bees

Honey on Tap

/ lizbaessler / 3 Comments

Two bee posts in a row? But how? 20150801_113442

Truth be told, my last post was about events of a few weeks ago. Today’s is about today. So, through blog magic, you get to see the results of nearly a month of honey box action!

Before going in, we always thoroughly smoke the bees. Using this great little steampunk contraption we slowly burn pine needles, pumping the bellows occasionally to create nice puffs of white smoke. Once you’ve let the needles burn for a few minutes, the smoke changes from hot to just warm and, for bees, intoxicating. It has a real calming effect on them that beekeepers have known about and exploited for centuries. And it really does seem to work. 20150801_112412

After giving the bees a few minutes to get drowsy, we prised open the hive. We set the honey box aside for a moment and examined the top box in the hive body. This is where the queen ought to be laying and new bees growing up big and strong. These frames were covered in honey that had dripped down from the honey box. A very good sign.

We took a peek inside the top hive body: no sign of the queen this time either, but there was a huge amount of brood (egg cells), as well as larvae and some honey and nectar. Basically all evidence of a healthy and productive colony. 20150801_114135 (1)

After that it was into the honey box.

We could tell just from lifting it that the bees had been at work. Honey ain’t light.

The honey box is working exactly as we were hoping it would. Of the ten frames, two and a half are completely filled with honey and capped, meaning the bees have declared it done and sealed it off for storage. All the rest of the frames have at least some honey in them. This couldn’t be going better.

The bees are working at a very fast rate, which means we have to take our next few steps fairly quickly. For one, we’ll want to add another honey box so they have plenty of room to expand and won’t slow down production or move honey storage back down to the hive body. For two, we’ll begin our honey extraction. We have a special excluder screen that fits under the honey box and allows bees out but not back in, because honey collection is easier when thousands of bees aren’t involved. 20150801_114623 (1)

Or so I’ve heard.

I’ve cross-posted this one with the community garden’s blog, too. Go give it a read!

The Road to Honey

/ lizbaessler / 4 Comments

The bees are living the good life. 20150706_122814

At least they seem to be. It’s high summer and they’re producing well, which means it’s time to start messing with them. On our most recent trip in, the plan of action was to take stock of life in the hive and, if all was well, install a honey box.

A honey box is a slightly squatter version of the boxes the bees live in. The main difference is that it’s separated from the rest of the hive by a queen excluder, a sheet of metal mesh that the worker bees can fit through but the larger queen bee can’t. That means no eggs can be laid past it, and it can be devoted to honey. Not all beekeepers do this, but it seems a whole lot easier to me. Here’s ours: the excluder will obviously go under it when we place it on top of the hive.

Our first order of business was to pretty up one of our old honey boxes. This meant scraping away all the propolis. Propolis is a hard, waxy substance (not to be confused with wax) that bees make to cement their hive together.

20150706_122104My friend Tommy, of previous mulberry
fame, was visiting, so we set him to work scraping propolis off of the honey box and frames.

Poor guy. It was his birthday.

We went to the zoo afterward, though, so it was alright.

Propolis is popular as a dietary supplement and all-around healer. We saved all of our scrapings in an envelope that I put… somewhere. As soon as I find it I’ll try concocting a balm.

Once the honey box was prepped, we donned our suits. Kim always wears a full suit, and we managed to get Tommy fully outfitted. I always wear a full coat, veil, and gloves, but the rest of my outfit is a little more improvised.

20150706_123400I had already tucked my jeans into my socks when we discovered some holes worn through in a particularly bee-vulnerable area. I didn’t want to go all the way home for new pants, and I certainly didn’t want inner thigh stings. We had a roll of masking tape in with the equipment, and when needs must…

I wasn’t doing much with my dignity, anyway.

All passages to tender flesh sealed, we opened up the hive and took a look around. The bees have been producing famously. The queen is laying eggs at a good rate and the workers have started making honey. A couple of the frames were already noticeably heavy with it. With any luck they’ll take this new honey box and run with it.

20150706_125621The last few times we’ve been able to find the queen, but this time she was hiding. This isn’t particularly worrying – there are thousands of little guys crawling around in there, and you can’t let yourself get down just because you didn’t find a specific one. It’s mainly good to find her because it shows she’s active, but with all the eggs and larvae present, it’s easy to intuit.

We also know she’s doing well because we haven’t found any queen cells. These are big, peanut-shaped protrusions on the frame, and each one holds a larva that’s being fed royal jelly – the goop that gives a queen that special queen flair (and ability to lay a whole hive’s worth of eggs). One of these larva will emerge before the others and, as her first royal act, she will murder all her proto-queen sisters in the womb. Bees are rough. This can happen when the previous queen is dead or just not very good at her job, so a lack of queen cells is a nice vote of confidence from the colony as a whole.

Queen cells may also be laid in preparation for a swarm. Bees swarm when they’ve20150706_125640 filled up their hive – the existing queen leaves, taking roughly half the population with her to seek greener pastures. The remaining colony stays behind with a freshly hatched queen. Our plan, if this does happen, is to steal the new queen before the swarm and raise her up separately in her own little queen nook. This way we’ll have an extra queen in our pocket if ours suddenly dies or a neighboring beekeeper loses theirs and calls in a favor.

It’s also another interesting way to play God.

I’m cross-posting this bee update on my community garden’s blog. Go check it out!

Fulfilling a Dream

/ lizbaessler / 1 Comment

I’m becoming a beekeeper!20150613_125532

Eventually.

I’m a lot closer than I used to be, anyway. The community garden I belong to keeps its own bee colony, and I’m apprenticing Kimberly, the garden member who actually knows what she’s doing. I’m the faceless one on the right. I promise it’s me.

The New England winter this year was famously awful. You may have heard about it. Or experienced it. A huge number of bee colonies died, and ours was one of them. So we ordered a new starter colony. Out of a little mesh crate about the size of an actual bread box, we released a few thousand bees into our hive. They’ve had a little over a month to get settled, and they’re doing great.

20150505_131550They’ve been filling up their first box nicely, so recently we put a second box, the blue one, on top. Yesterday we went in for the first time since then to see if the queen had moved up to the second box to continue laying. Kimberly prised the frames out one at a time and I noted our findings on my little clipboard.

My Findings:

The bees are loving it in the second box. They’re active in at least half the frames, collecting nectar and storing honey. And the queen, most importantly, is out and about and laying eggs. Queens are pretty easily distinguishable from the rest of the colony, mainly because they’re so much bigger. You can pay a little extra, though,20150613_130035 to get your queen shipped with a splotch of blue paint on her back. It’s easier for us, and it’s easier for blogging. There she is, right in the top middle.

We took a peek into the bottom box, but didn’t open it all up because we’d already been messing with the bees for a while and didn’t want to keep disturbing them. There’s still a whole lot of activity down there, so next time we’ll go in and see what those guys are up to. Once most of the frames have been filled up, we’ll add a third box on top, as well as a queen excluder, which is a fine grating the worker bees can fit through but the queen can’t. That means the third box can be devoted to honey, without a bunch of eggs getting in the way. But that’ll be later in the summer. For now we’re just observing, and I’m taking notes on my clipboard.

-Bees watch out

And expressing myself artistically.