GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Tag: beekeeping for beginners

Why The Different Color Honey Cappings?

I wanted to pull some of the honey off our bigger hive. Early in the year I had stacked two honey supers on that hive, hoping to catch an early nectar flow, which I managed to do despite a swarm. But as I was going through the honey supers, which are super heavy, btw, I saw frames with different color honey cappings.

Not sure what this meant. Were the darker wax cappings honey that was older? Had the honey had more time to cure, or lose moisture and darken? There wasn’t as much dark honey in the frames, there was a lot more honey with lighter, almost white cappings.

This is a dilemma I’m happy to have, after last year’s drought left us with almost no nectar flow, and no honey to harvest. Any honey the bees managed to make we left in the hives for them to use over winter. This year’s spring rains helped kick the nectar flow in early.

Because of that early nectar flow, I wanted to pull some honey frames off the hive, extract them, and get the frames back on the hive before the nectar flow stops this summer. So I pulled off all the dark capped honey frames I found in the honey supers. Most of the lighter capped frames stayed on the hive.

If you all are wondering why I only use medium frames throughout the hive, once you pull a honey super off a hive, you will understand immediately. Honey is heavy. A medium super of honey weighs about 40 pounds. If your hive is on a hive stand, and you have two honey supers plus 3 brood supers on a hive, you are pulling 40 pounds off a hive above your head.

I put metal handles on all my honey supers, and its ideal to have a helper with this any most all jobs with beekeeping. Learn from me.

OK, back to the question of cappings. Why white and darker cappings in the same hive? First an explanation about cappings from the best beekeeping blog, Honey Bee Suite. Rusty says:

Depending on their genetics, bees either place the capping wax directly on the surface of the honey, or they may leave a little air pocket between the surface of the honey and the wax. These two methods make no difference in the flavor, color, or quality of the honey, but they make the finished combs look dramatically different.

The honeycomb with the air pockets is said to have dry cappings. The comb appears white or very light tan. Honeycomb with wet cappings is not actually wet, but it looks like it might be. The appearance is darker and may have a variegated pattern due to scattered mini air pockets, which have a lighter color.

While some honey bees produce both types of capping, some consistently build one kind or the other. Italian honey bees (Apis mellifera ligustica) are known for producing white, dry caps. At the other end of the spectrum, Caucasian bees (Apis caucasica) produced wet caps almost exclusively.

White cappings are called “dry cappings”, darker cappings are called “wet cappings” FYI.

But why the different color honey cappings in the same hive? I put honey supers on this hive in spring, and then the hive swarmed. Not wanting to lose the honey season while the hive raised a new queen, I re-queened the hive. The new queen was a mix breed from Long Island. The white cappings of the newer honey suggests she is mainly Italian. The original queen was Carnolian.

June 15, 2017
Easy Insulated Inner Cover – Beekeeping 101 – GF Video
Here’s how to put together an insulated inner cover for your beehive without having to buy a new cover or build one. I learned this method from Phillipe at MudSongs.org , he has some great info on his beekeeping site, very down to earth.

An insulated inner cover reduces or prevents condensation in the beehive in winter.

Why does this matter? Condensation is water that collects on the top of the hive. It forms on the side of the inner cover that faces the bees. When enough water collects, it will drip back down onto the bees. Not a good thing.

Wet bees are dead bees.

Especially in winter.

How does this cover help? Condensation happens when warm air meets a cold object. In the beehive in winter, the bee cluster is warm, and there is some humidity in the air. When the warm air from the cluster rises and hits the cold inner cover, the water vapor condenses and drops back onto the bees. Not good.

The insulation that sits on top of the inner cover here keeps the cover from getting real cold, thus reducing or eliminating condensation. Since I have been using the insulated inner cover, I have not seen signs of condensation in the hive. If you find mold in your hives, you have condensation, FYI.

My variation on the insulated cover is to put a shim between the upper super and the inner cover. I then put sugar on top of the frames, using the dry sugar, aka mountain camp, method. This sugar provides a backup food source, and absorbs moisture in the hive.

Be sure the slot of the inner cover is not covered, one should always provide an upper entrance to the hive, plus it allows for air flow. Yes even in cold weather, I believe a hive needs some air flow, so provide an upper entrance. Remember to invert the inner cover.

You should also insulate the sides of the hive.

Here is how to stack the parts of the top of the beehive, top to bottom:
- Outer cover sits on top of insulation, and usually covers it.
- Insulation – I use 2″ thick polystyrene.
- Inner cover, turned upside down, flat side faces upward.
- Spacer shim, with dry sugar on top of newspaper.
- Top brood super
I built some DIY insulated inner covers that are more involved than this stack method, and they work well for me. If you are handy, have at them.
December 3, 2015
Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 10)
Field Marshal of Obvious here. There are a lot of honeybees in a hive. I would say “more than you can shake a stick at” but then two things would happen:
1. My sister, The Teacher, would lecture me on my poor English skills.
2. Some ~~idiot~~ fine person would go shaking his (because it would be a guy) stick around a hive, annoying the bees an end up with hundreds of stings and probably anaphylaxis.
I’m mostly concerned here, of course, with number one. The Teacher can be brutal with her critiques.

Seriously, I think that it can be a bit overwhelming the first time one pulls a frame out of a hive body and sees all those bees crawling around on the comb. Personally I felt mixed emotions when I first put my J-hook hive tool under the end of a frame, raised it up with my thumb and index finger and then repeated the process on the other end of the frame so I could get a good grip on it. The bees are everywhere and are seemingly putting themselves right where my fingers need to be. I was a bit cautious, frankly a bit intimidated, and certainly exhilarated. And for the most part, the bees didn’t seem to mind all that much that I was getting up close and personal with their world. I had some buzzing about, whining their high-pitched “annoyed” whine and some were bouncing into me – “head butting” as some folks call it. But most were busy as… well, bees.

This image is a closeup of a brood frame in my hive #2, the one from my mentor’s nucleus, or “nuc” hive. Over in hive #1, the bees originated from a package I purchased from Georgia and had a “marked” queen. Marking the queen, I believe, serves two purposes. First, the color often is used to identify how old the queen is, or at least I’ve been told that. Mine has a blue dot upon her back. That makes it relatively easy to spot her – likely the primary purpose for marking the queen. The blue is bright and stands out against the blacks, yellows, siennas and umbers of the hive. There just don’t tend to be blue things in a hive, so the dot stands out like a sore thumb. But that is over in hive #1.

In hive #2 there isn’t a marked queen and so it is a bit of a “Where’s Waldo?” game to find the queen. Honestly, I didn’t spot her while doing my inspection, though there was ample evidence of her existence – plenty of capped brood, larva, I assume eggs (my eyes aren’t what they used to be and I didn’t have my reading glasses handy, so I couldn’t be sure) and activity. The hive was humming along and everything seemed, well, orderly so my assumption was that she was alive and well.

But it is nice to find the queen.

Take a look closely and there in center is the queen. You can see everything other than her head, which is hidden by the wing of one of the workers. A few points of interest are:
1. The queen has an elongated abdomen where she stores her eggs and the sperm that she collected while mating with drones.
2. The abdomen isn’t striped like that of her workers.
3. Her wings are similar in size to that of the workers and so they look small compared to her length. That is what made her stand out in the picture. In the original picture, she isn’t in the center of the frame and blends in pretty well with the hundreds of workers on that side of the frame.
One other interesting factoid is that the queen has a stinger but generally doesn’t sting. She can, however, repeatedly sting because unlike the workers, whose stingers are barbed, her stinger isn’t barbed.

Enjoy,

Matt

Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) can do a pretty mediocre Bobby McFerrin chest thumping “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” impression which he occasionally uses to aggravate his daughter at bedtime. He once saw Mike+The Mechanics and The Outfield in concert at Kings Dominion. One of his favorite musical chords is the Neapolitan Sixth. His favorite in-person drum corps performance is Rocky Point Holliday by the 1983 Garfield Cadets. Amazing stuff.
May 31, 2012
Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 9)

One of these things is not like the other….

Take a look at this close up of a frame and you’ll see around 40 adult bees, busily attending to their duties – cleaning out cells, feeding brood and capping cells. Most bees in a healthy hive are female workers. But in this image one of the adult bees is different than the others – the big one near the center of the picture. It is a drone. A male honeybee whose sole purpose in life is to mate with a queen. The drones in a hive don’t do much of anything else other than mooch food from the working females.

Ladies, go ahead and insert your quip here about how this isn’t much different than it is in the human population. I’ll wait.

Ahem.

So, beyond the obvious size difference, you’ll also notice that this drone has large eyes too. I suspect that this aids drones in searching for queens. Something that isn’t obvious in this picture is that drones cannot sting you. They have no stinger.

In addition to the drone in this picture, you can see some larva in some cells, particularly on the right side of the image. These are fed by the workers until they are capped for the transition from larva to pupa. I think it is interesting that bees (and other insects) are essentially shut off from the world during this transition and I wonder about that sometimes. What exactly is the purpose in doing so? I think this is a question for my online insect friend, Debbie Hadley. I’ll talk to her about it and report back in the future on this.

Finally, you’ll notice the glob of comb at the bottom of the frame. This is called “burr comb” and can show up just about anywhere in the hive. I guess any comb that isn’t where you want it to be can be called burr comb. The bees, however, treat it like any other comb and might put nectar, pollen or brood in it. In general this burr comb is the result of excess space in the hive. Bees fill in the excess space with comb. You’ll also notice that much of the comb on this frame is darker in color and this is because the comb is probably at least a couple of years old. This frame came from my mentor’s nucleus hive so it has some age on it compared to the brand new frames and freshly drawn comb elsewhere in my hives.

Enjoy,

Matt

Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) likes raised bed gardens and collecting rain water for watering his plants. If he’s going to eat fast food, he prefers Chipotle and Subway over burgers. He modified the computer bowling game in high school so that he could always bowl a 300 game. The teacher was not amused. He is allergic to rabbits and politicians.

May 30, 2012
Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 5)

How do I start a hive? Good question. I asked this myself and of Eric when we talked on GardenFork Radio and via email. Well, you’re going to need some bees and that is the topic of this particular photo. What I am holding here is called a “bee package” and weighs a bit more than 3 pounds. It is a simple wooden box that has screen tacked onto two sides to provide ventilation to the bees within. On the east coast folks down in Georgia literally shake a few pounds of bees down into a cone that is jammed into the top of this box. If you’ve seen videos of this process, you’ll notice that there are bees everywhere. I can imagine the bees don’t like it all that much, but that’s how it goes in the bee package business. There are thousands of bees in this box and one thing that you’ll notice when picking up the box is that it is warm. Bees generate a fair amount of heat and I could feel their warmth through the thin wood of the package.

They tend to cluster around a queen cage that is hanging down from the top of the box and around a can of sugar syrup that is inverted and rests upon a ledge in the center of the can. You can’t see either of those things in this particular image, but you can see the thin square of wood that is tacked to the top of the package and covers the hole where the syrup can and queen cage are. The majority of the bees stay toward the top of the box though some will move around along the bottom. One point I want to make is that there will be dead bees in the package. I had approximately 1/2″-3/4″ of dead bees in the box after the live ones had vacated it and move into their hive. This is an expected situation, though if you’ve got an inch or more of dead bees you might want to raise some questions about how they were handled, etc. As a recycling guy, I knocked all the dead bees out of the box and into my compost bin, figuring that it was as good a place as any for them, but that’s a story for another day.

At package pickup I wore my beekeeper suit, veil and gloves but it wasn’t really required (though we did have one package break open and there were bees flying about) and my son and I did it mostly because we wanted to break in our suits. The bees can’t sting you through the wood (obviously) and so handling the package with bare hands and no bee suit is fine for transport.

I left my package in the garage for a couple of days until conditions were better for installing them into the hive. As long as the bees are not subjected to the hot sun and have food and water (which they do from the syrup can), they’ll be fine if you must delay a day or so. I had my son spray a little 1:1 sugar water on them – just a spritz – twice a day while they were in the garage. I don’t know that they would have done any worse if he hadn’t sprayed them, but I’m sure they were happy with the sugar water and it made us feel like we were tending to their needs while we waited for the adverse weather to pass.

Enjoy,

Matt

Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) makes his living worrying about software efficiency, asynchronous program execution and end-user needs. When he’s not driving the desk, he can be found listening to podcasts like GardenFork Radio while he tends to his hobby farm in Virginia. Matt quite dislikes pickled beets and liver. His miniature Sicilian donkey is unimpressed by Matt’s musical tastes and mostly just wants him to feed her carrots and apples.

May 19, 2012
Beekeeping for Beginners FAQ Part 2 : GF Radio

Matt joins Eric to answer Beekeeping for Beginners questions on this show. What equipment to buy, how to buy honeybees, where to put beehives in your yard, what kind of beekeeping suit to buy all answered here.

what kind of beekeeping suit and beekeeping veil is good?

what kind of frames should i use in the beehive, are plastic frames better than wood frames?

wax foundation versus plastic foundation should i use plastic or wax foundation on the frames of the beehive? eric talks about the benefits of wax foundation and plastic foundation and frames

Eric suggests 2 beekeeping for beginners books,

Buy On IndieBound Here
Click Here to buy on Amazon

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Click Here To Buy On Amazon

Beekeeping for Dummies and the Backyard Beekeeper

do you paint the outside of the beehive? yes, we use latex paint.

should i buy 8 frame supers or 10 frame supers? matt and eric talk about the benefits of 8 frame boxes and 10 frame boxes

what kind of beekeeping tools should i buy? eric suggests bringing duct tape, scissors, entrance reducer, smoker, woodchips, matches, 2 or 3 hive tools, a frame grabbing tool, needle nose pliers and more.

what kind of hive stand should my beehive rest on? cinder block, wood, metal stands are talked about, eric suggests having a work table next to your hives.

we talk about benefits of top bar hives vs. langstroth hives, and the drawbacks of top bar hives and langstroth beehives.

should you buy a bee package or a honeybee nuc? eric talks about the advantages of honeybee packages , the pros and cons of bee packages, and the benefits of being a nuc or nucleus hive to start a beehive.

eric advocates buying local honeybees and queens, either packages or nucs, the closer you can buy your bees the better.

www.whiteoakapiary.com in Brewster, NY and www.warmcolorsapiary.com in Greenfield, MA is where eric buys queens and honeybees.

should you feed honeybees in winter and how do i feed my bees over the winter? eric talks about how to feed bees in winter. you can watch our Beekeeping for Beginners video series here, and several videos are about feeding bees in winter.

Eric uses a hand immersion blender to mix this sugar feed solution, and adds this homemade essential oil recipe for bees to the sugar

The essential oil mixture is great for spraying the bees to combat nosema and bee diarrhea.

winterizing beehives is discussed, here is eric’s beehive insulated inner cover video, Eric feeds sugar cakes to the bees in winter, not fondant or sugar syrup. Should you close or open a screened bottom board? Matt and Eric discuss

Mudsongs.org is a favorite beekeeping blog of eric’s. Phillip documents his beekeeping in Newfoundland Canada.

where to site your hives in your yard, where should you put the hives, what is the best location for beehives? eric has learned that full sun is best, he talks more about it during this radio episode.

should I take a beekeeping class? eric says yes.

and join your local beekeeping group. search on the web for your state’s beekeeping association, and that site should list local beekeeping groups.

Megan of BrooklynHomesteader.com offers online beekeeping classes, and in-person classes as well.

January 16, 2012
Sugar Cake Recipe for Honeybees – Beekeeping 101
This winter feeding sugar cake recipe is an alternative to making fondant to feed your bees. From what I read in beekeeping magazines and online forums, it seems many people are moving to simple cakes of sugar, an alternative to sugar candy, which is a pain to make. We use these cakes in our winter insulated inner covers.

Note: I no longer use sugar cakes, I now use the Mountain Camp dry sugar method, its much easier.

I use shallow foil cake pans to make these sugar cakes, you can use whatever you want, or you could just hand form them into patties or rounds.

My point here being you don’t need to use foil pans for molds, you can free form the things, I just like how the foil holds the sugar cakes together, and are easy to transport in my truck.

The cakes do not always dry perfectly, it has to do with how much moisture is already in the sugar. I suggest you make these a few days before you are going to use them.

Sugar Cake Recipe For Honeybees

To make what I call sugar cake is pretty simple:
- Take a 5 lb bag of white sugar
- Mix it in a bowl with 7.5 ounces of water and a few drops of an essential oil mix. our honeybee essential oil recipe below
- Mix the water in well
- Spread into the foil pans, or drop onto wax paper or paper plates and make round sugar mounds.
Depending on how warm and humid your house is these dry overnight or a few days. Sometimes they crumble and crack, I think this is due to the moisture content of the bag of sugar you are using. Chunks of sugar cake are fine, the bees don’t care, really.

It is key to measure the water precisely, i use scale; it makes a big difference. if you add too much water it doesn’t dry right, i think.

You can also press this cake mixture into the inside of an insulated inner cover, if its deep enough.

Let the cakes at least dry overnight, a few days is better, and you are ready to place them on the top of the hive. Take care not to crush any bees when you do this. You need to use a spacer shim, or an insulated inner cover with a built in space for feeding when adding sugar cakes to the top of your hive.

Read more of our beekeeping posts here and watch beekeeping videos here. Here is the Honeybee Essential Oil Recipe Thx!

Do you use sugar in your hives in winter? let us know below:
December 16, 2011