GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Tag: beekeeping

Clear Cloudy Honey – Beekeeping 101 – GF Video

Clear Cloudy Honey with our how to video. Crystallized Honey can be easily decrystallized, watch Eric show you how. Why causes cloudy honey? The most common reason is temperature. The honey has been stored somewhere and the honey temperature eventually lowers enough to crystalize. The moisture content of the honey also causes cloudy honey.

How to Clear Cloudy Honey, some info:

Is it safe to eat cloudy honey? Yes, honey keeps for years. You can stir crystallized honey into your tea and it will dissolve just fine. Its hard to measure cloudy honey for baking, so its best to warm it first.

Can I use a slow cooker as a cloudy honey fix? Yes, its a great solution

There is some foam that floated to the top of the warmed honey. That’s ok, just skim it off, its beeswax probably.

The types of flowers that the honeybees collect from also can cause cloudy honey. If there are lot of rape seed flowers nearby, part of the mustard family, the honey produced gets cloudy quickly.

In my experience, we have had honey get cloudy when we have harvested honey from dead hives, and the frames may have a mix of capped and uncapped honey in them. The uncapped honey has a higher water content, and I believe this contributes to the cloudy honey.

If you have frames of capped and uncapped honey, I would leave them in the hive. If its a dead hive, I’d suggest cutting out the capped comb for comb honey. Or just extract the whole frame, keeping in mind this mixed capping honey should be consumed sooner than the capped frame honey.

This beekeeping video is part of our beekeeping 101 video series, you can check out all of the how to keep bees videos here.

Eric suggests 2 beekeeping for beginners books,

Buy On IndieBound Here
Click Here to buy on Amazon

Click Here to Buy On Indiebound
Click Here To Buy On Amazon

January 30, 2014
The Future Always Wins : GF Radio

Eric tells about driving the 2013 Ford F150 Limited in downtown Manhattan, as well as using the truck up at the CT house. A big thank you to our Mike and Scott and Mary Beth at Ford for making that happen!

Rick brings up the illegal importation of honey, read more here: http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2013/02/honeygate-sting-leads-to-charges-for-illegal-chinese-honey-importation

Eric talks about the celebration of the neato factor, the cool stuff people are doing, like Tyler and his severe weather data company, Allison House.

Speaking of the maker world, Rick tells us about WikiHouse, a project to use CNC machines to make housing, very neat. Its a house that is assembled all from plywood cut on a CNC machine.

Eric gives a shout out to Steve at Born To Farm, and his podcast, Growing Your Own Grub

Rick suggests looking outside the US for neat podcasts, you can get his podcast suggestions by following Rick on twitter and his hashtag: #podcastsworthhearing

Spray Foam Insulation comes up at the end

The Cement Truck always wins.

May 31, 2013
Winter Bee Inspection & Dead Bees – Beekeeping 101 Video
Another of our Beekeeping 101 videos on how to do a winter bee inspection. Links to more beekeeping videos at end of the post. This time we open up the beehives in late March to show us feeding bees in winter. Keeping bees in areas with snow and winter, you will want to add sugar cakes, aka fondant, in the winter, and then add protein patties in late winter – early spring to get the honeybees going early.

You can open a beehive if its above 40F to do a quick winter bee inspection, if its in the 30sF, you can open it real quick to put some sugar on the top of the hive. Do not take the hive apart for a full inspection. We are just taking off the outer and inner cover, and looking in from the top of the hive real quick. The faster you do this the better, I think.

Honeybees may not always crawl up to the top and show themselves, they may still be clustered in a lower super, so just leave them that way. If you come across a dead hive, as we did, my suggestion is to leave the hive be, tape up the entrances, and clean out the hive when it warms up. You tape the entrances closed to keep the wax moths from moving in as spring approaches.

Dead Bees near sugar cake

Why did my bees die? Its not always obvious. Condensation is a big winter killer, but since we switched to the insulated inner covers we built, click for the insulated inner cover post, we have not had a condensation problem in the beehives in winter. Every year we have had a beehive die in winter, it is hard to get them all through winter. So when a hive dies, don’t blame yourself if you have done the following:
- Followed a plan for varroa mite control
- Fed bees in fall with sugar syrup
- Left enough honey in the hive for winter
- Added sugar cakes or fondant
- Used an insulated inner cover
- Tilted the hives forward in fall
Read more of our beekeeping posts here and watch beekeeping videos here. Thx!

Questions, comments? please let us know below:
March 28, 2013
Beekeeping 101, a look back on the first year GF Radio

GF Contributor Matt joins Eric to talk about his first year of beekeeping. Matt reflects on what real world beginning beekeeping is like after watching the Beekeeping 101 – How to keep bees videos on Gardenfork. Losing a hive, getting stung, how to find the queen in a hive, how not to kill the queen are all touched on.

Matt wrote a series of articles on beginning beekeeping for our site, as he chronicled his first year of beginning beekeeping.

Matt tells us about how to work a hive and yes, you should wear gloves and beehives are heavy. We agree with Rick’s use of metal handles, as beehives get heavy.

Beehives die, and why do they die? As Rick says, bees are bugs in a box, and bees don’t read books. Eric offers a few reasons why the beehive died: a stressed queen, the queen was crushed when working the bees or putting the hive back together.

Eric gives reasons for not buying bee packages, and especially not having bee packages sent in the mail. Buying local nucs is much better. Matt’s experience with beginning beekeeping bears this out. His package of bees died, his nuc is going strong.

Matt talked about a program in Virginia that funds beekeepers,

Matt also talked about homemade or DIY honey extractors, like this one on Mudsongs.org .

We also talk about raised beds, and how to build raised beds using bricks or plastic lumber and the pros and cons of using different materials for building raised beds.

photo by micky07

January 15, 2013
Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 23)

Pollen is the topic of this post. In this image you can see quite a bit of it in the comb. It is of various colors and what I’ve seen them bringing in, at least the day of this hive inspection, is yellow. In fact, if you look closely at this picture you’ll see a couple of bees with what looks like little yellow corn kernels on them. This yellow substance is pollen and it is held in the pollen baskets on their legs.

Bees, like humans, require protein to survive and pollen provides that protein. The honeybees mix this with some nectar and produce something we call “bee bread” which is fed to the larva. Without this source of protein, the bees won’t develop. Some beekeepers will provide “pollen patties” to their hives. This is a man-made substitute for pollen which they will, apparently, use like pollen. I have not had any experience with pollen patties at this point.

Pollen is a little bundle of cells covered in a protective coating. The cells include vegetative ones and also a couple of reproductive ones. Pollen is the sperm of the plant and is a necessary component for reproduction. Plants which utilize pollinators like honeybees produce pollen which sticks easily to these pollinators and is carried from the anther to the stigma, thus reproduction in the plant. That’s really the main reason plants have flowers – to reproduce.

Bees, flies and other pollinators live in symbiotic harmony with flowering plants. These plants produce lots of pollen and some of it gets moved from the anther to stigma, helping to ensure reproduction in the plant. The plant relies upon these pollinators. The plants, in return, provide the protein needed for the bee to reproduce.

Happy beekeeping,

Matt

Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) likes pickled cucumbers but not pickled beets. He thinks matrix math is cool. Matt wishes there were less lawyers and more scientists in the world. He knows there are some serious steering issues with Fred Flintstone’s car that nobody else seems to care about… oh yeah, folks… chuckle away at that stone-age humor. Haha very funny. Matt’s not amused by Hanna-Barbera’s lack of knowledge about vehicles and engineering, let alone physics.

October 13, 2012
Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 22)

Here I’ve got a photo from my recent hive inspection of hive #2. As you can see, the bees don’t all look alike. Oh, sure they have wings and are about the same size but their coloration varies. Along the bottom of that frame in the middle you can see some very yellow-orange bodied honeybees and some that are black/dark gray and a dull grayish yellow. In fact there is quite a variety of coloration and banding on this frame.

Why is that?

Mostly this is due to genetic variation among these honeybees. The queen mates with many different drones and so there is almost certainly going to be a bit of a “melting pot” in the hive. Over in hive #1, I had an Italian honeybee queen and most of the initial workers in that hive looked like Italian bees. But as the hive has grown, there has been a bit more variety in the bees in that hive, but certainly not as much as in hive #2, which my beekeeping mentor, Lindi, called “mutt bees” – I suspect the queen in that hive is some cross. Mix the genes of this queen with a variety of drones and the genetic diversity increases.

Genetic diversity in a hive is a good thing.

If all the bees in a hive were genetically identical – clones if you will – their particular genetic makeup might make them less hardy in adverse weather conditions, maybe it would make them more prone to succumbing to disease. You get the idea. The hive thrives by having a diverse population. The idea behind natural selection is that those traits which are advantageous for survival given the current situation will give the bees having those traits a leg up on those that don’t have those traits. So in a hive where the population is heterogenous, some might succumb to a disease or perhaps mites while others may be less inclined to be affected by that disease or the mite infestation. If the queen is one of those survivors or some of her drones are among those with superior genetics, the result will be that those traits will have an opportunity to be passed on via sperm and egg. The queen that doesn’t make it, or the drones that don’t make it won’t pass their traits along, of course.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that these honeybees are moving toward perfection… their population is just affected by their genetic makeup and the world around them. What affected population N and caused certain members of population N to die off might not affect population N+M. In fact, it is possible that population N+M might be affected by something to which those from population N that died were better suited to survive. Interesting, huh? Well, at least to me. The point is that the world is a dynamic place and selection doesn’t always mean improvement. When the conditions change, populations have to adapt or they won’t survive. Genetic diversity provides better odds that the population will survive.

Happy beekeeping,

Matt

Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) would like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony but he’d be happy if the folks that can’t carry a tune would just hush it already. Seriously folks, you’re killing him with your off-key renditions of “Call Me Maybe”. Matt loves to play backgammon, go, and chess. He stinks at two of the three of those – guess which? His favorite Partridge was Laurie, of course.

October 9, 2012
Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 21)

Propolis – that sticky, gooey substance that honeybees make from plant resins – is strong stuff. Anyone who has tried to separate one super from the one below it can testify to the holding power of propolis. As I’ve written before, bees use this to fill in small cracks and seal up anything needing to be sealed up.

Apparently, they needed to seal this frame in its box very well. Between a bunch of burr comb and an abundance of propolis, this frame simply would not come out. As you can see, the nails and glue failed before the propolis did. I honestly didn’t expect that to be the case. I was very careful when building these frames and if you look closely, you can see that some wood tore away on this frame… maybe it was just weak wood.

I two-tooled the frame out after pushing my hive tools down between the frames a couple of times. I’ll probably swap that out in the spring and I tapped it back together and noted which one it is.

Happy beekeeping,

Matt

Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) doesn’t like those cutesy flower-topped pens that businesses use to discourage folks from taking them. He doesn’t understand why people like eating liver at all. There are much better things to eat in life. His favorite stooge is Moe because he is grumpy and has a smart looking haircut. Just kidding… he’s not that grumpy. Matt is one of the nine people in North America that listened to AM radio last week. If you haven’t listened to AM in awhile… it hasn’t improved.

October 7, 2012
Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 20)

Varoa Destructor!

Ominous sounding name, huh?

This little sucker (literally) is one of the many pests which can affect the health and well being of a hive. Varoa is a mite which latches onto the honeybee and sucks the hemolymph from the bee. You can think of hemolymph as being like our own blood though it doesn’t serve exactly the same purpose in the bee as blood does in humans. For one thing, bees don’t need to have oxygen circulated throughout their bodies because they respirate (breathe) directly through the spiracles on their sides. Another type of mite, the tracheal mite, sets up home inside the bee’s trachea and block the airways. You can’t see those with your naked eye.

There’s a Varoa mite prominently displayed right in the center of the picture behind that center bee’s eyes. If you closely under the left wing of the second bee from the left on the bottom, you can see another Varoa mite. Without my reading glasses (yes, I’m getting old and my eyesight stinks) I can’t see these mites, so I generally need to rely upon examining the pictures I take when inspecting my hive. I saw other Varoa mites in other pictures but not a lot of them. I will be treating for these in the next week using powdered sugar. Essentially you dust the bees with it and it helps to dislodge some of the mites as part of the process. The bees don’t mind the powered sugar but it does actually result in some of the mites falling off.

Varoa reduces the life of a honeybee and so it is important to treat for these pests to keep them in check. Hives will have them – in fact most every hive is going to have Varoa mites. But the presence of these mites doesn’t mean that your hive is doomed. A simple method for checking them is to treat with powered sugar and stick a slide-in card in your screened bottom board. The mites will fall off – at least many will – and you can count them to gauge how your hive is doing. It would be nearly impossible to prevent Varoa since bees don’t live in a closed system – they are out and about and likely to pick up Varoa and bring it back to the hive. Our job as beekeepers is to treat for and keep account of the Varoa population rather than attempt to eliminate them – that’s not going to happen. Varoa poses no direct threat to humans or animals as far as I know. It doesn’t affect the honey either. It is simply a pest that affects the life of the bee directly.

Happy beekeeping,

Matt

Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) is not a fan of seersucker suits, NASCAR or zydeco music. He prefers sausage over bacon and bacon over Canadian bacon. His favorite pizza topping is black olives, at least today. Matt thinks right now is a great time for a nap.

October 7, 2012
Requeening A Hive In Fall, a visual beekeeping how to

This year has been the year I’ve had to requeen 4 hives. Not sure why, but wanted to show one way how to requeen a beehive. This beehive was doing fine, I pulled some honey off the hive, and then checking it 3 weeks later there is barely any covered brood and no freshly laid eggs anywhere in the hive. You can see here in the first picture of the beehive, this frame is from the lower super, where there is usually brood, there aren’t any eggs on this frame. Luckily, I have a few other robust hives, and was able to get a queen from a nearby beekeeper.

Queens will slow down their egg laying in the fall, so you have to make sure the hive really is queenless, check most or all of the frames for brood.

Empty brood frames, not a good sign

Requeening this hive, I had to keep in mind its getting late in the year, and these bees will need a good population to get through the winter. I pulled two frames full of brood from a nearby healthy hive, knocked off most of the bees from those frames back into their hive, and got ready to open the queenless hive.

From the queenless hive, I took off the upper supers and then pulled two empty brood frames from the bottom super. I then put in the queenless hive the two frames of capped brood from the healthy donor hive, and then wedged in between those two frames the new queen in a queen cage.

Gently tap this frame over the donor hive to knock most of the bees off and back into their hive. Make sure the queen is not on these donor frames.

Capped brood from the donor colony

The capped brood will hatch soon, and will help boost the population of the hive while the queen gets acclimated and starts laying. I think this hive will make it through the winter, we still have a few months to get it back in shape.

I feed all our hives a 2:1 sugar syrup solution with an essential oil mix added in ( get the honeybee essential oil recipe here ), with this hive i may start early on the feeding.

queenless hive ready to accept brood frames and queen cage

Capped Brood Frames and Queen Cage inserted into queenless beehive.

Here are some beekeeping books I recommend:

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What has your experience been with requeening? Let us know below:

September 14, 2012
Best Flowers for Honeybees : Woodland Asters

What are the best flowers for honeybees? What kind of flowers do bees like? How do i attract honeybees to my garden?

Honeybee attractant flower – Asters

Being a beekeeper, I pay a lot of attention to what flowers honeybees are attracted to, and in the late summer and fall, the forest edges of my yard are full of Woodland Asters, and these flowers are full of honeybees. Woodland Asters bloom late, and keep their flowers quite a while into the cold days of fall. They are an edge of forest plant, they wont grow in direct sun, and are inconspicuous before they bloom, then all of a sudden, they are there in front of you. Full of honeybees too. Asters are one of the best plants for honeybees in the fall.

The flower world calls these White Wood Asters, my neighbors call them Woodland Asters, the experts call them Eurybia divaricata, which is a mouthful. The name Aster comes from Greece, meaning ‘star’. The name fits the flowers, these have white petals that shoot straight out with a yellow center. This particular aster is considered threatened in Canada, but it grows in pockets around my area. According to Wikipedia, it is common in the Appalachian Mountains.

Project Native, a cool group up in Massachusetts, sells several seed mixes that have different native asters, I’m thinking most of the asters are honeybee attractant plants – flowers.

Honeybees are all over the asters in our yard

If you have asters in your yard, but don’t see honeybees on them, just wait. Honeybees focus on a particular plant for a while, then move on to the next plant species that is ready for them. The honeybees in your area may be working another kind of flower, like Goldenrod, and when they are done with that, they’ll move on to the asters. Honeybees don’t hop from one aster to another goldenrod, they focus on one flower type, then shift to new plants.

What flowers do you see honeybees on in your yard? Let us know below:

September 14, 2012
DIY Solar Beeswax Melter Video by Rick

Solar Wax Melter plans here. Rick built this DIY solar beeswax melter out of a cooler and stuff you probably have in your garage.

Beeswax is made by the honeybees, and when you harvest honey, the cappings on the cells of the honeycomb are cut off, and you can save these wax cappings, melt them down, and make candles, soap, and all sorts of beeswax products. In this how-to video you’ll see how honeybees make beeswax, and how they build honeycomb in a beehive.

A solar beeswax melter will melt and clean beeswax without using electricty. Its very hands off, you don’t have to do much with it, just leave it in the sun and the solar power takes care of it. This wax melter uses a cooler and a piece of glass, its important that the glass not be double glazed, according to Rick. A few pans from the store and you are good to go.

With the melted and cleaned beeswax, you can make all sorts of beeswax based products. Some of the most popular are candles, soaps, and lotions.
Some interesting facts about beeswax: bees eat honey from their hives to produce beeswax, and the ambient hive has to be between 90 -97 degrees F.

Do you use beeswax? let us know how below:

August 12, 2012
Arduino Controllers, Pinball, & Burritos GF Radio

Mike and Eric talk about how to use arduino controllers in pinball and beehives, how easy it is to use them and program them. Repairing a shower mixing valve without cutting a hole in the wall, be sure to turn off the water before you replace the mixing valve cartridge. Eric did put in a new shower mixing valve at his parents house, the video will be posted soon. Mike talks about being overwhelmed with success of a bootstrapped pinball project, and how what was once great is now a ball and chain. Eric tells of how one of his beehives swarmed and what he did to try to capture the beehive swarm. Lacking a tall ladder to retrieve the swarm cluster, swarm traps are brought out. Did it work? listen and learn.

photo by ppdigital

July 17, 2012
Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 19)

After eight days in the wonderful state of Maine on a much needed vacation, I did a quick “hey howya doin’” on the hives this afternoon. As a first year beekeeper, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that the best thing I can do for the hives is not rob them of honey so instead I’m feeding them a 1:1 sugar water to help them draw out comb and create strong first year hives. During today’s check on the hives my son and I added another super to each hive (they’d completely drawn out all the frames on the top super and filled most of it with honey) so they’d have something to do with their time. Idle mandibles are the devil’s workshop… or something like that.

It was hot and we’d already decided that today wasn’t the day to do a full hive inspection unless we saw something obviously bad when we opened the hives. Everything was humming along smoothly and the bees were calm so a quick look to see how the top frames were doing (fully drawn, mostly capped honey) and then we added our supers and refreshed their bug juice.

Buttoning up things, I noticed this odd little insect busy stealing some sugar water off the lid of the inverted mason jar and so did the honey bees. I’ve not yet identified it and first thought it might be a syrphid fly but it has a head more like a wasp. I’m going to check with my online bug guru buddy Debbie Hadley to see if she can identify it from my admittedly bad pictures.

Honeybees aren’t much for sharing and definitely didn’t like this little bugger anywhere near their hive. Within seconds there were a half dozen of them ganging up on it and they quickly dispatched with the intruder. This was the best shot I got of the attack and it is tough to see the prey. Two workers in the center had it locked up and a third had come in from above.

Bees may be vegetarians but they are fierce fighters and territorial creatures. On previous inspections I’ve seen them going at it with both bumble bees and horse flies that ventured near their hives.

Moral of the story – if you’re going to venture into a hive, bring along some friends or you’ll be sorely outnumbered.

Enjoy,

Matt

Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) is quite enamored with the low bush variety of blueberries. These smaller berries are sweet and delicious. He loves to kayak and take pictures; neither of these things does he do particularly well. He thinks most people would benefit from having a canine companion. His favorite Brady was Marsha, of course.

July 15, 2012
Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 18)
The last half of June and the first week of July 2012 have been HOT here in Virginia. I live in the Piedmont region and…

Stop. Geography Time!

I’m doing the MC Hammer shuffle dance right now. It ain’t pretty, folks, but I try to imagine that it looks good. Humor me. I have almost no rhythm and I paid a fortune for these parachute pants.

Ahem…

Virginia is broken up into five physiographic regions:
1. Appalachian Plateau – way down in southwest Virginia. Factoid: Virginia actually extends west of Detroit.
2. Valley and Ridge – western part of the state. Beautiful and so different than heavily populated NoVA.
3. Blue Ridge – picturesque and home to some great hiking and camping opportunities.
4. Piedmont – rolling hills and some plateaus.
5. Coastal Plain – typically we call that “Tidewater” around these parts. GF’s Rick lives in the Coastal Plain region.
As I was saying, I live in the Piedmont region and it comprises the largest area of the state. We’re west of the Tidewater and the fall line separates the two regions. It is higher than Tidewater and it is also HOT here in the summertime for man and beast alike. August can be brutal here. This year it’s been pretty hot since my kids got out of school. Anyhow…

So my lovely bride and I were out working on our garden fence (pictures soon) one evening and noticed that the bees were doing something interesting. This picture shows them doing something called “bearding” which is different from the bee bearding that some folks do where they get bees to hang all over their face. I don’t understand doing that at all, quite honestly. Hanging bees off one’s face is akin to sword swallowing, running with the bulls and juggling running chainsaws – they all fall into the same category entitled “Activities Which May End Badly”.

Bearding is something honeybees do when it is hot. It helps with ventilation in the hive and is a normal thing when it is hot. I use, as I’ve written before, a screened bottom board so that helps somewhat with ventilation. I do need to, however, vent the hives a bit at the top (you can do this by propping the outer cover open with a stick) when I’m home. I’ve also seen folks offset a honey super a bit to help let some of the heat escape. It isn’t absolutely critical but every bit helps.

I thought it was interesting that both hives were doing this and the patterns were similar. They definitely were making use of the landing boards (those slanted boars on the bottom) and stayed out there until well after 8:30PM. I don’t believe that bearding is any indication that there is a problem in the hive, just that it is hot.

Bees are quite good at regulating the temperature in the hive. They’ll flap their wings to help cool things off. If you are quiet and put your ear up to the back of the hive – it is quite safe back there – you can hear them inside, buzzing away and flapping their wings. I think that sound is cool. They also will bring water into the hive so I keep a large plastic pan filled with large rocks and water nearby to provide them with easy access to water if they need it. The rocks give them someplace to land without drowning in the water. They also weigh down the pan during windy times.

Enjoy and stay cool!

Matt

Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) enjoys the music of the Punch Brothers, Crooked Still and The Greencards. He is a fan of pepper jack cheese. He doesn’t like liver of any sort. He believes the world would be a far better place with more folks like the late Fred Rogers in it.
July 4, 2012
Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 17)

Having the right tool for the job makes all the difference. You can try to drive a nail into the wall with your shoe to hang that picture and it might work but even a crappy dollar store hammer will make that job a cinch because the hammer is specifically designed to accomplish that task. Those Top-Siders… well, not so much.

Tools for beekeeping are no different and today I want to introduce the hive tool to you. There are a few different types and I’ve got two of them. The one I’m not talking about in this post is flat with a 90 degree bend on one end. Both ends narrow down and can be used for prying or scraping. I like it. I’ll talk about it in the future.

But in this photo you can see my other hive tool – the J-hook style hive tool in action. It has a flat end that tapers to a narrow blade and this is also useful for prying apart hive bodies, particularly when they are stuck together due to propolis. Visible in the picture is the J-hook end that is great for lifting up one end of a frame in order to grab hold of it. This is quite helpful when removing the first frame in the box because there isn’t a lot of room anyway and adding a bunch of bees to the mix only makes it that much more difficult to get a good grip on the frame. Those (as GardenFork’s own Rick would call them) “bugs in a box” seem to have a keen sense for being exactly where I need to put my fingers. Not wanting to crush any bees (or get stung in the process), I just use the tool to carefully move the frame into a position where I can more easily grab it.

There are a few other tools that are useful when inspecting a hive. I’ll write about those in the future.

Enjoy,

Matt

Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) can be found most summer weekends mowing grass. He’s nonplussed about trimming the ditch along his farm’s road frontage. He stinks at throwing a baseball and really isn’t particularly skilled at throwing objects in general. Matt likes his steaks grilled medium and never uses steak sauce.

June 22, 2012
Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 16)

When folks talk about beehives – average, non-beekeeping folks, that is – they’ll probably mention honey, honey comb, the queen bee, maybe pollen. Those are things most folks would know. Today I want to talk about something that few folk outside the beekeeper community would know about – propolis.

In this image you can see what look like dirty peanut butter along the edge of the hive body. This is a resinous substance known as propolis. It is produced by the bees from the plant resins and sap. It is a sticky, gooey mess when it is warm and I am told it is hard and brittle when cold. The color will vary a bit based on what plants the bees use to produce the propolis.

Bees use propolis in the hive to do a few things: fill in small cracks, seal up anything they think needs to be sealed, coat anything they cannot remove from the hive (such as a dead mouse). Personally I’ve not seen bees do the latter (yet) but I’ve certainly seen them seal up gaps.

Hives bodies (the boxes holding frames of comb) are challenging enough to handle when they are full – they get heavy quickly. Propolis adds to the challenge by sticking them together, making it harder to separate hive bodies so you can lift them. I had to really work hard to get the hive body above this one in the picture off and found my hive tool worked pretty well to gain some leverage and pop it apart.

Propolis, I’m told, is quite effective at hermetically sealing nasty stuff in the hive (such as that dead mouse) so that it doesn’t foul up the hive. It apparently has some antimicrobial and anti-fungal qualities depending upon what plants resins are used. I’ve witnessed that honeybees are pretty clean creatures and act in a very methodical way to maintain order. If I ever have an opportunity to capture them coating something (other than the cracks of the hive) with propolis, I’ll be sure to snap a picture.

There are folks who use propolis for medicinal reasons. I’m told you can find it in heath food stores and that claims are made as to its efficacy in the treatment or prevention of this or that. I don’t have any personal experience here so I can’t really say. I’d probably want to see some scientific evidence of this before plunking down any cash on this. I’m not sure that there is even any requirement to prove its efficacy before selling it. And if there’s (potentially considerable) variability in its makeup, it might be difficult to know if that propolis you’re buying is going to do you any good. Again, I’ve got no experience here but I’d be reluctant to shell out too many of my greenbacks on a substance that might not be regulated and may not provide any real benefit. I simply don’t know enough about this to definitively come down on one side or the other. Caveat emptor.

Beekeepers wanting to collect propolis (and potentially make some cash by selling it) can put a screen in the hive – these are available from the various beekeeping supply companies – and the bees will coat the holes with propolis. Personally, I’d rather that they make honey but who knows… I might try this in the future.

Enjoy,

Matt

Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) enjoys making his own carbonated drinks with his Soda Stream. He is not a fan of horse flies but prefers them to deer flies since he can hear them flying around. He is tired of replacing rotted wood in his raised bed gardens and wants to move to brick ones. First, he’ll need to get some mad mason skillz(TM) to accomplish that task.

June 20, 2012
Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 15)

The bees in hive #2 (the hive formerly known as “the nuc hive”) have been very productive. Three weeks ago we put a medium super with new foundation atop this hive and when we checked it on Father’s Day, we found not only drawn comb but drawn comb filled with nectar in the process of being turned into honey. All ten frames were drawn and most of them were full of nectar or were in the process of being capped so we put another super on this hive to provide them more room.

In this image you can see a sample of what I mean. The bees are very busy working to create honey. This is accomplished via enzymes within the bees which break down the complex sugars into simpler sugars. This is called inversion. Then the water content is reduced by the bees via fanning. Once it has reached the proper moisture content, it is capped by the bees.

I personally find bees amazing. There are so many aspects of their lives which make me wonder, not the least of which is how do these bees know when to cap the honey. I suspect it is passed down through their genes but still… it is fascinating that they create a substance which has an insanely long shelf life. Cool huh?

One other thing.

A medium super of honey is pretty heavy. I can completely understand why some folks opt for the 8-frame mediums vice the 10-frame ones.

And don’t get me started about the weight of a deep hive body full of brood and bees. But that’s a topic for another time.

Enjoy,

Matt

Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) is not a fan of Bermuda grass. He likes Art Deco but not Zydeco. He prefers to make greeting cards rather than buy them. Twenty-eight years later he still can play (albeit poorly) a tenor sax solo he had to memorize for jazz band concert in high school.

June 18, 2012
Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 14)

It was a Father’s Day hive inspection. Dad (that’s me) and son checking out our two hives. Beautiful day. 78 degrees Fahrenheit and just a light breeze. Quite a few things to say and show about this inspection so expect more posts from me in the coming days.

There are a LOT of bees in these hives. I think non-beekeepers (as well as this first year beekeeper) just don’t get how many bees can live in a hive. It’s incredible quite honestly when you pop open the hive and there is just frame after frame of bees – often so many of them that you can hardly see the comb underneath. The frames with brood on them are just teeming with bees.

I’ve written before about pheromones and how the hive uses these to communicate. One pheromone they use quite effectively is the alarm pheromone. I understand folks say it smells like bananas. I’ve got a particularly poor sense of smell and am not sure I personally could smell it. At least I haven’t noticed it yet.

Here is a closeup of my glove. Yes, there’s some goo on it – white shows every stain – but right in the center of the shot is the topic of this post.

The stinger.

Today we were on the business end of the stinger. Not the place you want to be, quite frankly.

My son was taking the lead on the inspection and the bees weren’t all that happy that we were bothering them today. We used the smoker a couple of times and it helped a bit but they were head butting us from the beginning. They were crawling all over my son’s gloves and that, pardon the pun, bugged him out a bit. I think he was worried about squashing them as he lifted up frames.

He got stung on the index finger through his glove while trying to take out the sixth frame and let the frame drop, maybe only an inch, back into the hive body. That didn’t, as you might guess, improve the hive’s disposition. The stinger stuck in the glove and a bit of the venom went into his finger. He wasn’t happy. They weren’t happy. We stepped away, I took the hive tool in my hand and scraped the stinger off the glove. That step is important. The sooner the stinger is removed, the less venom ends up in the body and the less it will hurt. Scrape it, don’t grab and squeeze.

I sent him in to put some ice on it.

I decided then that it was time to button things up and try again another day. Their mood wasn’t going to improve.

That’s the issue though with beekeeping. Unlike woodcarving or painting or playing the french horn, if you need or want to stop, you can’t just walk away from the hive. If you’ve opened it up, you’ve got to close it back up. Even if the conditions stink. Even if they aren’t happy. Even if you’ve been stung. Some beekeeping friends of mine (Eric and Rick, to name two) have been stung way more than this and surely wanted to just walk away for the day. But you have to finish what you started because that hive won’t put itself back together.

There were a dozen or so bees banging into me and buzzing that distinctive “I’m pissed at you” buzz. It took me about five minutes to get everything back together because A) the smoker had gone out and B) I needed to step away a few times because they were getting a bit overwhelming, quite honestly. Crawling over my hands, walking all over my veil, flying about, bouncing into me.

Then they stung me in the hand. Just two or three times. I only felt one of them, looked down and instinctively wiped my one glove with the other. I scraped one more off that I saw before the camera guy in me said “you dummy, take a picture” and then I looked over the glove and found another. That’s the one you see here. This one, however, didn’t penetrate the skin.

Fortunately my gloves are thick and it just felt like a pin prick as no venom reached my skin. I took a walk away from the hive for a minute or two to see if things calmed down. It did – at least enough to finish closing up the hive. And I got that picture, which was cool. We took one of my son’s finger post-sting but it didn’t turn out well and he wasn’t all that keen to have dad keep messing with it so I gave up on that shot.

For the keeper, the poke of the stinger and the pain of the venom is a temporary thing. My son’s already over the sting and off to camp to enjoy a week of fun. For the bee, well… it means death… at least for the workers. The barbed stinger of the worker ends up sticking into the skin (or the glove in our case) and causes the back end of the bee to open up. The bee soon dies. Unlike the worker, the queen has no barb on her stinger so she could, in theory, sting you multiple times. In practice the queen isn’t likely to sting you. The male drones have no stinger, so one can pick those up barehanded without incident. The workers… yeah, they sting. A little smoke applied to the sting area helps to mask that alarm pheromone.

Box checked. First stings have happened. There will be more. No worries.

I plan to get back into the hive again later this week to finish what I started. I talked with my son and he was OK and said he’d definitely be back in his beesuit again. I’m glad for that.

Enjoy,

Matt

Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here

Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) once went to timber framing school with his brother. He prefers homemade jam to store-bought. He loves the puzzles of Martin Gardner. He wonders why all milk products aren’t packaged in the same plastic as milk jugs.

June 17, 2012