In the Jar

Another pretty crop of bee juice, bottled and waiting to bring joy to the lucky few. This time we used all larger bottles. If we harvest in August, which is looking hopeful, we'll probably fill a lot of little bottles for wider sample distribution.

The honey bear is cute. Perhaps next time I'll order bears for greater honey kitsch.

I also put lots of wax cappings in the chest freezer. Got enough for some candles and chapstick.

Checking and Robbing the Hives

Here is the Assistant Beekeeper pulling a frame out of the super on the little hive to see if they had any capped honey. They have drawn out honey comb in this super and filled it with nectar, but so far very few caps. Still, we're just pleased and proud to see them flourishing. After we process honey from the other hive, we're going to give them one of the supers so they have room to expand. We'll also pop in a queen excluder so they don't put any brood in the supers.

We then proceeded to the super duper tall hive. We checked the four supers, rearranged a bit and popped a fume board on the top (pictured below) to get the bees out of two supers of capped honey.

The bottom super had capped honey with brood along the bottom of the frames. We left that for them, and put a queen excluder on top of that super. We moved the very top super on top of the excluder, since it was full of nectar but not capped honey.

The two middle supers were chock full of capped honey, so they were moved to the top, emptied mostly of bees and popped in the wheelbarrow for transport to the house. The lovely towels prevent us picking up hitchhikers on the way.


So the tall hive now consists of two deeps, one shallow super with honey and a little brood, a queen excluder and one shallow super filled with nectar. The Assistant Bee Keeper is hollering at me to get moving so we can process some honey. More on that later!

Much Ado about Robbing

We left the hive on the sidewalk overnight, and this morning there were bees flying in and out. By the sunny part of the day there were a good twenty or more bees coming in and out of the entrance. We got all optimistic about the belief that we were hosting a swarm, but figured we needed to pop that top deep box off and put a feeder on top.

So we took off the top box...peeked in the bottom box...and there were maybe ten bees sitting on frames hanging out.

We have a new theory. One bee flew into the garage, found the old deep and frames sitting there and found a little something left in a few of the cells on the frames that she thought was worth collecting. She went back to the hive, recruited some of her sisters with a little dance and brought them back to the garage.

Just then, ABK and teenagers came to get in the car. ABK moved the hive outside and the bees continued to rob those small portions of whatever was still in the hive. (We had left it out on the open air porch for a month or more for the bees to clean out prior to storage.)

So...robbing, not swarming.

We went ahead and moved the hive out to the middle of the yard, where they can rob it to their little hearts' delight....and where, if they feel a need to swarm this week, they can move in. But probably not.

Hello, What?

Imagine my surprise when I come home, bags of groceries in hand, only to discover a hive on the sidewalk leading up to the back door of the house. What what?

Not just a hive, but a hive with bees going in and out.

What?

I was home for lunch, and this was definitely not here then. It is my hive...I recognize the paint.

So I'm still standing there, groceries in hand, when the Assistant BeeKeeper returns from her voyage to return the visiting loaner teenagers to their parents. It turns out that when they went to get in the car the garage door had been up a while, and there were BEES everywhere in the garage. They were mostly concentrated on the unused hive box that was just sitting in the corner, minding its own business.

ABK grabbed the hive, plopped it on the sidewalk on a bottom board, threw on a cover and hit the road.

So...we peeked in just now when we put on an inner cover, and there doesn't seem to be a whole swarm in there. We think these are mostly scouts, and that the swarm is hanging out in a nearby tree somewhere.

Now we wait and see. If they move in, then we start slowly moving the hive a few feet at a time to a more optimal location.

ABK points out that it was Memorial Day weekend or thereabouts last year when we caught a swarm next door.

This reminds me of when our friend Greg, a professional beekeeper, used to keep an empty hive on the back of his truck in case he needed it in a hurry to catch a swarm. One day he went out to his truck and saw bees going in and out of the hive. He peeked under the cover and a swarm had moved in without his assistance, right there in the bed of his truck. They were completely moved in and setting up housekeeping.

You just never know. The girls are very resourceful.

May 22 check on honey supers

Took a peek inside the supers we added to each hive. In the little hive (pictured above and below) the bees are beginning to draw out beautiful white comb on two or three of the frames. This hive has been looking good lately, with happy afternoon dances of bees around the hive.
In the enormously tall hive, we peeked in the top two supers. The newest frames on top are a similar story...the bees are just beginning to draw out comb. In the super just below, the frames are all full of nectar and the top cells are capped on each frame.

In other news, got a call from my cousins Rhonda and Kathy, and Rhonda's husband Steve this morning. They described a swarm of bees hanging on a low branch behind my aunt's old house. I advised them to find a local beekeeper...and wished they lived close by, so that I could capture that low hanging swarm myself.

Adding Supers

We made a field trip to Saluda, NC today to buy some more shallow frames and foundation. Peeked in the big mama hive and found they were busily filling the shallow box I added last week with nectar, so popped yet another super on top. This one had five frames with wax already drawn out and four frames of foundation (flat pieces of wax upon which the bees will build honey comb). I put the foundation frames in the middle in the hopes that they will start their work from the inside out.

A peek in the little hive showed a lot of bees and some beautiful new white wax in the top deep. Encouraged by their obvious progress, we popped a shallow super with ten frames of just foundation on top of them. If I'd anticipated this, I would have given them the drawn out comb, but as it was, I had to jog to the garage to get the super to top them off.

It is great to see both the blooms on the trees and the obvious signs of the bees working.

Using Bees to Keep Elephants Out of Your Garden

This news just in:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100505/ap_on_re_af/af_kenya_elephants_and_the_bees