out in a temporary location for a while (often in a tree).  Scout bees will shoot off and scope out prospective homes.  When one returns with a good location in mind, she'll signal the other bees via the waggle dance, and the swarm will move on it.  It is in this staging area where they are most desirable and easiest to gather.  This is the kind of swarm that Grant collected in the previous post from the upper boughs of a pine tree.

So, how does one catch a swarm without going through this 'harvesting' process? We set out a wooden box with frames and a little bit of lemongrass oil (the lemongrass oil is actually very similar to the scent produced by a bee's nasanov gland, which communicates a hive's location to other members of the colony).  Basically, we wanted to just the sort of habitat a bee would look for. A scout bee from a swarm found our box and convinced the colony that she'd found the best new home.

So now we have a new hive.  With local, survivor genetics from a proven queen.  And what a queen she is.  I think anyone can appreciate an abdomen like that!

First Swarm of 2011

With the gracious help of Brian Ronk I collected our first swarm of bees for the season! Brian and I climbed to the top of a two story house, and then I climbed up another twelve foot of extension ladder, leaning from the top of the roof up to the uppermost branches of a pine tree, to collect the large swarm of bees. 
They have been added to the 5th Street Apiary and seem to have settled in despite the rainy weather.  Hopefully Brian was able to get some good video and maybe we can get a link up.
If you see a swarm give me a call, 312.2122, and I will do my best to collect them.  Swarms do not have a great chance of surviving if left on their own and they may end up somewhere they are not wanted and be subjected to a can of wasp killer.  Not a good outcome.  Your reward is a free jar of honey!


UPDATE: Once the hive was settled in, we found (or rather didn't find) something unsettling.  The queen didn't make it with the rest of the bees.  Ug.  Fortunately, we'd made a split from Columbia last time we inspected her because we'd found capped and uncapped queen cells*. When no queen was evident in the swarm (you can tell because they don't act settled like they do when they're queenright), Grant combined the split nucleus we'd made from our booming hive (replete with a number of queen cells.  He inspected again yesterday afternoon and found a small queen had emerged!


* This time of year, when you see a hive building queen cells, it likely means they want to swarm.  Swarming is really just a hive--as an organism--reproducing itself and we'll probably need to dedicate a whole post to that process.  However, it is important to know that swarms are quite docile because they don't have anything to defend.  Anyway, so the workers need to make a new queen so the old one can go with the swarm, so they do so by making queen cells.  You, as a beekeeper, may try to prevent this by making a split.  More on all that later.