Winter in the Bee Yard

Winter in the Bee Yard is rather boring.  The bees still fly when is it warm but not with as much energy.  This little girl came out one cool morning, checked out the temp and returned to the hive box.  The opening has been reduced by the wooden "reducer" to keep out the cold and hopefully to prevent the entry of mice in the winter.  Mice love to move into a hive box, it is warm, and there is a food source - honey.

This intruder must have thought is was safe to enter the hive.  Guess they showed him.

The bees are now all gathered into one big ball.  They will produce heat by doing something similar to shivering.  Ever so often the bees in the warm center will move to the outside.  They are polite to share the work.  Bees never freeze in the winter but they can starve to death.  It is our hope that they have enough honey stored up and will be able to access it through the winter to keep them going.

The bees have quit going to the feeder where we have provided them with sugar water for the past few weeks.  We will remove the feeders and now we can quit purchasing 25lb bags of sugar until spring.

More photos from Honey collection

Here are some more photos from the honey collection.

Yum!

Hot, sweaty and sweet work!

Robbers in Aggie's hive

Tuesday, August 31, 2010
We went to Aggie's to rob the honey from her bee hive.  This is quite a process and it involves taking what the honey bees have labored long and hard to produce.  That said, they just might resent us taking their honey.

First we smoke them, which mostly covers up any alert, intruder, attack pheromone they might produce.  We do not want everyone to get upset with us.  Here I am with all my protective gear ready to smoke them.

The top compartment is called a super.  It has smaller frames.  The queen is kept down in the hive bodies by a queen excluder which is a screen that allows the worker bees access but the queen is too big to squeeze by.  This keeps her from laying eggs in the super and the honey bees use these frames for just storing honey.

To get the bees to leave the super we spray a product called Bee Gone on felt inside the top of a cover.  They cannot stand the smell of this product.  They will leave the super and go down into the hive body after a few minutes.  We waited about 15 minutes and opened the hive and low and behold only a few hold outs (bees who must not have a good sense of smell).

Harry removed each frame...blew off the remaining bees and placed the frame in a hive body we had positioned in a wheel barrel.  I quickly covered it with a towel.  We did not want the bees to find the honey.

Note:  the limit of his protection was long sleeves.  Bees like him.
He is using a neat little clamp that makes lifting the frames much easier.  Bees have stuck the frames into the hive with their propolis.Perhaps this is to make it difficult for us.

Once we had all the frames in the wheel barrel and covered for security reasons (we did not want the bees to know thieves were at work) it is off to the garage.  You have to work with the honey in an enclosure or the bees, yellow jackets, and other insects will find you.  Who needs that kind of competition?

We are members of the local beekeepers association and have use of the honey extraction equipment.  This includes the extractor, hot knife, and a plastic tub for catching the wax.

Aggie is removing the wax capping using the hot knife. 



We all had to try this.  This is the most fun!

Frames are then placed in the extractor and spun by turning the crank.  It works like a centrifuge and spins the honey out of the comb.

Unfortunately my camera battery died about this time.

The next day Harry cleaned up the extractor.  Well he thought he had cleaned it ... and he looked out to find the bees did not approve of the cleaning job he had done and they were finishing it for him.  They took every last drop of honey form the extractor.

This is the beautiful result.

Keep your hands off my honey.

How did Jack Trap's chickens get in this blog?

Swat Team Alert

"A Wake County sheriff's deputy found himself

in serious need of a  
SWAT team Tuesday after getting into a standoff 

with a huge swarm of  
bees that covered his police cruiser."
 
I'm giving them big points for the SWAT team pun!
 

Click here to see the whole story complete with picturs

Swat Team

Another story sent to me from the Garden on The Edge shows a unique way of observing bees. 
Click here to see the pictures of the bees under glass. 
Bees will fill the space, no matter where it is. The Langstroth hives that most beekeepers use is designed with what he (Langstroth) discovered to be “bee space” (~3/8”). The space between the frames is just enough that they will build out the comb on each frame but not get carried away and fill it like they did in the jar. There is enough space for two bees to pass one another after the comb has been built out.

Aggie's bees

Our friend Aggie is not able to work with her bees especially during this heat wave.  We went over today to look at the hive and make sure all looked good.

Aggie's hive has two hive body boxes and one souper on top.  The plan is for the bees to raise their young in the lower two hive body boxes and store honey in the top souper which we plan to rob later.








The first frame just had some comb being built out. 

Second frame has about 1/3 of the honey capped.














Third frame about 1/3 capped honey.

Fourth frame, bonanza, Mostly capped honey. 

Fifth frame about 3/4 capped honey.  No pictures of frames 6, 7 and 8 but they were about 1/2 capped honey. 

This is a frame from the top box that was all honey and a lot of it is capped.  This box was very heavy with honey.  The bottom box had capped brood so the queen is still doing her job. 

All and all Aggie's honey bees are  were docile and calm, they must take after Aggie.  They were quiet while we messed in their hive.  No one got stung.
All looks good Aggie.

Off Topic

Can anyone identify this bird?

Bearding

We have been observing lots of activity on our yellow hive for weeks.  Queen bees can lay up to 1500 eggs in one day so it stands to reason that she can have that many daughters emerging in a day.  After the worker bee emerges from the cell she cleans it up and starts working in the hive building wax or feeding larvae or other such duties.  Then she will become a forager.  She leaves the hive box and spends some time getting oriented and taking some practiced flights.  Which way is North?

You can see why this is called a beard.  This picture was taken early this morning and the crowd will increase as the sun comes up.

Compare it to the green hive which has significantly fewer bees.