I wear Carhartt work pants. Whether I am in the city or in the country, I’m wearing Carhartt’s black canvas work dungarees. ( I do own one tan pair )
Yesterday, we worked the bees, our plan was to powder sugar the bees to treat for varroa mites, and add new grease patties for tracheal mites.
Before we left the house, The Camera Operator looked at me and said, “Do you want to tape up the hole in your pant leg before we go?” I had torn a hole in my dungarees dropping some pine trees. ( I should really wear the double front Carhartts )
The hole in my pants
Me, being me, said no.
So, in the middle of taking apart our largest hive – the hive that gets a little more agitated than our other calm hives – I felt something crawling up my thigh.
Then I felt the pinch. All this occurring while I have a 60 lb deep brood box in my hands.
The Bee Sting
I realized once again who is the smart one in our family. Lesson here, tape up any holes in your pants before going to the beeyard. Or better yet, wear pants that don’t have holes in them.
Duct Tape Works
What knucklehead things have you done when working? Let me know below…
We are going to start a second beeyard at another farm. We wanted to have a second beeyard as a hedge against the chance that a bear will destroy our existing honeybee hives.
Our hives in their current location are surrounded by a traditional electric fence, three strands, and is part of a larger electric fence to keep beef cattle in their pasture. Bill, who owns the farm where our hives are, thinks the local bears are already aware of his electric fence, and have not tried to get to our beehives.
But if the bear ever did, we would lose all our hives. So we decided this year to put a few hives at another friends farm, on the other side of town.
The Electro Net fence protecting a beeyard, photo from Premier 1
I started to look in to bear proofing and saw an ad in Bee Culture magazine for a bear proof electric fence that will protect beehives from bears. I contacted the company, Premiere 1, and they sent me an ElectroNet 9/35/12 electric fence and a PRS 50 Solar Energizer at no charge to use in our new beeyard.
The solar Energizer, which contains the battery and electronics to zap bears, is housed in metal box that looks like it was engineered for space travel. Its pretty bulletproof.
The electric fence and solar powered energizer for our beeyardInterior of the solar powered energizer
We’ll shoot a GardenFork show about starting a new beeyard and installing this fence, and I’ll report back on how it works with our local bears. Thanks for Premier 1 for sending me this.
We pulled the inner cover on our biggest hive, and it was not easy this time. The honeybees had sealed it pretty tight with propopolis, a waxy resin that bees collect from trees.
bees seal shut the inner cover with this waxy resinthis stuff makes it take some work to open the top of the hive
Learn how to requeen a beehive in this beginning beekeeping video. Requeening the hive is not rocket science, but you do need to know how a few things when you do this. This Beekeeping video will show you how to replace the queen in your beehive, or at least how we do it. As with many things in life, this is how we do it, others may do it differently.
You replace the queen in a beehive when you want to improve the hive’s characteristics or when the original queen of the beehive has died for some reason. You also requeen a beehive to keep it from swarming.
We are going to try requeening our hives in late August to prevent swarming the following spring. I’m told that queens replaced in the fall will not swarm in springtime, so we’ll see. Of course we’ll make a video about that.
We’ve added a third hive to our beehives, and our package of bees arrived on Saturday. The weather was not great, cold and windy, so we thought we’d wait until the next day, Sunday. We kept our bees in the basement to keep them from overheating.
Sunday arrives with wind and 32F. Not good. But we waited until 1 pm and the temperature rose above 50F, and it was time to hive the package. Hiving the package went really well. The worker bees stayed close to the queen in the new hive.
The bees in the package are surrounding the queen cage and the sugar feeder in the boxOpening the top of the package reveal the queen cage and the sugar feeder canRemoving the queen cage from the bee packageThis is the queen cage, the fondant on the left is pierced with a small nail and the worker bees will eat thru this to release the queen once this is put into the hive. Two bent nails are inserted into the queen cage, with the fondant candy facing up, this queen cage then sits between two frames in the middle of the new hiveAfter the queen is placed in the new beehive, the bees are added to the hive by shaking the hive packageYou have to move the package back and forthThe worker bees cluster around the queen cage that was placed in between the frames.I tear open the screen of the package to allow the last of the bees to exit to the hive.An entrance reducer allows the young hive to defend the entrance from robber bees and yellow jackets. I did not have one of those wooden reducers, so I used a mouse guard.
I went over to a friend’s house yesterday to find he had lost a hive recently. There were few dead bees in the hive, but here was a ton of what I think is nosema in the hive, evidenced by the amount of bee droppings in the hive. Nosema is an intestinal ailment in honeybees, it gives the bees diarrhea.
And bees normally don’t poop in their hive, seeing bee poop in a hive, i think, is a sign of something wrong.
Both of our hives have signs of nosema, and I have been treating them with Fumagilin in a sugar syrup, spraying the hives once a week for 3 weeks.
You don't usually see comb spotted with bee droppings
and in the frames with honey, there was what looked like crystallized honey in some of the comb. Again, not sure what this is all about. Anyone know?
We decided to move a beehive, so I learned how to move a beehive, and now we’ll show you how we moved the it. Moving a beehive is not hard, watch this Beginning Beekeping Series video and learn how.
We’ve had a cold winter here, and we’ve had few opportunities to open up our hives to check on the bees.
It depends on which expert you are asking, but you should only open up a hive if its above about 45F. The rule I’ve read is if you have to wear a heavy jacket, you should not be opening up a hive.
Why open up a hive? Many hives perish in late winter or early spring when they may have run out of food. You want to get a quick peek to if there is food in the comb and if they bees are alive.
After reading and talking to our bee mentors, we decided to slip some fondant into our hives, as well as new grease patties. Fondant can be bought at a bakery supply or some craft stores, or you can make it yourself. There is a good discussion of making fondant on the Bee Source forum here. Pressed for time, we picked up some fondant at a craft store.
Bees entering thru inner cover gap
We finally had a day where the weather was in the 50s F, we opened up our hive at Maple Knoll Farm. We found a lot of dead bees on the bottom board, and we cleaned these out. The bees were out, already bringing in pollen ( we think from maple trees ), and they were entering the hive through the small gap in the inner cover.
Honey bee with pollen in late winter
To put the fondant on top of the frames, I built a simple spacer to allow the fondant to sit on top of the top super. We did a quick check of the frames in this top super – do not pull out the frames, just look down into them – and we found ample food in the comb. We decided to add the fondant and a grease patty just to be safe.
Spacer or shim allows for block of fondant and grease pattyHoneybees brining in a yellow pollen in late winter
We watched the bees, and despite us cleaning out the dead bees from the bottom board, they continued to use the inner cover entrance.
Dead bees pile up at the bottom of the hive during winter
A few days later we decided, since it had been so warm, to put a sugar feeder on top of the hive, with a 1:1 sugar syrup ( 1 lb of sugar to each 1 pint of water ). We pulled off the polystyrene and inner covers to find they bees had barely touched the fondant. They had been using the grease patty.
We left the fondant and spacer on, then put on the sugar feeder. We saw the feeder had warped, and there were gaps along the edge that mates with the hive body. The honeybees were trying to get into the hive between the feeder and the spacer. ( When adding a sugar feeder to the top of the hive, you do not use the inner cover, as it would allow bees to get into the syrup reservoir and drown. )
Bees trying to enter hive under warped feeder
Remembering in some of my beekeeping books, people do drill entrances into upper hive bodies, i opted to drill a hole in the spacer to allow the bees to enter the top of the hive. I also screwed the warped edges of the feeder into the spacer.
With no inner cover on the hive, I made an upper entrance.
All the time we were at the hive, the bees were bringing in pollen, which i was suprised by. I’m thinking it was probably maple tree pollen and some other early flowering plant that was a nice yellow color, perhaps pussy willows.
Each hive got a gallon of sugar syrup, as well as leaving the fondant on the hive. This week I will probably remove the fondant and top up the sugar syrup.
What have your experiences been with late winter beekeeping? Please let us know below:
In late winter, when you have a warm day, say 44-50 F, its a great opportunity to quickly check your honeybees and beehive. In this beekeeping 101 video, we show how we open the hive and place some fondant and a grease patty in the hive to get the bees through the last bit of winter. Links to more of our beekeeping videos at end of this post.
Note: Since making this video, we have changed our methods and are no longer using the styrofoam outer covers or fondant, but its still a good video on caring for your bees in winter. Watch our dry sugar feeding videos here.
Your honeybees may or may not have enough food stores to make it thru this last part of winter, but I am of the mind that it pays to put in some fondant. Other beekeepers will have differing opinions on this and many other practices related to beekeeping. It is too cold to feed your honeybees sugar syrup in late winter, feed them fondant.
We have produced this series of Beginning Beekeeping Videos to document our first years of beekeeping to show people how fun it really is and to demystify it, and to spread the word on raising honey bees. We are not beekeeping experts, we are still learning. Tell us your experiences below and we can all learn more.
Bee fondant and Grease Patty recipes are based on information from Cass of WVBeekeeper’s Blog and the BeeSource forums . A big thank you to Cass for his writings.
Fondant bee candy can be fed directly to the bees once cooled. Fondant is a good food source for mini-mating nucs because there is no drowning involved when you have a small amount of bees. It is also common to use this recipe in small quantities to plug the hole on a Queen Cage.
> 4 parts (by volume) white sugar
> 4 parts (by volume) 2:1 Syrup or HFCS
> 3 parts (by volume) water
Boil water and slowly add the syrup and sugar until dissolved. Continue heating until the mixture reaches 238°F (114°C). Without mixing allow the solution to cool until it is slightly warm to the touch. Then begin to mix and aerate the solution. As you do this the color should lighten. Pour into shallow dishes or mold and save for later use. I prefer to make the fondant thin enough to where I can work it into an empty frame of drawn comb.
Grease Patties:
I made my own based on reading thru the Bee Source forums and WVBeekeepers blog.
2 cups vegetable shortening – NOT butter or other flavored shortening
4 cups white sugar
10 drops of food grade pepperment oil or wintergreen oil
1/4 cup mineral block – this is a mineralize salt lick you can get at a farm – ag supply store. break off a chunk with a hammer.
mix this together and form into 4″ wide patties, they have to be thin enough to be placed between hive supers.
you can wrap these patties in wax paper , put in a freezer back and freeze for future use.
Here is our first honey harvesting video where we show you how to use a comb knife and an extractor to extract the honey from the honeycomb.
Our teacher, Jim, sent us an email after he saw our video with the following comments. Jim has strong opinions, like most beekeepers, I agree with most of what he says here, but not all of it. Again we are beginner beekeepers, so we can and do make mistakes. my goal here is to show people that they too can raise bees. So here is Jim’s take on our first honey harvesting video.
Offered in what I hope is noticed to be a TOUNGUE-IN-CHEEK and FRIENDLY
tone, are the following comments from your peers, as summarized by me:
1) Putting an undrawn frame of foundation into a hive in September is a dead
give-away that not only did you fell asleep in class, but you also failed to
do the reading. Bees are very unlikely to drawn comb after the middle of
August. Much better to simply replace the extracted frames when you are
done extracting.
2) The “purpose of the smoker” is not to drive the bees down in between the
frames. That level of smoke was last used by Richard Nixon against anti-war
protestors. The purpose of the smoker is to simply block alarm pheromones
from alarming other bees, and can be used sparingly.
3) When you are fully suited, veiled, and gloved, the bees can fly around
without endangering you. There is no reason to be concerned that they take
flight when you are brushing them off frames.
4) Brushing should be done with the frames upside down, so that any bees
with their heads in cells will not be bent backwards or pulled apart. Cells
slant upwards within the frame, so brushing from bottom of frame to top (by
bushing with the frame upside down) is much easier on you and the bees. If
your sound effect was the actual brushing, you also need to use much shorter
strokes, so as to avoid “rolling” bees on the frame. A fume board and some
Bee-Quick might have made the job quicker, easier, and sting-free, but I’m
not going to shove specific choices at anyone.
5) “Finding the queen” should not wait until frames are hanging on the frame
rest, as the queen might fall outside the hive. One wants to inspect frames
as one removes them, while holding them over the hive. The odds of the
queen being on frames of honey are small, but they are non-zero.
I wear Carhartt work pants. Whether I am in the city or in the country, I’m wearing Carhartt’s black canvas work dungarees. ( I do own one tan pair )
