Chapstick, Success!

Made a double boiler with a pot of water and a pyrex measuring cup. Then added one part beeswax (with some honey still included) and, if memory serves, three parts olive oil. Then added the fluid from some vitamin E tablets for a preservative.

I've saved small tins for a couple years. Cleaned them up and poured in the hot mix.


The chapstick is very smooth. I'll try different types of oil in the future. I also need to buy some tins, as the Altoid tins are now all dispersed to the guinea pig friends who wanted to try the chapstick first. So far no complaints.

Honey drained from the Wax Cappings

The new decapping tray, pictured at harvest time, was fabulous. They say that the honey drained from the wax cappings (the wax you cut off the frame before extracting the honey) is the very best honey. We got almost four whole pints of honey from the decapping collector. Two freezer containers of wax cappings for later wax projects, currently stored in the freezer.

The cappings honey is not strained, so it has little bits of wax floating in it. It is kind of like chewing gum, munching on the wax.

Calculating Pints of Honey

For the record, this is how the math teacher determines how many pints are in the bottling bucket.

The volume of a cylinder: volume =Pi * radius squared * height.

Volume answer is in cubic inches...google for table of "cubic inches to pints" conversion.

The radius of our bottling bucket is 5.5 inches.

Another measurement of this harvest: the bees filled their top deep and two supers with honey. We harvested from the two supers (small boxes): five frames from one, six frames from the other.

We put the supers back on the hives, including five partially filled frames. At least a couple of the frames we returned to the bees had capped honey on one side and uncapped honey on the other side.

23 pints and some new tools

Postscript on DRAT

I'm to report that the assistant bee keeper "is NOT limping." She says that makes her sound like a wuss. Actually, you can barely see where she was stung, so that is a good thing.

We had further thoughts on the new hive. It could be that this hive was the source of the swarm, and that instead of having no queen, they may just have a NEW queen, who hasn't gotten her egg laying groove on yet. We're hopeful. But we're also trying to find someplace to buy a queen, just in case. If we can be sure of a queen in that hive, we may recombine it with the swarm hive, which we believe to be completely a queenless mess.

Poor bees. We just figure it all out as we go along.

Well, drat all around.

A problematic day in beekeeping.

1. The good news: I have still not been stung. The bad news: the assistant beekeeper suffered our first sting. We made it over a year with no injuries. Today a bee crawled up her pants' leg and got squashed and gave its life and its stinger. The ABK is limping around with a baking soda poultice on her leg.

2. The good news: The swarm hive has drawn out frame throughout their box. The bad news: they are looking suspiciously queenless. Not much uncapped brood, too many drone cells and drones hanging out. Could we have another laying worker hive?

3. The good news: The original hive is chock full of honey. We put on a bee escape to see if we can harvest honey from the two supers on Monday. The bees should go out of the bee escape into the rest of the hive and not be able to get back up into the supers, so we should be able to just lift the supers off and take them in the house in a couple days. Their top deep is also chock full of honey. The uneasy news: we couldn't get into the bottom deep to check on things there. The top deep was REALLY HEAVY, and seemed to have frames stuck to the bottom box, so we gave up without fully assessing the situation of the hive. We are hopeful that the bottom box is not full of honey and that there is a queen and brood and a normal situation down there. We should have harvested honey a week or two ago, but have been out of town and unavailable.

4. The good news: well, heck, let's just skip to the worries of the hive that we started this spring. "The new hive," not to be confused with "the swarm hive." We didn't find a remarkable lot of brood or honey in the new hive's box. The bottom deep box had lots of bees in it, but not much of anything in the cells. The top deep box had honey around the top edges, but we didn't see much evidence of a queen. Could we be losing both of our two newest hives?

Drat. I took a couple pictures of the swarm hive frames, but was having trouble with the blogging program, so I'll maybe post those separately.

Swarm

So yesterday, I'm sitting in my living room drinking my morning coffee, enjoying the peace and quiet of the morning, when my next door neighbor comes over and rings the doorbell. "I think I've got something of yours," she says.

We trudge next door and she points to a small pile of bees on the ground, probably fifty or so bees, a pile the size of a small hand. "Huh," I said. "That's not a swarm. There's not enough bees. Plus, swarms usually aren't sitting on the ground. They're up in a clump in a tree." I pointed upward, vaguely. We all looked up. My neighbor took a few involuntary steps back toward her house. There, up in the tree, was a swarm, tens of thousands of bees clinging together. We all paused for a quick think. Then I launched into reassurances. "Hey, wow. No problem. Swarms are not looking to sting anyone. They just want a home. We can call a local beekeeper, and they'll be glad to come get them. Free bees!

We would have thought about getting them ourselves, but they were twenty feet up, and we didn't have any equipment...no swarm catching bucket on a pole, no big ladder, no hive. We called our friend who keeps bees professionally. He was on his way out the door to go camping with his family, but said he would call someone. By the time we got a call back, it was too late. We had a plan.
*We made some sugar water and put some of it in a spray bottle. We got the cardboard nuc (small box holding five frames of bees) that our latest bees came in. We put on our bee suits. We went in one of our hives and stole a frame of drawn out comb full of baby bees (see below) and put it in the nuc, along with four brand new frames with wax foundation. We grabbed an old white bedspread, a small ladder, and the tree trimming extension pole that has a hook on the end.

The assistant bee keeper climbed up the small ladder with the pole. I held the ladder and helped with the pole. We hooked the branch, looked at each other and counted to three. On three we gave the branch a huge jerk. KERFLUMP! Down came the bees, mostly on the blanket.

We hit the bees with fast squirts of sugar water. We figured they were hungry, and bees licking sugar water off themselves are usually too busy and happy to sting you. Then we picked up the bedspread and dumped a bunch of bees in the cardboard nuc onto the frames.

The bees figured out that they had arrived, and that there were BABY BEES that needed their care. The old beekeepers in the area tell me that if you hive a swarm with baby bees, they will almost always stay put and not swarm out again. Sure enough, they had hardly hit the box when some of the bees put their tail ends in the air to send out pheromones indicating that this was home and everyone else should come.

We put the top on the box, leaving the little round entrance open. Pretty soon the vast majority of the swarm was in or on the box. Then we went home to wait a spell.

When we returned around four, most everybody was inside the box. We corked the entrance and took them to the backyard.

(Meanwhile, I had spent some frantic time on the phone trying to find a hive. Many thanks to Orr Bee Supply in Old Fort, North Carolina, for opening on a Saturday to help me deal with my emergency.)

We transferred the five frames into the new hive, spraying everybody with sugar water as we went. We dumped the bees out of the bottom of the box into the hive, put a sugar water feeder on top, and left the box near the entrance for any stragglers to find their way home.

I just checked the neighbor's tree. The morning after there is a fist sized clump of bees hanging there. They were the bees that were out and about gathering and hunting when we moved the cardboard nuc. I'm sad about them, but these things happen. For a hive, it is not the loss of the individual bees, but the survival of the hive. This hive has a happy new home.

*I'm not sure how my neighbor feels about the remaining small clump of bees, but I'm sure this is preferable to tens of thousands.