Honey, Sweet Honey

We visited Hollis' farm today for the use of his excellent manual extractor... a machine which uses centrifugal force to spin out the frames. Mostly it was all capped, so we use a 'cappings fork' to scrape the 'lids' off the comb and place into the spinner. There was a small pail (~10 lbs) of light honey which came from the uncapped parts first spun, kept separate. This is honey that is very light amber and liquid (runny) since the bees weren't quite done with it (hadn't removed all the moisture and capped it yet). That might ferment sooner, so it will be used first. (More about MEAD to follow as well, as H. suggested to us that batch is a good source to make it.)

Next we uncapped, and spun out ~35 lbs. of the deeper, more viscous golden elixir, as the poet Lorca put it, "the epic of love/the materialization of the infinite/the soul and the blood of flowers". Absolute delight. We also saved the cappings and the wax for candles. P'raps a picture or two to follow. Next we'll jar it up for friends and family! Yayyy!
edit: pic!

We gave back the supers for the bees to clean out, but will likely put them away in a couple of days for next spring. Leaving on the original brood box, the second brood box, the queen excluder, and the dadant super from last week for now. H. suggests we take them down to a single box for the winter. We're looking into questions of size and medicine now, thinking about splitting the hive and growing a new queen, probably will wait until spring now, since the blackberry flowers have all pretty much turned into lil'green berries now. A top bar hive? Maybe building our own with a viewing panel? Lots to research and think about for the future. For now, we know that our mysterious unidentified queen is an amazing layer!


All is tinder dry here... note to self to make sure smoker is fully extinguished before setting it down in the dry grass...

Rainfall totals for July 2010 @ YVR: 0.6 mm (usu. average for July is 40 mm)

I Did It Myself!

I hadn't even considered opening the hive on my own but the desire to see what was going on inside outweighed my hesitation and I decided to go for it. Sorry there are no pictures of in hive interior but iIcan report that there was absolutely no room available in the brood box or honey supers. The entire hive was jam packed with bees, comb and sweet sweet honey!

In the honey super with the missing frame they had filled the empty space with comb attached to the wall which I removed to put the new frame in. It was beautifully made and filled with deliciousness, too bad it got all warped and distorted on removal because it was warm and soft and  honey was dripping everywhere.

It took superhuman willpower but I managed to save some for you:

The brood box was completely filled with bees, and the plastic frame was all drawn out. There were so many bees it was difficult to see what was in the cells, and i only pulled out the middle four frames because their sound  began to increase both in volume and pitch so I decided to finish up as quick as possible. So my inspection wasn't complete, but I can report that I did see open cells with brood, cells capped with white, cells capped with yellow and honey. Mostly i saw bees. We thought there were a lot of bees the last time we looked, but I'm tellin' you what, there were just bees upon bees covering every surface, and more bees in the air all around. I didnt see any queen cells, and that strange bulge on frame #4 (counting from the track side) was still there, still closed and didnt look any different as far as I could remember. What could it be?
The queen excluder was all covered with burr comb dripping with delicious honey. I scraped off some and gave it to the kids, but I left a lot simply because there were so many bees all over it that it was hard to tell what was what. also it was hot and i was sweatin like a hog.

I quickly put the new brood box, the excluder, then honey super and then the two full ones on top. Maybe I overestimated my strength because it took almost all my power to lift all that honey to the top of the stack. with 2 brood boxes and 3 honey supers the hive is a beautiful tall tower:

 Even though the boxes should only be painted white I couldn't resist adding a little pastel color just for fun. I read all over the interweb about alternate colors and the consensus seemed to be that only light colors should be used due to heat concerns, but beyond that the bees dont care.
All in all I am very pleased with the work of cleaning up the boxes and fixing up the frames with new clean foundation and replaced missing/broken wire (one frame is fixed up with a guitar string) and cutting down two large frames to make up for the missing ones. The bees have a lot of room now to expand their operations and judging by their flight traffic they are busy doing it. Go Bees!

speaking of bees on lavender

i just thought i'd forward along this lovely shot i happened across upon flickr today:
see it large (it's better)

Still Going Strong

It has been 10 days since  putting those new frames in, and the bees have been gettin down to business. The weather has been fine, sunny and warm without being hot. The big seasonal flow seems to be still going strong  judging by the action around the hive, the bees are arriving and leaving in numbers that cause a terrific traffic jam at the entrance.

workin the lavender:

Busy busy bees!

Wow, the blackberry flowers flow is really on! So incredibly busy, the queen's been laying and the hive seems to have quadrupled in size since it first arrived in happy little Davesland. To "recap" so to speak:

On June 17th, we went in and took a peek, and all seemed well, and at that point we put on a 'dadant' honey super. We should have returned sooner, since the flow was very good in the last few weeks, and by the next time we opened it up, July 6, just a little over two weeks later, they'd managed to quite fill that super, with mostly all capped off honey! Sweet! There was a crazy mass of burr comb all over the queen excluder, and several of the brood box frames had been drawn out right to the wall, bursting to full with honey and new brood. In fact, even one of the two ugly black plastic frames that the bees had heretofore avoided drawing out had foundation starting to rise on it. There were so many bees and so few empty combs that I feared the queen would decide she didn't have enough room to grow, and might swarm if we left her like that another couple of weeks!

So, we scraped of lots of the burr comb, rotated inwards the two black plastic frames, and put on a second honey super (moving the full one up a level, we set the empty new one directly on top the queen excluder. Then, on Thursday, I went over and met and chatted with Chris, of Chris' Honey Yard (at 72 Ave & 152 St.) He very kindly helped set me up with some older boxes and frames, as well as some new sheets of foundation, and showed me how, after the frames are cleaned up, to half or quarter the sheets, and hang them into the frames as neatly as possible (we attached with wax, but he said you could also nail them in with a small top strip of wood.) It was so incredibly hot on Thursday, and the boxes (a brood and a dadant) plus frames were so grimy, that we only fixed up one brood box frame to replace one of the crappy black plastic frames, and also one extra honey super frame, as it turned out the new box we'd put in on Tuesday was TWO frames short not just one, so we'll definitely have to get another dadant frame in that box in a few days too. Anyway, they've got some space to work on now, and hopefully the queen --she of wonder and mystery driving this whole growth overdrive, yet who we still haven't been able to eyeball!--hopefully she'll now have enough space at least for a few more days to keep laying.

I feel like we quite disturbed them this week, smoking them and messing around lifting up almost all of the frames looking for any peanut shaped queen cells that might be hanging around, that any swarm instinct has probably been thwarted for now.

It was truly amazing to see though, the stunning growth in just a few short weeks. It seems like the blackberry flowers only just opened up, but the window is so brief, even now as I look at the big splash of blackberry bushes in my own backyard, most of the flowers are now withered into tiny green berries. Chris suggested this flow is probably the last big one of the summer. Like my apiarist mentor, Hollis, he suggested that if we'd had a second hive box, and done it a couple of weeks ago, we probably could have pulled out a few frames (that we were certain didn't hold the queen) rotated some new empty foundation in, and tried to get them to grow a new queen, effectively creating a second hive. Now at this point, we have a box to clean up, and we could put it over the existing brood box, or even just clean up and install the dadant for the existing queen to lay in, but now that the flow is on the tail end, perhaps it would be better to try to maintain one big strong hive instead of two weaker ones.

Ah well, we'll watch and see (closer and more frequently now) and we'll know for next year to be even better prepared for when the flow first hits. Also, for that full super on the top: I think I worked out the use of Chris' mechanical extractor... but Hollis' hand cranked one is also available to us, although out in Langley. We should very shortly get the honey out of that one and put it back into the hive for them to re-fill if they can, if it looks like the flow might continue another couple of weeks yet.

I also have some pictures from a couple of weeks ago to post for your viewing pleasure.
Cheers to all!
-=pj=-

lately

Everything seems to be going ok for the bees.
Several times I have seen them a block or so away on some flowers.
you should come over.

oh how i love the little bee

that makes the honey for our tea

and pollinates so many plants

and wear those crazy pollen pants.