Colonial Honey Farm - www.colonialhoneyfarm.webs.com

A good day

2012-02-04T17:54:00.000-08:00

Another great weather day today, two 60 degree days in a row, almost unheard of around here especially for February. The girls were out in force.

When I opened it up it was just frameafter frame of bees, they also had a nice but small brood nest

After this I ran out to the maltby hives and checked them out a little more than I did the first day. Of the three hives two are looking good with nice brood nests, the other not so good and no sign of an active queen, I am expecting that hive to die out in the next few weeks. All the hives were bringing in a bright yellow pollen. which my book says is from the Maple

Maltby Update

2012-02-03T21:19:00.000-08:00

With the afternoon temps hitting 60 degrees I made it out to the maltby yard to see how they faired. I was not sure what to expect but I got a nice supprise when I found all hives were active and the bees were flying.
I quickly put a gallon of syrup on each hive along with half a pollen patty and left them to be.

A note about the new Dadant winter pollen patties.
The bees seem to like them but I have to say I was a little disappointed with the way Dadant packaged them. I purchased a complete box and each box is divided into four with the patties stacked in each section. Trouble is the patties were not firm enough when they were boxed and they have tended to all melt together. Not a huge deal but it is a pain.
I spoke with somebody else who also got some and they had the same problem. Dadant is not a small outfit and I hope they are already making changes to get rid of this problem.

Mixing sugar water for spring feeding

2012-01-30T13:12:00.001-08:00

Many folks take way to much time measuring out sugar, boiling water etc. A few years ago I was making it up in a 20 gallon plastic garbage can with a piece of wood. It was taking too long and I soon switched to HFCS because it needed no mixing, trouble is I have to take a vacation day and drive down to Seattle to get it. Time is money and I really don’t have much of either to splash around so here is what I did this year.

Take a 5 gallon bucket, fill it halfway with sugar, put it in the bathtub and fill the bucket with hot water. As the water is running mix it up with a paint mixer and electric drill (12 volt battery) The whole process is 3 – 4 minutes and the syrup is ready the next day once it has cooled down. Also the paint mixer I got was heavy duty and still only $9.

Death toll, so far

2012-01-26T20:51:00.000-08:00

It was nice out when I got off work so I headed out to the farm, of the eight hives I had two have died. Definatley looked like they starved.
At home I had four hives and a nuc, the nuc and three hives were dead, again starvation.
That puts me at 30% so far with a couple of months to go. I will start feeding this weekend.
I will do a full autopsy with pictures later in the month.

With a vengance

2012-01-17T19:36:00.000-08:00

Winter shows up, about 20 inches in 24 hrs and another 12 slated for tomorrow. Power was out all afternoon but is back on at least for now.
My car aint going anywhere until the snow melts, I live in 4x4 country so its the other cars that do all the work this time of year.

Our dogs love this weather, here China has a chew toy that is solid ice on each end, she runs around with it in her mouth. She likes to curl up under a tree to sleep, she pretty much refuses to use the dog house.

The snow is heavy on the trees, power outages are a sure thing.

The bees are all tucked away, time to clear entrances.

Looking out to the gate, note the ice on the power lines

Its Been a mild winter so far

2012-01-15T12:13:00.000-08:00

But here comes the snow.....but first, Happy New year everyone. Lets hope that 2012 is a better year than 2011. I started last year with carpal tunnel surgery in my left hand and ended the year with a night in the ER followed a week later with surgery to remove my gallbladder. I wont go into details but the surgery was not as text book as we would have liked but after a couple of weeks recovery I am now back in good health. I lost 27lbs and plan to try to keep losing weight this year.

Now onto 2012, the forecast was for some spotty snow but not a lot and temps in the mid 30's. So far at the house we have about 5 inches and its still coming down hard. I am really hoping it does not get too bad or stay too long especially as I am driving the worst car ever designed for weather like this.
I am hoping the bees are doing ok, but still will not know for about a month, my plan this year is to not buy packages but to make splits, that assumes I will have some hives survive the winter. I am not looking to make any great expansions this year, I finished last year with 15 and would like to be at 20 for the end of the year, lets see how that goes.
I am also hoping to build a honey house this year although that might be a stretch on the wallet and is one thing that might slide into the spring of 2013, but I definatley need one if I go much beyond 20 hives.

Early winter feeding

2011-12-04T18:10:00.000-08:00

I am not sure if it is early winter feeding or just really late fall feeding. I never did get around to feeding in the fall so I was getting concerned about how they were doing.
It is too late for feeding syrup so I went ahead and ordered a box of Dadants new "winter" formula pollen patties. Today was sunny but cold so we went and placed a patty on each hive to help them out hopefully for at least the next month.

The good news is each hive was still alive and appeared to have good numbers of bees in each, the bad news is the bees in almost every case were in the top pox and not in the bottom, so either they have already worked there way from the bottom to the top or they never got around to getting into the lower box. Due to the temperature I did not break the hives down to check, just pollen patties and a prayer until after xmas.
Wednesday I have surgery and will be in recovery mode for about a week so it was good I got this done now and did not put it off.

Over the xmas break I hope to be working on my woodenware for next year, I need to build a polariscope and a new solar wax melter, this should keep me busy for a while.

Harvest update

2011-11-05T10:03:00.000-07:00

This year I am keeping track of what I actually bottle and sell, including any that I give away. I wanted to try to be accurate this year when adding up my harvest. From the totals I have so far it is a down year and I think it was even worse than I estimated when I did the extracting.
I have actually sold or given away 67 lbs for a gross of $600 and bottled or waiting to go in the bottle is another 60 lb. I also have 90 comb sections being sold for me but I will not see the revenue from those sales until after christmas.
I still expect to be sold out by Christmas which is ok by me, just wish I had more to sell. My gross sales this year will be about $1800, I spent about $1000 on supplies and equipment which leaves me with just $800 for the year and I have taxes to pay from that. Not great but still in the black, I covered the years operating expenses and paid off a little of my original start up costs. If I did a better job with accounting my expenses (gas etc) I would not even have a tax bill this year, I will add that to lessons learned.

So far I have shipped to Texas, Florida and South Carolina.
I am already looking forward to next year.

Bad Beekeeper

2011-11-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

A good beekeeper is somebody who really cares over the bees and makes sure that everything is ready when it is needed. This year I have been busier than usual at work and I have not been able to give them the time I would have liked.
In the spring I was late feeding, and in fact stopped feeding a little early, although I was tricked by the weather on that one. I was later than usual with the harvest and I still have a couple of supers on that need to come off.
My biggest fault so far this year was letting a pollen trap wipe out a hive, my not taking the time to do proper inspections really got me with that one.
Right now it is too late in the year to put a liquid feed on the bees, something I should have done 6 weeks ago, but again work kept me too busy to go buy the feed so they were left to their own devises. I am hoping to be able to put some sugar on the hives this weekend I have kept sunday open in the hopes that I can do that one last chore before the snows come.
At this point I am not planning on buying any packages in the spring, whatever survives will become my stock base for next year.

Comb Honey

2011-10-23T15:49:00.000-07:00

All the comb honey is now weighed and labeled and if you wish to buy some you can, but you will need to go to Val's Surroundings Gifts
She sold all my comb honey last year and it did not last long so if you want some dont wait. Val also has a really nice store full of great gift ideas and Christmas is right around the corner.

Packages arrive

2011-10-17T16:23:00.000-07:00

I have been waiting on a couple of packages.
The first to arrive was the refractometer that I purchased. Most honey when capped is already at or below the required 18 1/2% however knotweed can be borderline so before I bottle it I wanted to be able to test it. I got this one off ebay for just $33.

I had two half buckets of knotweed (not as much as I thought) one bucket tested at 17 1/2 % the second bucket tested at 18 1/2 %. Now that I know they are good I can combine the buckets and start to bottle.

Note when testing the honey that has been sitting for a while, the honey you get out of the honey gate (bottom) is denser than the honey at the top, this is because the honey with the higher moisture content will settle to the top of the bucket.

The other package was my labels for the comb honey, I think they look pretty nice. The one on the left is Blackberry and the one on the right is Knotweed. Both weigh in at over 5oz which is the net weight on the labels. I still need to decide what to do with the ones that are slightly under weight or not 100% capped.

We finally got a summer.

2011-09-18T10:02:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately it was not until August. For the first time in many years we had no rain during the 12 days of the evergreen state fair, the bee booth was as popular as ever and interest in taking beginner beekeeping classes was high. Because summer did not arrive until August, we had an almost non existent blackberry flow, the problem here was that it takes about three days for the blooms to produce nectar, when it rains it gets washed out and this year it rained every 4^th day almost like clockwork. This has led to a much darker blackberry honey this year because the bees went to the secondary flow in bloom at the time which was the clover. Clover is a darker honey and it is less affected by rain so the bees spent more time on that flower this year.

The knotweed came into bloom in early August and is still going strong in some areas although for the most part it is now also done. I left all my supers on the hives all the way through the knotweed flow this year just in the hopes that they would put more by. Despite the great weather it does not appear that they put away anymore than they did last year, however the hives are pretty heavy and I think the majority went into the brood nest and I am OK with that.

The first boxes I removed were the comb honey boxes, they did not do as well as I had hoped for and I ended up with 90 units, a lot of it being knotweed.

Last night we extracted the blackberry and I only got about 100 – 120 Lbs. I still have to extract a few frames of knotweed and I also have three or four more boxes on the hives that will come off this week. I am not expecting those boxes to yield much so my estimate of 150LBs of honey for the year is going to be pretty close. Disappointing but not a total loss.

I had a total of 13 supers on hives (not including the comb honey), five were removed with nothing in them and from the few that I extracted last night I only had 32 frames that had honey in them. That is only 3.4 Lbs. per frame average or 27.5LBs per box. This may change a little after I do the remaining boxes but I do not see the average getting above 30LBs per box.

Mite treatments.

I actually used a commercial mite treatment this year for the first time ever. I went with “Hopquard” and I have to say it was extremely effective and I have seen no negative affects on the bees. I decided to go with this product as it is less harsh on the bees and going into the fall I thought it would be the better option. I did not put it on every hive, only on those that showed signs of heavy mite infestations. However you can leave this product on and I may yet put it in all hives just to play it safe.

Upcoming events.

I will be teaching classes in November and December, I will post details on my website when I have everything confirmed.

The WSBA Fall Conference is in October, details can be found here, http://www.wasba.org/

Also the Annual Regional Dinner is on Oct 18^th and everyone is welcome, details can be found here, http://www.nwdba.org/

Evergreen State Fair

2011-08-21T21:07:00.000-07:00

Today I was at the fairgrounds to judge the honey entries. Last year we had a record number of entries, this year we were at the mercy of the weather and I was not expecting a large turnout, however what we did get was still disappointing. In total we had two people enter the different wax catagories and we had three people enter frames of honey, that was it. No extracted honey, no comb, no cream honey. I guess everyone is having a bad year.

I checked the hives and the knotweed has started to be collected, now if only the weather will hold out for a couple of weeks. Right now if I was to extract I would guess somewhere around 150 lbs blackberry and 80 comb units. I left everything on and will just extract everything once the knotweed is finished.

The summer that never was

2011-07-26T20:28:00.000-07:00

Its been a miserable year so far, all my new packages were hived in the rain, something I have never had to do before. We have not had four sunny days in a row yet this year, 3 days has been the limit and everytime it has been followed not by cooler cloudy weather but always by rain. Sunday it was 80 degrees followed on monday by temps in the 60's and heavy rain. It is supposed to get better as the week goes on but eventually you run out of time and that is what is happening to us. We only have about a week of blackberry left and after that if I am lucky we will get some knotweed, then its button down that hatches and prepare for winter.
The girls are trying and I will get honey but it looks like I am going to be a long way from my goal earlier in the year.
The following pictures were taken using my phone so the quality is not great, if you click on them you will get a bigger view.
Here you can see the bees have finally started to draw out the comb sections in one of the boxes, now we just need to flow to stay on and the weather to stay nice long enough to finish them off. The other box I started has not been touched by the bees yet.

Next comes some queen pictures, this first one is the nuc I have out at the farm, it was an overwinter survivor that was really struggling earlier on, I combined it with another survivor and have just been waiting for them to catch up. They had built up to a double nuc and today I moved them into a regular box, they had about six frames of brood and now the goal is to get them built up to overwinter.

This queen is from the swarm I got last week that was between two tomato plant pots. They are doing well and she is laying but she is the strangest queen I have seen, all her black has a reddish brown color she is a queen bee with a tan.

The last queen is the one I got from a coworkers swarming hive, the hive actually swarmed several times and I am pretty sure she was a virgin when I got her. Here she looks like she mated and is laying nicely.

Later this week I will be doing a cutout and should have some pictures on how that goes.

Rain and swarms

2011-07-21T20:39:00.000-07:00

It rained all night and most of the morning. About 4pm I got a call for a swarm that had been in place for about a day. They were real easy, I used the bee vac to make sure I got as many as I could and when done I doubt there was still ten bees flying around.
I got them home and moved them into a nuc, I will leave them alone until the weather gets better and I can look for the queen. Not long after I got the lid on and everything put away the rain returned.

Just not catching any breaks

2011-07-17T17:24:00.000-07:00

We are just not getting any breaks with this weather. I dont think we have had three days in a row where the sun has been out. The last nice day we had was a week ago and it has rained every day since.
The bees have not been out much and in the lower elevations the blackberry has started to come to the end of the flow. Most of my hives have not even needed a super, all I can do is hope they end strong although the forecast is not great.

Honey is coming

2011-07-09T20:10:00.000-07:00

The hives at the maltby yard are just starting to bring in some honey, hopefully in the next week they will really kick it into gear.
At the farm I really have a mixed bag, two hives will not give a surplus this year, the hive I requeened last week might, they have two deeps and a western, the queen is busy in the bottom box and they are filling the second deep with honey, so far they have not touched the super. Several other hives have just started to collect but they have a ways to go yet. Two more hives are going gang busters, they already have a super each almost full and today one got a new super and the other got a comb honey box.
The swarm that moved in was packing away the honey and there was no sign of a queen so I put a new queen in today.
The blackberry around the house is only just starting to bloom so I hope the home hives kick in soon.

Passed my Journeyman Field test

2011-07-07T10:22:00.000-07:00

I guess it is official, I am now a certified Journeyman beekeeper in Washington State, although it will not feel like it until I actually recieve the certificate. It was a hot evening with temps in the 80's and the bees did everything they could to accomodate me in my testing. They were very calm and although I had the smoker lit, not once did I need to use it, which is how I prefer to work the bees when the flow is on.

The hive that was almost wiped out by the pollen trap is now officially dead, there was no activity in the hive which is a pity as before the trap went on they were a really nice looking hive.
I guess the next bit of news kind of makes up for it though. I had a dead out hive that I had left in place, although I had been taking frames from it as I needed them and when I popped the lid off I was pleasantly suprised to see that a swarm had moved in and had already filled two frames with honey. I did some swapping of frames and they now have two deeps of drawn out comb to make use of, I will leave them alone until saturday to see how they are doing.
The hive that was requeened on Sunday has released the queen and she looked to have settled in, I will also check them in more detail saturday to make sure she has room to lay. With the flow full on right now some bees fill up and leave the queen nowhere to lay so you need to keep an eye on them.
The Nuc that I have been babying along most of the year finally looks like it is ready to explode, I just need to decide if I am going to overwinter as a nuc or move them into a deep, I may also requeen this hive.

Like I said yesterday it was 84 and I set the pollen traps to collect pollen, it should come as no supprise that today it is in the 60's with rain and looking at the ten day forecast we will be lucky to see 70 again anytime soon.

By the numbers

0 days in March without cloudy skies.
5 days 70 degrees or above at Paine Field through June.
14 days described as fair weather at Sea-Tac Airport through June.
300 consecutive days below 80 degrees at Sea-Tac Airport through June.

Pollen trap update

2011-07-03T20:08:00.000-07:00

One thing I have learnt from this years attempts at getting pollen, you have to pick the right hives. I had three traps in use, trap one just about wiped out a hive, I dismantled it and could find nothing wrong with it. Today I put it on a hive in the home yard just so I can keep an eye on it. So far the bees appear to be coming and going just fine, although no pollen yet. Right now around the house we just do not have much for them to forage on so not a whole lot of pollen is being collected.
Trap two has been a little dissapointing, the amount it is collecting has been minimal, I have to make account for the weather but at least we have a good forecast for the next week. Just to make sure the trap was not getting clogged I took the hive apart today and it was lucky I did. I found six supercedure cells, one capped and only a small amount of brood. No sign of the queen. They cannot get back into the hive through the traps so if they leave for any reason or a new hive goes on a mating flight she is doomed. So today I removed the trap and installed a new queen. I will check on her again in a couple of days. I had been told that pollen traps take their toll on queens. At almost $30 a queen the pollen traps need to work well to make them worth using.
Trap number three is working the best, in the last couple of days with the improved weather collection has increased significantly. Today I collected 5.3 oz in just a 24 hr period.
Pollen colors are mainly grey (blackberry) some brown (clover) along with some yellow and orange.

Not all that flowers is food

2011-07-02T09:29:00.001-07:00

Every year in June I get calls and emails from new beekeepers asking me why their hive either has died out or is just not doing very well. Sometimes the reason is not apparent but in the vast majority of cases it can be put down to starvation.

Depending on the weather we have an early nectar source that we get from the big leaf maple, usually this runs from as early as mid March to as late as mid May. Then we really don’t have anything around until the blackberry comes into bloom which depending on weather and elevation can be anywhere from mid June to late July. Some folks may be near significant sources of raspberry and lavender but for most of us, blackberry is what we are waiting on.

Packages hived in April on new foundation need a lot of food in order to draw out the comb, once comb is drawn out they need an ever increasing amount of food to feed a growing hive and raise brood. Even overwintered hives will see an increase in the need for food, they don’t have the comb to draw out but they do often have large brood nests.

One call I get a lot is “I need a new queen, there were eggs and brood two weeks ago and now there is almost nothing, she must be dead”

Usually the first question I ask is “are you feeding them” and often the answer back is ” No, they stopped taking feed back in May so I took it off” Bees will often cut back the syrup intake if they are getting anything from the maple, once the maple stops then if you are not feeding they will first cut back on raising brood, the queen will stop laying and after two weeks you may have a hive with no signs of an active queen. You may see dead larvae being removed from the hive, bees start to look slow and lethargic. At this point you may start to see lots of dead bees in front of the hive, you will see them kicking out drones. If nothing is done soon you could have a hive with only a handful of bees and once the cluster gets below a critical mass they cannot survive and the hive will die out.

If you make it to the blackberry bloom, pay attention to the weather, if it is raining a lot they will still not be able to forage and may need still more feed until the weather improves. When you do your inspections if you cannot see any cells with nectar in them or there is no capped honey around the brood nest your hive could be on the verge of starving.

Remember, some flowers are good pollen sources and some are good nectar sources but very few are both.

The Washington State Beekeepers Assn. annual conference

2011-06-29T19:05:00.000-07:00

The Washington State Beekeepers Assn. (WSBA) is holding its annual conference

Thursday Oct. 27 thru 29, 2011 at the Best Western Evergreen Inn & Suites in

Federal Way, Washington.

See more detail about the conference, hotel registration contact numbers and forms, soon to be posted on the association website at: http://www.wasba.org/,

Telephone to book rooms & ask for WSBA Conference rate – 877-574-2464 (local 253-529-4000).

We will be updating our website information as it becomes available so please

check back several times.

This is your opportunity to hear the latest information and research pertinent

to bee management in the Northwest. Advanced registration for the conference

is recommended, forms will be available on the above website.

Swarm calls

2011-06-26T18:15:00.000-07:00

So far this year has been very quiet as far as swarm calls go. Today I got the first call and they were within the distance that I limit myself to. I loaded up the car and headed out.
I got there pretty quick and the homeowner pointed out the tree to me, there were a few bees coming and going. Unfortunately the swarm had left and only a few scout bees were left.

From the homeowners description the swarm was probably 4-6 LBs, all that was left were a few scouts.
In talking to the homeowner I found out that this swarm had been in the tree for 3-4 days, at first I was just a little put out that they waited so long to call, however when I checked my missed calls they did in fact call yesterday, my voicemail only gave me notification late today, guess verizon takes the blame on this one.

Ready for honey

2011-06-22T21:54:00.000-07:00

At the lower elevations in just the last couple of days the blackberries have come into bloom. I have supers on all the hives that I wanted them on and now its up to the weather and the bees, I also need to assemble 100 western frames so I have extra if needed.
Speaking of weather, so far this year, Seattle weather has sucked. We have only had one 3 day spell of sunny weather, mostly we get one or two days followed by several days of clouds and rain. The weather man keeps promising that next week will be sunny and hot but so far next week never comes.

So far the pollen collection has been a bust, I probably only have around two LBs collected so far, this is mainly due to the weather we have been having, and its killing me as I have customers lined up.
The hive that was almost wiped out by a pollen trap is slowly coming back from the brink, they went from two full deeps to only 3 frames, however the queen is laying and I am hoping that with the flow on the hive will grow back to a size that I can get through the winter.
Tonight I took apart the offending pollen trap, and I was not able to find anything wrong with it. Its a bit of a mystery and I plan to put the trap on a hive at the home yard so I can keep a close eye on the hive.

Bears

2011-06-18T10:51:00.000-07:00

A week ago I was filming a beginner video with Ron Upshaw. See HERE
One segment was where we went through and did a deadout autopsy.
The hive had plenty of honey in it, no disease and lots of brood comb. This is a good hive to use as a swarm lure which I what I suggested Ron do with it when he got it back home.
A couple of days later I get this picture from Ron, guess the bears wanted the honey. Usually they want the brood as it is higher in protein, but the Salmon Berries did not really come on in any great number this year and its too early for the blackberries so I guess the bears are hungry.

At least the bear did not turn the hive and frames into firewood.

Blackberries are blooming

2011-06-18T10:20:00.000-07:00

At the lower elevations the blackberries have started to bloom, I actually thought it would take another week but there you go.
At the Maltby yard all three hives got a single honey super, this should give them a week or so to clean up before they start to store honey.
At the farm Due to the combining activity that took place last week, I have nine hives, the hive that nearly got wiped out by the defective pollen trap is still recovering and I doubt it will be in any shape to produce a surplus, that leaves eight hives that might. I plan on putting comb honey supers on two hives and regular honey supers on the other six.
Of the three hives at home only two may give us a surplus, one has enough bees for sure and one seems a little light on bees, however at this higher elevation I still have maybe two weeks to get ready so I put some feed on them and hope they kick it into gear. The one hive I have at home I recieved as a Nuc and it just is not doing that great, still barely a full deep, in fact we put a second deep on yesterday and I hope they expand into it quickly. I could have combined this hive with the weaker of the other two, but I have some Sue Colby queens coming next week and she has been importing drone seman from overseas to improve the genetics and I think I am going to put one in this hive. The other hives I will put them in are the combined nuc hive and the pollen trap death hive.
I am going to bank the existing queens from these hives just in case I need an emergency queen. Plus it will give me some practice handling queens and banking them.

My goal at the start of the year was for 600 -900 LBs of honey and 100 comb sections.
With 11 hives supered it is going to be a stretch and I would need 55LB average to hit my minimum goal. I may fall short on the blackberry flow but may catch up with the knotweed.
Potentially I could get 256 comb sections, it is pretty rare to get 100% on these so I am now hoping for 150

If all goes well, this year could see me bringing in $7000 which will actually cover all my expenses this year and leave me with a healthy profit.

Assuming the minimum (600 LBs honey and 150 comb sections, also assumes all blackberry, I get more for Knotweed)
600 x $11 = $6600
150 x $5 = $750

Bottles for Honey - $300
Comb Kits - $110
Total = $6940
Even at the low end of my goal if I hit this number I will be happy.

Congratulations Laura

2011-06-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

Snohomish class 2011

Way to go.

Pollen trap killing a hive, Videos and more

2011-06-11T22:12:00.000-07:00

Today I met up with Ron Upshaw (http://farmerron.blogspot.com/) Ron is a Seattle radio host and he keeps bees. He has expanded his beekeeping to include a web store (http://www.worldofbeekeeping.com/ ) in the store he has a beginner video that he made a year or two ago that is pretty good. This year he wants to do a second video as a follow on to the first and that is where I came in. Ron asked me to help him in a couple of segments in the video. We covered the need to carry an EPI pen, why its a good idea to wear protective gear, swarms and swarm lures, pollen collection and we finished up with a paper combine of two weak hives. I look forward to seeing the finished video which will be for sale on Rons site. Hopefully not too much ends up on the cutting room floor.

Speaking of pollen traps, I have three hives with traps on. Two hives were giving me a small amount of pollen and one was almost none. I was not too supprised as the weather we have been having has not been very good, also it took a little time to find all the gaps they were using to bypass the traps. You dont want to leave the traps set to collect pollen all the time, leave them on too long and the bees will start bringing in smaller size pollen and the trap will not work, also you want to leave them with enough pollen to feed a growing brood nest. Last wednesday I set the traps to collect pollen and today I went to see how they were doing. Two traps were collecting a reasonable amount, the third trap had not a single grain of pollen. I checked the front and no activity so I decided to open up the hive and remove the trap to make sure nothing was wrong with the way the trap was put together.
When I removed the lid I was supprised to see the queen on the inner cover, going into the hive there was no brood, no pollen and no honey, this hive was on the verge of starvation. All the escapes on the trap were blocked with dead bees, not sure why, I still need to take it apart and look for some error in the way it was put together. I put the hive back together and put on a gallon of syrup, by the time I left the bees were busy flying. I will check them tomorrow and if needed I will give them more syrup.

At the Maltby yard things were going better than I thought a week ago, two hives are ready for supers and they will go on tomorrow, the third hive which I thought was queenless is actually ok, it just needed better management by me. This hive originally had a western on it over the winter and not only did they go up and eat the honey but the queen went up and was laying in every frame. So I moved it to the bottom in the hope that she would move up and I could remove it. What this actually did was put a deep box between the queen and the top deep that she had also been laying in. The top deep acted like its own hive and created a supercedure cell while the queen stayed in the bottom. I re adjusted this hive and was able to remove the western, I will check on them again in a week.

High School Presentation

2011-06-06T20:51:00.000-07:00

Today I gave a presentation to a class of Seniors at Snohomish high school. The 45 minutes went by really quickly and I had a fun time talking to them. They were very attentive and from some of the questions asked they were paying attention. The observation hive was popular.
Next time I need to carry some notes just to keep me on track, its a little different than when you are teaching a structured class.

Good news, Bad news

2011-06-04T20:09:00.000-07:00

Today we checked on the Maltby (ant) yard.
Two hives are doing well, the ants are almost completely gone. That is it for the good news.
One hive had a virgin queen two weeks ago, today it is a dead out and being robbed out. The fourth hive had lots of bees, some capped brood, but no larvae or eggs. All the hives appear a little light.

We checked just a couple of hives at the farm and most appear ok, I have one very weak hive that I am going to combine with a nuc that finally appear to have taken off. We set all the pollen traps to collect pollen.
I id not check most of the hives but will try to get to them tomorrow.

At home a quick check of the hives showed two doing well and one queenless hive.

So tomorrow I am going to have to go buy two queens.

Next week I will be getting together with Ron Upshaw from Kiro radio and we will be shooting a follow up to his beginner beekeeper video.

Ant yard update.

2011-05-21T19:07:00.000-07:00

Got to the yard this afternoon, wanted to see how the bees were doing against the ants. Looks like the ant bait might be working, still a lot of ants but not like they were, also they appeared to be staying above the inner cover with just a few exceptions. A quick inspection showed each hive doing ok, with one exception. One hive was putting a lot of maple honey in the top box so I added a super two weeks ago. They had not touched it, so I checked the first deep, no signs of brood but I guess about 30lbs of capped honey. In the bottom box we also found no brood, no larvae and no eggs. I did find one open queen cell and we were able to find the small virgin or recently mated queen. I will give them a week and see what they are up to, we may need to requeen.
Although the other hives are doing ok, I would not say they are doing great, I will continue to monitor them and more queens may be needed.
One thing I did notice, I had some old frames that had old but never used foundation, I put them in various hives and what I notice is, the bees dont like them, no one of them has even started trying to draw out the foundation. I will need to swap these frames out soon.

Pollen traps back on

2011-05-19T22:00:00.000-07:00

Quick trip to the farm tonight, I got three pollen traps put onto the hives, Tomorrow I will swing by and see how they are doing. I also made sure any gaps were completely sealed. I have been looking around for a commercial kitchen to rent in order to process the pollen for human consumption, I have a couple of leads and am now just waiting to hear back with prices.

I wrote about one of my new packages trying to supercede its queen HERE.
At the time I removed the queen cells as it was too early for them to raise one of their own and the queen really did look very nice. Tonight when I checked the hive I have to admit although she is laying she is not going gangbusters like some of my other hives. Looks like the bees know what they need as I found another capped supercedure cell in the top box. I did not find the queen, she is a black Carni and the hive had a good number of very black drones so she was able to stay hidden from me.

Journeyman certificate. All the tests have been passed, I now just need to schedule a field exam. I hope to get that completed in the next week or so.

Ant nest update and the lost bluetooth

2011-05-14T18:53:00.000-07:00

The ants at the yard are a problem that I need to take care of, here is the nest, hard to tell from the picture but it is about two feet high. It is also about two hundred feet from the hives.

Here is a close up, taken with a camera phone so not the best picture.

No messing with these guys, the ant bait went straight on top of the nest. As soon as they landed the bigger guard ants were all over it. With the size of the nest this is going to take a few weeks and more bait traps

Once done we headed back to the car, we had to pass the hives and I was wearing a bluetooth. A single bee took exception to it, possibly the blue flashing light, not really sure. However I can tell you that even a beekeeper does not want an angry bee buzzin in your ear, and she was real angry. I ended up flickin the bluetooth out of my ear, did not see where it went and the grass was pretty long, so I am now going to have to buy a new one.

Not a great spring

2011-05-13T19:12:00.000-07:00

We have been breaking all the records this spring, just the wrong ones, coldest, wettest, longest period since the last 70 degree day. And it is showing no signs of changing.
Tuesday was one of the few nice days, so I headed out to the farm and checked in on the bees, most hives are doing ok, but I have two weak ones (both survivors from last year) that I am keeping an eye on. At this point they are poor enough that requeening is not an option. I am hoping that they both improve enough that I can combine them and then requeen.
On tuesday the forecast for the week was mid 60's I set the pollen traps to collect pollen, then overnight the forecast changed and we had heavy rain for the next two days. Thursday the rain stopped but it did not warm up much. Today was nice and I checked the hives and traps. Not much in any trap, but not supprising knowing the weather, also I noticed that the bees would use any small gap they could find to bypass the traps. The trap I am using has a wooden piece that when rotated opens up a bypass, trouble is it was so tight that I needed to bang it into place, so with weather forecast for the next 7 or 8 days off came the traps and I will do some modifying in the workshop.
When I got home I weighed the pollen and it came in at 3.25oz, gonna need to do much better than that if we are going to collect a viable amount to sell.

Here is a random picture of one of the package hives, doing very well. I am starting to like the new style frame feeders, however you can only fit 8 frames when they are in use.

Farmers markets begin

2011-05-08T14:38:00.000-07:00

Even though we have had a terrible spring, the markets start no matter what.
I dont have anything to sell, I was all out before christmas.
However, Val of Vals Surroundings asked Anna if she would mind running the Saturday market at Woodinville. Val sells my comb honey in her store and I figure it would be good practice for her when we do start selling.
Things started out kinda slow, it was the first one of the year and rain was forecast. There were only a few vendors selling flowers, asparagus and some crafts. The rain held off and in the afternoon things got a little busier. I expect she will be really busy as the year goes on and more vendors show up.

Overall she did pretty good and is looking forward to next week.

Hive types

2011-05-04T11:19:00.000-07:00

I have been having a debate with myself for some time now. Ever since I started teaching beekeeping to beginners some of my perspectives on beekeeping have changed.

The debate I have been having with myself involves the questions we get on Top bar hives, foundationless frames and Warre hives. With the exception of the warre, I have tried them all. The following is my opinion on each.

Foundationless frames are a way to save a little money and be sure you are not using any chemically contaminated wax, I tried this my first year and gave up on it pretty quickly. That first year I started five hives and each hive was a completely different experience. I had one hive drew everything out perfect, another hive tried to draw comb off of each side of some frames, making it almost impossible to remove frames for inspections, a third hive decided to ignore the frames completely making a really bad mess that took a lot of work to clean up.

Additionally the drone count in these hives was much higher than you normally see in a regular foundation hive, possibly 30% or more. This did have a negative effect on the production of the hive and even for first year packages I had a really bad varroa mite problem.

My advice on foundationless is, in your first year, don’t do it. Too many potential issues and beginners have enough to learn without having the additional hassle, I feel this is even more true if you plan on more than just a couple of hives.

It would not be correct if I said that TBH’s were a fad, they have been around for a long time and will continue to be used by many beekeepers. There are many issues with them, if you plan on doing all tbh then you need to either make them your self or find a supplier who makes them, however the idea that tbh’s are a poor mans hive kinda go out the window when suppliers are charging $250+ for them. Tbh’s require more inspections the first year, just to make sure the bars get drawn out correctly, don’t do that and the following troubles arise.

Other issues are that you will not find many experienced tbh beekeepers for advice, although this is slowly changing. If you have multiple hives of regular design and then add a tbh, it is going to be a stand alone hive. Swapping frames or doing splits into regular nucs is not an option. Also if your tbh’s are different styles or dimensions you will be limiting your hive management options. Honey from tbh’s is not as abundant and is harder and a lot messier to extract.

Here my advice is if you are going with just one hive and you don’t care about the amount of honey you get, sure give it a try, but if you are expanding with langs, give it a pass.

Warre hives are a mix between a lang and a tbh, they tend to be expensive, custom made and even the ones I saw made from one supplier were all different. A warre is smaller than an 8 frame lang, uses foundationless frames and you super by adding to the bottom. If you want to go with this style I would suggest just using 8 frame equipment, at least then you can purchase standard boxes and not be paying somebody for customized equipment. Warre fits into my definition of a fad.

Busy weekend, arent they all !

2011-05-01T21:37:00.000-07:00

I spent all day friday helping out at Beezneez. It was their second package bee day (550 packages went out on their first day) we handed out almost 250 packages and a lot of equipment, it was a fun day but bed was very inviting that night.

Saturday I was in Renton picking up some bees, today I was able to get out and do some inspections.

At the home yard, both Nucs I started died, they were just too small and the weather has been too wet and too cold. All the other hives are doing well.

As usual click on any picture to get a bigger view.

Maltby yard, when I got there, the property owner said that the bees have been busy and she had seen a steady line of ants going into the hives. I did not think it would be a problem but I had not seen the ants at that time. I was in for a supprise. Here is a picture of the ants at the bottom of the first hive, I did not get a picture from under the lid where the feeder was but multiply this by ten.

This picture is inside the feeder box of hive #3, not as many ants but still a lot. I am going to put some cinamon down, which most ants dont like, however these are Allegheny Mound Ants and they can have a large nest which if disturbed can lead to multiple bites, as the property owner has children I think we may try to find the nest and deal with it in a more permanant manner. These ants will spread fast and actually swarm similar to bees, it is better to not let them get too bad.

One of the hives has really been packing in the honey, although I am pretty sure this is from the feed I have been giving them, still it looks very nice.

Another hive had not taken any of the feed I gave them, when I went throught they had 30 - 40 lbs stored and capped, as you can see it is darker in color and I am pretty sure it is maple, these bees must have been flying in the rain ! I will add a super to this hive to see if I can harvest any. Also I should note that this hive had the smaller brood pattern of all four hives at this location, I kinda wish they would work at raising brood over bringing in honey. I am going to have to make sure the queen has enough room to lay.

Next I headed out to the farm, I was met by property owner Vince Caruso and he told me that his wife Anna had a baby girl friday night, congratulations to both. Then Vince gave me some of the asparagus fresh from the field, looking forward to having that tomorrow night with some good old English Shepherds Pie.

Here is a picture of one of my package queens, she is a carniolan and is very nice looking and plump, she appears to be laying well and there is a good brood pattern, carni's tend to start laying later, only when they know that a good nectar flow is in progress

That is why the next two pictures supprised me a little, supercedure cells, one capped and the other a few days behind. I am not sure why they feel the need to replace her, it could possibly be that they are italian bees and they dont like her slow start. As there are not many drones around yet and our weather outlook is still kind of cool and wet I decided to remove these two cells and keep her going, if later on they try to replace her I may let them

On another good note, the nuc I thought had died, actually I was certain it had died, now has a small cluster and a laying queen, pretty sure she was not there last time I looked. If it warms up enough for the next few weeks they have a chance of making it.

I also set both pollen traps to collect pollen.

More bees

2011-04-24T20:56:00.000-07:00

I got a call late today, did I have room for more bees ?
Turns out a local supplier had extra and rather than see them die he gave them to me.
I had to rush around getting equipment, stuff I thought I would have on hand for swarms or splits and even some stuff I had on hand to add to existing hives when they needed it.
We were able to scrounge enough boxes, bases and lids for two 10 frame hives and 2 Nucs.
I did have more stuff available but it was over at the farm and it was getting late and the packages were due to arrive at any minute.
Once the packages arrived, we set to installing them, it was a rushed job trying to rain and getting darker by the minute and apart from Anna getting four bees going up the inside of her pant leg and while getting them out got stung under the arm, all went well.
Bees are installed, they all have feed on them and all the queens were direct released.

One comical point was when I tried to release a queen, she flew up and landed somewhere on my back. I had Anna try to get her but she took off again and this time landed on the veil just under my chin. From there I was able to shake her off into the box. That was the only excitement in the whole operation.
Now I just need to buy yet more boxes to be ready for the expansions I know will be occurring during the summer. It does not seem to matter how much you have, it is never enough.
I guess I should add that for me it was not as easy as usual as I had carpal tunnel surgery on my left wrist just five days ago, but it held up ok and a couple of vicodin and I feel pretty good this evening.

Finally a day when the sun was out and I was not working.

2011-04-23T22:05:00.000-07:00

We headed out to the farm to do a thorough inspection. Here are the results as I noted them.
#1, New package installed two weeks ago. They were installed on existing comb, plenty of pollen but only two smallish brood circles on two frames.
#2, This was an overwintered hive, only about four frames of bees, plenty of stores with lots of honey.
#3 Only three frames of bees in this hive, we reduced them down to a single deep.
#4, This was one of the stronger hives, brood in the bottom box and the Queen was up in the top box, we added a pollen trap to this hive (but not set to collect pollen)
#5, Another new package, about six frames started.
#6, Another hive with about six frames of bees, this hive also got a pollen trap setup.
#7, Only 3 -4 frames of bees but a nice brood pattern, some cells had two eggs as this was a new package with a young queen, it is possible that she is still learning. The worker bees will remove one egg and allow the remaining egg to develope. I think the queen was impatient so we added a second deep.
#8, Small cluster in top deep, almost no brood, reduced to one deep.
#9, The bottom box was a western which had three frames full of brood, the second box was a deep that had a good amount of honey. We moved the western frames of brood to the deep and removed the western.
#10, this was the weak hive that we moved to a Nuc, it did not make it.

Home yard.
#1, This was a Nuc I created, it is struggling with not enough bees
#2, New package, seven frames drawn out and a second deep added
#3, Overwintered hive doing really well, we took a frame of brood and bees and gave them to the Nuc. I also removed one really old frame. Two new frames were put into the hive, they still have plenty of room in the second deep.

All hives received a gallon of syrup.

In general I would say the hives were weaker than I would like to see, but there were a couple of good hives. I am sure if we could get something other than rain then they would do better.

Maltby Yard all setup

2011-04-21T08:03:00.000-07:00

I got the hives moved in a couple of weeks ago, Tuesday I finally got out there and got feed on the bees. The property owners did a very nice job of supplying a nice secure fenced area, not shown in the photo is the gate. All that is left is the hot wire, there are bears in the area.

Plenty of room to expand.
Today I am at home recovering from my second (and final) carpal tunnel surgery and its snowing, about 1/2 inch or so. Supposed to hit 60 tomorrow, go figure.

Nice day yesterday to work the bees

2011-04-13T10:16:00.000-07:00

I got off early and went out to clean up a little from the rushed package installations. I also needed to create a couple of splits.
The bees were flying and bringing in a lot of pollen, not the best pictures but click on them to enlarge and you should be able to make out at least three pollen colors.

I needed to collect all the package boxes and just tidy up in general

Here you can see my old hive stands on the left, the boxes stacked up in the top left were empty boxes that will be added to the package hives as needed. I moved them so they are no longer in front of the hives. The Nuc in the bottom left was one of two I created, they got loaded into my truck and moved to the home yard, they both got russian queens installed. On my next visit out I will remove the old stands completely.

The one hive that I had that was struggling to survive is still hanging on, I moved them into a nuc to reduce the area they have to manage until they get stronger. I may yet end up adding another frame of bees to the.
Also on the list for a future visit is a thorough inspection and note taking session, I am not the best record keeper and feel that I need to do better in that area.

Busy day

2011-04-10T17:36:00.000-07:00

First thing this morning we got four hives all closed up and loaded into the back of the truck, we took them out to our maltby yard and got them installed on the new hive stands. Apart from one accident when the hive fell off the dolly as we were moving it all went well.
Then we rushed home, loaded up the truck with what we needed to install 5 packages, mixed up 10 gallons of syrup and headed out to monroe to pick up the packages. By now it was raining, although still only light.
We got the packages and headed out to the farm. Moving as quick as we could we got everything unloaded and ready to install. We did not have a spray bottle so we were unable to spray the packages down, as it turned out we did not need to, it was cool enough that the bees were not that inclined to fly.
First package was in and the queen direct released, then the rain started and the next three packages were done in record time, each queen was direct released. By the time we were done we were soaked, but all the bees were in new boxes with a gallon of feed each.
We still had one more hive to install, this was at the home yard, by the time we got home the rain stopped and we were able to install in dry weather.
All five packages are installed, all queens are direct released.
The only thing we forgot was to put pollen patties on each hive, we will do that tuesday when we go check up on them.
I have never installed bees in the rain before, come to think about it I have never even worked the bees in the rain, all said and done it went well and the bees were very mellow.

Now if we could just get some decent weather.

Which day would you hive packages ?

2011-04-10T09:13:00.000-07:00

No real good choices, gonna get wet no matter what day is picked

Busy Day

2011-04-09T22:06:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow the bee packages arrive, I had a lot to get done to be ready for them. First I headed out to the farm and set the new hive stands, the property has a pretty good slope and I was not happy with the way they leaned one way. Now they will at least be level.
Next up was getting hive stands out to Maltby, we will set those tomorrow when we take hives out there.
After that I headed over to Olypic Nursery in woodinville, there to give a two hour bee class.
Then I had to head into Everett to get sugar, I wanted HFCS but I have just not had the time to go get it.
Once I got home it was out to the shed to assemble frames, 50 so far, then out with the wax and just had time to coat them all with a layer of fresh wax. The plastic foundation never has enough on it from the manufacturer.
Tomorrow we are moving hives and then picking up packages, I am hoping the weather does not get as bad as forecast.

Package bee day and snow

2011-04-06T15:32:00.000-07:00

Sunday is package bee day, I still have to get the outyards set up and get equipment ready. Although I think I am about ready on the equipment front.
Today I awoke to 2 inches of snow, we had four inches before the sun came out and it started to melt.

What frames work best - my opinion

2011-04-02T21:36:00.000-07:00

When it comes to frames you really only have 4 choices. You can go with a wood frame and no foundation (known as foundationless) or you can use a wood frame with a wax foundation, a wood frame with a plastic insert and finally an all plastic frame. What you choose really depends on your opinion ( your a beekeeper, you have one now) and your budget. The cost for each varies and will all be close if you do the assembly on the wood, however wood & wax frames get expensive when you buy them pre assembled.

In my first year I believed a lot of hype I read on the forums and decided to go foundationless. This was only partially successfull. In some boxes the bees drew out the comb starting at the frame edge, some frames had two layers of comb, once they did that inspections were hopeless. In my worst hive they drew the comb across the frames, it took a lot of work to get them back on track, and it set the bees back a lot. Remember 7-10 lbs of honey to make a single lb of wax.

I had some frames made up from wood frames with a wax foundation, the bees took to it very well but I have to say that assembling several hundred frames it got to be very tedious and time consuming.

I tried plastic frames and contrary to belief the bees will use them, you have to give them a good wax coating, the thin layer they come with is not enough. New frames on the outside of the boxes need to be watched, the bees like to remove the wax coating and move it to the center of the hive, once the frames are bare the bees will not use them, I often end up replacing the frames so I can recoat them. Another draw back is they will occasionally build bridge comb from the surface of on frame to the surface of the frame next to it, they also like to really cover the top bars with burr comb and will always attach the top of the frames in the bottom box to the bottom of the frames in the top box. You get a lot of extra wax but it sure is a pain.

You will also hear people say that you should not mix plastic and wood frames. As long as the frames are drawn out you will have no problems mixing them, however if you mix new frames you could run into some crazy comb building

This year all my new frames are wood with plastic inserts, I have 200 of them and will assemble and use them as I need them. The wood frame should eliminate the burr comb issues and the plastic insert will help reduce assembly time

Home yard update (edited)

2011-03-25T18:11:00.000-07:00

Well the weather forecast for the week has been off, so much so that when I got home today all the hives were active and I could see a lot of orientation flights going on. Time to get on the beesuit and do a thorough inspection.

The first hive was strong with lots of bees and brood, they also had a good amount of supplies. We could see where they had stored the sugar I gave them as the cells we milky white. we removed the boxes, cleaned off the bottom board and then swapped the boxes when we put it back together so that the queen and brood are on the bottom.

The next hive had a lot of honey, the first three frames I pulled were solid capped honey (see pic) once we got into the middle frames the honey was only covering the back half of the frame, the front was brood which was nice to see. Again we rotated the boxes and cleaned the bottom.

Next up was the hive I got from somebody who had a swarm move into stored equipment, it was kinda nasty when we got it last year but it was getting late in the season and the frames were pretty much welded into place, I decided to leave them in that box over the winter, the idea being that in the spring they would be in the top box and I could swap out the nasty one.

Here is a picture of the box before we removed the frames.

As you can see it is pretty solid, also the box that I did not use showed obvious signs that the previous owner used chemical treatments, ~~the wax in these frames will get melted down and used in candles only~~. ~~The frames will be cleaned up and repaired for reuse~~. Not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that, think I am going to blame the fact that I have been sick. Due to the chemical use that appears to have been used in this hive the frames that I removed will be put on my burn pile never to be used again, complete with the wax. The boxes are usable and I will clean them up.

The final two hives were also strong and well stored, as you can see from this picture, the bees were landing all over us, but they were not angry, just resting.

I have heard that package bees from northen california are going to be at least a week late, this helps me out as it will give me a little more time to get things ready. Also I have been asked to teach four more beekeeping classes in April. No rest for the wicked.

Last good day for a while

2011-03-23T20:03:00.000-07:00

Today it made it up into the low 60's and we headed out to the farm to do detailed inspections and to see how the weak hive was doing. Although warm the farm is located on the side of a valley and the wind was blowing pretty well.
We checked the weak hive first and all was looking well, the queen was on the frame that we put in yesterday and the hive seemed to have a good number of bees in it and they were not robbing it out so I think this hive might make it. We were going to add one more frame of bees but the one hive that had enough capped brood also had a lot of bees and we could not find the queen, I did not want to risk moving a frame that had the queen on it and due to the wind we were trying to be quick to protect the capped brood. We checked all the other hives and rotated the deep boxes on each hive, cleaned the bottom boards and cleaned up the yard a little.
The forecast for the next five days is low 50's during the day with showers and low 40's at night.
I am slowly falling behind in my preperations, I still need to construct new hive stands for the outyards and move hives, painting is pretty much done but I do still have 200 frames to assemble.

Trying to save a dying hive

2011-03-22T18:30:00.000-07:00

I had that one hive at the farm that was down to almost a non existant cluster, but the queen looked healthy.
In an attempt to save this hive, today I went and took a frame of brood from one of my stronger hive and put it in this weak hive, I also shook in a few extra bees. I will give it 24 hrs and go see how they are doing, if the queen has survived the addition then I will add one more frame from another hive.

From the hive that I took the brood from I added an almost complete frame of honey, I figure it was a good trade. I was a little supprised how well they were doing, on four frames they had capped brood on both sides, but not for the full length of each frame, they just used the front half, kinda smart when you think about it, by using the front half of several frames they are able to keep the brood warm easier than if they had use all of the frame, even if they had used less frames. I saw some larvae and the capped brood was on the verge of emerging which means they were busy laying during a pretty good cold snap we had at the end of Feb.

It will not be long now and I will need to get feed on them to try to get them built up. I am planning on using HFCS but if I cannot make the time to go get it I may have to just use sugar syrup.

I still need to rotate my brood boxes which I am hoping to do tomorrow.

Long range weather forecast

2011-03-21T11:19:00.000-07:00

The 10 day outlook for Seattle is rain or at least showers every day. Going to be a long wet spring by the looks of things.
Also California forecast is about the same, I believe this is going to put a big delay in getting queens mated for packages, I have not heard yet but I am expecting packages to arrive late this year.

Winter loss update

2011-03-20T19:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a banner day in the PNW. I got out to the bee yard about 3 pm and the sun was out and the bees were flying. Out at the farm I only wanted to check in on one hive, this was the one I did not get to last time. A quick look at the entrance and it was looking good, I saw several bees bringing in large clumps of bright yellow pollen.
I opened up the hive and about half the sugar I had put on was gone, as was most of the pollen patty. After that it was pretty much disappointment time. I could see the cluster between two frames, it did not look very big. I seperated the frames and lifted one out. The cluster was only about four inches across, the bees were busy packing the pollen and the queen looked good, but I doubt there was 400 bees in the hive. Without adding some bees this cluster is doomed, there are just not enough bees to keep any brood alive. We are scheduled for more rain all week so I doubt I am going to be able to do anything for this hive.
Today I wanted to check out the home yard, due to having to work on truck brakes all day I did not get to them until about 5pm. The weather was not as nice, it was cooler and overcast, rain is on the way.

The first hive I checked was a deadout, all the bees dead on the bottom and about 25lbs of capped honey in the frames of the top box. So they did not die from lack of food. The other five hives were full of bees and look to be doing well, I was unable to look at the frames as every time I tried bees came boiling out, the weather just was not right for a thorough inspection.

I was able to remove some surplus boxes and I finally got all my extra stuff in the shed for a cleanup and a coat of fresh paint.

So as of right now I have lost 4/15 and expect to lose one more. I am really hoping that this is the end off the losses.
I have 5 packages on order so looks like my expansion plans are going to have to come from splits and swarms.
I am going to have three outyards this year, I want to put four hives to start at two locations and keep the farm at eight hives. The only hives I will have at home this year will be swarms and Nuc's. I would like to get all the outyards to eight hives.

Help the Bees, Plant a bee garden

2011-03-17T18:43:00.000-07:00

One of the main reasons bees (both honey bee and bumble bee) are dying out is that we just don't have the floral variety that we used to have, and what people do have they often spray with all kinds of chemicals.
Help out the Honey bee and all other local pollinators by planting a variety of flowers that will benefit them, and keep it chemical free.
We are selling a great little seed kit that contains 8 packets of seeds and a handy little planting guide. Each seed type has been carefully selected to provide you with a variety of flower that is beneficial to bees, and they all bloom at different times giving the bees a good food source for several months. Don't bee surprised if you also see increased activity from bumble bees and mason bees and possibly even butterflies.

Description

The Bee Garden includes a 16 page detailed planting guide and the following 8 House of Bees flower and herb seed packets:

Phacelia - Phacelia tanacetifolia
Catnip - Nepeta cataria
Lemon Mint Monarda citriodora
Purple Coneflower - Echinacea purpurea
Bachelor's Button - Centaurea cyanus
Coriander/Cilantro - Coriandrum sativum
Lemon Balm - Melissa officinalis
Borage - Borago officinalis

This collection is perfect for backyard beekeepers, fruit growers and gardeners who want to encourage more pollinators to their yards.

Packaging details

The Bee Garden includes 8 indiviually packaged seed packets in a 6x9 envelope. The Lemon Mint, Lemon Balm and Catnip contain 500 mg of seed. The Purple Conflower contains 1 gram of seed, and the Phacelia, Borage, Bachelor's Button and Coriander contain 2 grams of seed.
The seed kit is only $10 and shipping is only $2 to all lower 48 states in the USA.
Sorry but due to seed transport regulations we are unable to ship overseas.

Beekeeping Classes are in Demand

2011-03-16T15:05:00.001-07:00

It looks like the interest in beekeeping is not slowing down.
I gave a one day class to 30 people in February and I am teaching another one day class to a group of 40 at the end on the month.
I have been invited to give a quick two hour intro to a group in the first week of April and I will be teaching a five week course at Beezneez in Snohomish starting May 26th.
Between the clases, the club and the bees I barely have time for work

Rain, Rain, Rain

2011-03-14T07:26:00.000-07:00

We are two weeks into the month of March, and we have had twice the normal rainfall for this time of year. I believe we are currently at about 3 1/2 inches so far and nothing but more rain in the forecast. This makes getting the yards ready and checking the bees almost impossible.
I finally got the shed cleaned up and I have been busy painting pollen traps and assembling boxes. Next on the list is to paint boxes and assemble frames.
Once all the new stuff is ready I will go through the older equipemnt that is not in use and start cleaning and painting, my goal is that when the weather finally picks up and we go rotate boxes, that I take the box going on top and replace it with a new box, also some bases and lids need to be rotated so that they can be cleaned and painted.

Pet Pollen

2011-03-09T11:19:00.000-08:00

So this year I am going to be collecting pollen. Due to the somewhat restrictive requirements for packaging it for human consumption which is excessive in cost for the small guy like me, I have decided to market it as a pet food supplement.
Even for pets it has many of the beneficial qualities that humans get from pollen. It is in pretty good demand for show dogs, herding dogs and folks who like to do agility with their dogs.
You can read all about it here http://colonialhoneyfarm.webs.com/petfoodsupplement.htm

I already have a wait list going as this product will not be available until about May (depending on weather)

If you would like to be on this list send me an email.

Farm Update

2011-03-06T19:24:00.000-08:00

It was warmer out today than it has been in a long time, although when the wind blew it had an edge to it.
I got out to the farm determined to do full inspections on all 7 hives.
The fronts of the hives were just masses of activity, things were looking up. I started the inspections at the far end. Hive #5 was the deadout previously found in January.

I checked the first hive and it turned out to be a dead out, it had me fooled for a while with the number of bees in the hive however as I dug deeper it became apparent that these bees were just helping themselve to the honey in this hive.

The next three hives seemed to be doing better, I even found the queen in one hive and she looked good, I did not see any new brood but some frames were deep in bees and I did not want to keep them out of the box too long due to the chill in the air. Hives 6 & 7 were doing well, Hive #8 is marginal and may be another deadout, it was getting too cold to open up and the activity was very similar to the first hive, I cleaned out the entrance and there were a lot of dead bees.

So as of today, I have lost three of fifteen and as soon as we get another warm day I will check the home yard.

At least it's not SNOWING

2011-03-03T11:18:00.001-08:00

Just need it to warm up.

At least I made it home

2011-02-23T17:23:00.000-08:00

I made it home and it was actually pretty easy. The roads were just wet, it was worse when I headed out to work. Kinda wondering how I always get stuck with the saturn and the wife gets the 4x4.
It was fine until I hit the private road and then it got slick again.

And its snowing again

Seattle weathermen suck

2011-02-21T18:38:00.001-08:00

They really are useless.
Today they were saying by Thursday we could see a little lowland snow or possibly just rain. Then another paper says we are going to see 6-8 inches possibly.

I could hear it raining outside and looked out the window and amazingly my rain is white and sticking and its ONLY MONDAY NIGHT.

Big tree got to go

2011-02-20T18:54:00.000-08:00

I have a large cedar tree that throws a shadow across the beeyard and I have decided it needs to go.

This is a large tree, 80 -100'. It pretty much blocks any morning sun from the yard. I have felled large trees before but this one is a little large for my 20" chain saw.

In this picture you can clearly see the shadow being thrown across the bee yard. What is not so easy to tell is that this tree is about 4' across at the bottom. Also you cannot see a split in the bark that an expert in trees told me is a sure sign that this tree is rotting at its core. Another reason to get the tree removed.

Time to call in the proffesionals

Beekeeping classes

2011-02-20T13:07:00.000-08:00

I teach beginner beekeeping classes which are approved by and use the curriculum of the Washington State Beekeepers Association. It is a very popular class and a great way for the beginner to get introduced into beekeeping. Those that stay in beekeeping for more than a year or two can go on to take the Journeyman level and then later progress onto the Master beekeeper.
I am an approved instructor of the course and I am also a member of the Master Beekeeping Committee.
Later in the year when the weather improves (mid to late April) I plan on also offering hands on classes at several of my outyards. These will be limited to two people per instructor. It just amazes me and to be honest disappoints me that I am already seeing people offering hands on classes here locally and its only Feb. This week the night time temps will be in the high 20's and daytime just in the 40's. This is too cold to do proper hands on inspections, and these people are either doing a lot of harm to their bees or they are not giving the kind of hands on experience these folks think they are paying for.
For anyone reading this who would like to take a hands on course, please have some patience, save your money (for now) and dont sign up for any hands on class being offered in temperatures of less than 50 degrees.

Cold Snaps

2011-02-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

I have about four hives that were 50/50 at best to survive until spring sets in. I was somewhat hopefull as our temps were in the mid 40's and upto mid 50's. When it was not raining the bees were flying.
This week the night time temps will be dipping below freezing and day time temps will stay in the 40's.
This morning I had 3" of snow and it was coming down hard when I left. Once I got down the hill it was just rain.
I guess for now the bees are on their own.

Chickens like Sugar

2011-02-11T10:43:00.000-08:00

I was feeding the bees out at the farm last night, I did not know chickens liked sugar, I do now.

Varroa Treatment News
Without doubt the biggest problem beekeepers have had over the last ten years or so is the varroa mite. If left untreated these mites will wipe out a colony in as little as two years.
Treatments consisted of Pesticides which over time became less effective, plus they killed bees and contaminated the bees wax or a few "organic" treatments which were only effective against exposed varroe, not the ones in the capped cells that were reproducing.

Very soon now, we could have the option to use two new "organic" treatments.

HopGuard - A section 18 request has been submitted for the use of this new treatment. Basically it uses Hop Beta Acids that are obtained from brewers hops after the brewery is done with them. You can read more on this treatment by going to http://www.wasba.org/

MAQS - Mite away quick strips, this treatment was federally approved on Feb 4th 2011, all we are waiting on now is for the company to submit the registration to the state and we will be able to use it in our hives. MAQS is formic acid applied by strips to the hive, this newest formular was tested by the university of Hawaii and was found to be almost 100% affective against varroa, including those in capped cells, with no adverse effects on the bees. Read the report here, http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/sustainag/news/articles/V1-wright-varroa.pdf

Both treatments were tested during the honey flow and they can be left on during the flow as no residues were found in the tested honey.

There is a slight possibility that the section 18 for Hopguard may get rejected as there is now an approved alternative in teh MAQS.

MAQS could be available in WA by late March

The bees are feeding, well at least some of them.

2011-02-09T17:18:00.000-08:00

I made it out to the farm today, the sun was out and the bees were flying. The first hive had just about finshed off the sugar I gave them, the pollen patty was completely gone.

The next hive had not touched the sugar, however I could hear them buzzing away somewhere below. You can see where they have removed some of the pollen patty.

The next hive had also been busy,

This was pretty much the pattern with all the hives, some had not touched the sugar and others had put a good dent in it.

The hives at the house have been less active, this does not supprise me as this yard gets little sun in the winter months. The hives I put the honey on have been feeding, but not a lot.

I have to get all my yards ready for bees and have everything finished by April 20th when I go in for my surgery on my left wrist, that will put me out of action for about a month.

Arranging out yards

2011-02-01T19:06:00.000-08:00

I currently have 3 yards, the house, the farm and the North yard. Yesterday I visited another location and have agreed to put bees in a fourth yard. This means that I am going to have somewhere between 20 - 30 hives this summer, two yards will start with just four hives, the third has eight. I want the home yard to have no more than four as so far it has not been the best place for bees. I am going to be buying at least five packages this year, the rest will depend on collected swarms and possible splits.
I need to run a count to see what I all ready have for boxes, bases and lids and then figure out what I am going to build Vs buy. Guess I will also need more frames.

First feed of the year

2011-01-27T09:01:00.000-08:00

Last night we got feed on all the hives, I am guessing the temp was in the low 50's and the bees were very active bringing in bright yellow pollen which could be Maple or possibly Willow. Three hives just got a jar of surplus honey and the rest got just plain raw sugar. We will check up on them in a week to see how they are doing.
Just based on bee numbers I would say that out of the remaining 13 hives, two are considered weak and may not survive. Jan - Mar is really the time where you will see most of you die offs, keeping fingers crossed.

Beekeeping class.
Colonial Honey Farm is hosting a beginner beekeeping class in March, you can find all the details here
http://colonialhoneyfarm.webs.com/beekeepinglessons.htm

Home yard report

2011-01-23T15:00:00.000-08:00

I have 7 hives at the house, this afternoon I was able to check them out for the first time.
The first 4 hives I looked into had good bees and it was a good start.
Here is a picture from one of the first four hives.

The next hive had no bees in the top box, but I did find a cluster in the bottom.

Boxes 5 & 6 had bees but I would say they were pretty weak and at best only have a 50/50 chance to make it.
My last box was a dead out, not supprised by this one, I had issues with it all last year, requeened it and even had to combine two hives later in the year when it lost the queen and had a laying worker. There were very few dead bees in the hive, here on the bottom board you can see how different it is from my other deadout. I also think this hive died out early in the year.

I found the two frames where the final small cluster died, the queen was dead right in the center of the dead cluster.

The dead queen is on the hive tool, the dead cluster is on the left and if you look closely you can see signs of robbing on the comb to the right, it is all ragged.

So far this year my losses are at 13%, much better than last years 80%. I will not really be out of the woods until late march.

I am not sure why the bees are doing better this year, however 2009 was very dry and the bees really had a hard year, seemed like we were feeding all year long. Most of the hives went into the winter light. Last year was just a better year all around.

Time to see how they did over the winter

2011-01-22T19:47:00.000-08:00

Finally we have a few days of nice weather and I can check on the bees.
I have 8 hives out at the farm and I was very interested to see how they were doing.
When I arrived it was a little overcast but there were signs of bees everywhere, I even saw one bee with a small amount of pollen on its legs.

The first hive I looked at was very encouraging, lots of bees.

Seeing these bees in these numbers is a great sign, however the fact that they are all the way up in the top box says they are either very low or out of winter stores, tomorrow I will get some feed on these hives.

The next box also had bees near the top.

I had several hives that even had bees spilling out through the hole in the center cover, they were not angry but they were on guard, I did not have the smoker going so I did not disturb them.

It was not until I got to the fourth hive did I come across a deadout. I removed the lid and this was what greeted me,

The bottom box was completely empty, the top box had about ten lbs of honey in it, also a good supply of pollen was present. In this picture you can see that the bees stayed clustered until they got too small to survive, several bees died head down inside the cells, starving. The capped honey was only inches away.

The bottom board was also deep in dead bees. I am not sure why they died, or even when, but I guess they probably died before christmas.

So far I am happy with the results, last year I lost 6 of 8. This outyard only lost 1 of 8. I have six more hives at the home yard and I will be inspecting them tomorrow.

A New Year begins

2011-01-03T07:42:00.000-08:00

Well here we go, lets hope this year is better than last year for many folks.
I am progressing well in my goal towards my Journeyman Certificate, I have now passed 6 of the 10 tests.
My lowest score was 80%. Only four more to go and then the feild test.
Several states have master beekeeper courses, but to be honest some are kind of a joke, one state even lets you qualify with only two yrs beekeeping experience, not enough to be considered a master beekeeper in my opinion.

Total number of Certified Beekeepers in WA/OR/ID: 1,563

Total Certified Apprentices: 1493

(318 new in 2010, 278 new in 2009)

Total Certified Journeyman: 64

(12 new in 2010, 4 new in 2009)

Total Certified Masters: 6

(1 new as of June 2010)

Next month I am teaching a beekeeper apprenticeship class, we are currently fully booked with 30 people signed up.
We shall see what extra club work I have to do now that I am Vice President, hopefully not too much more.

Its time to clean out the shed and start getting equipment ready for the spring.

End of year wrap up.

2010-12-22T10:33:00.000-08:00

This year has just flown by, somebody once said that as you get older the years goes quicker.

The year started on a down note with me losing 6 of 8 hives. From there things improved with each passing month. We were able to retrieve 4 very easy swarms, Richard, a beekeeper in the Seattle area gave me a couple of boxes of bees, as he did for several others. His bees are very good and I like adding them to my gene pool.

In June I became allergic to bee stings and spent several hours in the emergency room, I am pleased to report that the treatment I am on appears to be working and the few stings I have received since have had no adverse affects on me.

In July we were busy adding honey supers and preparing for the Evergreen State Fair. The fair was a great success, the bee exhibit was very popular and we were able to pick up several ribbons for our honey and wax.

After the fair the club held a one day beekeeping class which was attended by 30 new beekeepers, another very successful endeavor.

Harvest time was a blast, between the blackberry, wildflower and knotweed we were able to harvest about 300 lbs. We also got about 30 comb honey units.

As of today I am officially sold out and actually got my first pre order for next years blackberry.

Other points of note, I have passed the first 4 journeyman beekeeper tests, 6 more to go and then the field test.

I will be teaching another beginning beekeeper class if February and we are well on our way to filling it up. I am also the new Vice President of the NWDBA.

When summer was over we had 15 hives that we set up for the winter, right now I have no idea how they are doing, between work, weather and dark evenings I have not had time to pop a lid to see how they are doing. Lets just hope they don’t need my help just yet.

Before long it will be spring again.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Colonial Honey Farm.

First cold spell almost over

2010-11-25T16:51:00.000-08:00

It only lasted a few days but it got down to 12f which is -11c.

I guess I really should put that lawn mower away.

I went down to clear the entrances and several hives had bees out dead on the snow, I even found a couple of live ones, dont know why there are dead bees outside the hive after only two cold days.

Seattle weather

2010-11-23T12:29:00.000-08:00

Seattle is known for its rain, and gets made fun of when we get snow. Our roads shut down and pretty much everything comes to a halt. When we get wet snow its not really a problem, however last night we had rain push up from Oregon and cold come down from canada, this is a worst case scenario for seattle.
Snow falls and almost instantly is compacted into ice. In 19 yrs I have only seen this exact condition twice and only once has it beaten me, and that was last night.
Not a lot of snow in the lowlands, but the ice it created was just pure havoc.
I headed home from work at 3pm, my commute is usually 45 minutes, not last night. Traffic was litterally a parking lot, it took me two hours just to get on the freeway, a trip that usually takes 5 minutes. I have one hill I have to get up, usually I have no trouble as long as I dont have to stop, last night that was not going to happen, there were at least 10 stuck vehicles including a school bus, with some help I was able to turn around and headed back down the hill, my goal was to make it to the local grocery store and just spend the night in the car waiting for the sanding trucks to do their work. I only made it about half way when stuck behind slow moving cars the camber on the road took a grip and I slid off the road into a ditch, about two miles from my goal. Snow was coming down harder, but amazingly we were able to get a tow truck in about an hour, thankyou Top Notch towing of machias.
A few minutes later I was able to make it to the store, let them know I was staying in my car, and settled down for the night. I had plenty of gas and ran the engine to keep the car heater going, turning it off every now and then. I was listening to the radio and people calling in giving their stories, one girl had been stuck on a bus on I5 for seven hours, another person had only moved two blocks in Seattle in four hours. I was feeling pretty lucky.
About 10 pm just after the store closed for the night, the fire department showed up to give me some blankets, my wife had called them and they wanted to check up on me.
The night passed quickly, about every hour I woke up and started the engine for an hour to warm up. I sure was glad to have the blankets.
About 5am I decided to head home, it was cold enough that the ice actually has traction, I nade it all the way to our road but was unable to get up the short hill at the beginning, I had to walk 1/2 mile in the moonlite.
I finally made it home about 6am, thats a 15 hour commute, a record I hope I never break.

I am going to see if the chains are in the shed and will head down to get the car in a bit.

All the animals are bedded down in fresh straw, the bees are on there own for now.

Snow

2010-11-21T07:56:00.001-08:00

Snow… well it finally arrived. Just a dusting when I left home for work this morning but it was still coming down hard. The forecasters don’t seem to be able to decide what we will get but seem to be leaning towards not much unless it’s a lot !

The bees are all put away, entrance reducers are on and feeders are off. I still have two hives with a single honey super on, they should be coming off here any time now. The bees should be clustered in the bottom and if they did what they were supposed to the supers should be empty.

I have been playing with a candy mixture for the bees, I have been mixing sugar, corn syrup and pollen patties together to try to come up with an emergency feed mix that is not so soft that is cannot be placed directly on the frames.

I think my current batch might be the one, it is solid but not too hard, you can easily push you finger nail into the mix once it has cooled down.

PS. The hives all survived the wind storm, I was concerned but they did not budge even an inch

Wind storm

2010-11-16T12:18:00.001-08:00

We had a rather severe an unexpected windstorm last night, 230,000 are without power and trees were down all over the place. The hives at the house are ok, they are pretty sheltered and this morning I could not see any lying over as I drove past. I am a little concerned for the hives at the farm, they are exposed and on the side of a valley that the wind channels through. I am going to go after work and check up on them, hopefully they are ok.

I need to get some additional tie down straps and secure them before we get any more nasty weather.

Starting in January I am the new NWDBA Vice President. There was a push for me to be President but I was actually trying to step back and let others do more in the club. Vice President is good for now and hopefully we will get more member involvement next year.

I am also studying for the WSBA Journeyman level beekeeper certificate. It is pretty involved and will take me at least ten months to complete all the test requirements.

I am also teaching a beginner beekeeping class in February for the club and we are already getting a lot of interest in it.

Fondant feeding

2010-11-06T09:01:00.000-07:00

During the cold wet months of winter it really is not a good idea to try to feed bees using a liquid feed. They cannot convert it and if it gets really cold it will freeze solid and depending on what type of feeder you are using they may not get to it if it warms up enough to break cluster. A good substitute is Fondant. In general in my area it is cheaper to make yourself Vs buying it.

When using fondant you have to decide how you want to use it, some folks make up a candy board which is much like a top feeder, depending on the style you use the fondant can be more fluid than some other styles. Others like to set the fondant up in a frame and place it in the hive, I don’t like this method, way too much work. The one I tried last night involved pouring the fondant into a 9” foil cake pan and then placing this under the lid of the hive, don’t know if I like this method as the bees are going to have to travel to get to the fondant.

Here is the recipe for last nights batch,

7 LBs sugar

1.5 LBs corn syrup

1 LB water

1 LB mega bee (I did not have the powdered type so just dissolved a pollen patty into the mix)

Heat to a candy boil (250 -270) pour and let set up.

This mix is ok but you need a BIG pan to deal with boiling sugar. I may not have gotten it hot enough as it was a little softer than I would have liked. This batch filled four cake tins.

This next recipe I like as if done right will allow me to place it right on top of the frames.

The measures given are for a small batch, just keep the ratios the same for bigger batches.

I will try this one tonight.

1 cup sugar

3 Tblsp corn syrup

Heat to a temp of about 250, the consistency should be like soft putty.

If needed add more sugar or syrup to get the desired texture.

Place ½ the batch on grease paper and roll out to the desired size, place a portion of pollen patty in the center and then cover with the remaining fondant. This will give them a pollen boost right when they need it in the spring.

The whole batch can then be placed directly on the frames (including grease paper).

I got stung again.

I picked up something that had a bee on it and got stung in the palm of the hand. For me those hurt the most. I had just got my bee allergy shot a couple of hours earlier and was interested to see if I got any reaction.

Apart from some mild swelling and itching looks like I dodged the bullet (again)

Feeders Off

2010-11-05T07:54:00.001-07:00

We have had some nice weather so I have been trying to get the feeders off of the hives as it is now late enough in the year that any feed we give them now will just ferment.

We headed out to the farm and removed all the feeders and empty boxes. Two hives still have a super on as they are still moving honey down to the lower boxes. The bees we very active and we watched them bringing in a yellow/orange pollen. I hope they are finding some nectar to go along with it.

The hives at the house will get worked tonight when I get home, although we are scheduled for rain. I took one feeder off earlier in the week and the bees let me know they did not want me around, I had about 50 or so bees head butting me and I decided to leave them alone.

On average I have given each hive 4 gallons which is about 44LBs of syrup, some still seemed a little light and I may have to give them more to get them by, I will monitor the situation and see how it goes.

Is Fed EX trying to help out the Post Office

2010-10-30T11:43:00.000-07:00

So all we ever hear about is the money that the post office loses every year and how they need to raise rates. Once they raise theirs then the private carriiers can raise to match. Here you can see the trail of a box of business cards I ordered.

Oct 30, 2010 6:56 AM

At U.S. Postal Service facility

SNOHOMISH, WA

Arrived at local Post Office - Allow one to two additional days for delivery

Oct 30, 2010 6:34 AM

Departed FedEx location

FEDEX SMARTPOST KENT, WA

Oct 30, 2010 12:00 AM

Shipment information sent to U.S. Postal Service

Oct 29, 2010 12:52 PM

Arrived at FedEx location

FEDEX SMARTPOST KENT, WA

Oct 25, 2010 10:47 PM

Departed FedEx location

FEDEX SMARTPOST GROVE CITY, OH

Oct 24, 2010 5:05 PM

Arrived at FedEx location

FEDEX SMARTPOST GROVE CITY, OH

Oct 23, 2010 2:04 AM

Arrived at FedEx location

FEDEX SMARTPOST BELLEVILLE, MI

Oct 20, 2010 1:58 PM

Shipment information sent to FedEx

I am completely amazed that once it gets within an hour of its delivery location, they go drop it in the mail adding another day or two (longer because tomorrow is Sunday). I have never seen this on any packages from Fed Ex or UPS before.

They do like the HFCS

2010-10-20T06:48:00.000-07:00

I have been feeding HFCS for a couple weeks now. Its easier and cheaper than sugar water. The bees seem to like it just fine, I put one gallon feeders on the hives late saturday evening. Last night I went and checked and almost everyone was bone dry. 1 gallon in 3 days is a pretty good pace to take feed.
I put another gallon on each hive and will check back on them on friday.
The weather has been nice and I could see them bringing in yellow, red and grey pollen. I am assuming they have a nectar source as many bees had no pollen so they should be carrying nectar.
Hopefully this is all going towards winter storage.

Award winning comb honey

2010-10-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce that our Comb Honey is now available Exclusively from "Val's Surroundings"
This new gift store offers local varietal honey, beeswax products and Garden and everyday gifts.
Val's Surroundings, Maltby, WA off rt 522 (next to the Maltby Cafe)

The Stores grand opening is Saturday October 16th

Random picture

2010-10-10T12:45:00.000-07:00

I was just going through some old files and I found this nice picture from earlier this year.
Look closely and you can clearly see the early stages of bee growth prior to cappng.
This was brand new drawn out comb on Pierco plastic frames.

Everybody is fed

2010-10-06T20:15:00.000-07:00

Today we were able to finally get caught up on getting feed on everybody. I have switched over to using HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) as it works out cheaper and there is no mixing involved.
The free hive already went through two gallons overnight, the other hives are probably going through it almost as fast. I do have one hive that we are not feeding as they have the best part of a full western on them. The other hives moved the honey down and we were able to remove the supers.

Free hive inspection.
First let me just say sorry for the picture quality, taking pictures with a cell phone while wearing sticky gloves is harder than you would think.
I removed the top box an set it to one side, this allowed me to get to the middle box. As you can see from the picture this has not been opened in some time, the amount of burr comb and propolis meant that I could not get into this box to do any kind of inspection. So this became the new bottom box on a nice clean base.

Just click on the picture for a bigger view. In the spring the bees will have emptied this box and moved up, this will allow me to remove this box, clean it up and replace the frames.

Next I went through the bottom box, the first four frames were undrawn foundation so I put them to one side, that was followed by some black nasty looking frames that had been pretty much robbed bare and chewed down, then a couple of frames with a small amount of healthy looking capped brood and a frame of pollen.

You can see the chemical mite treatment strip that was left in place long ago when this person stopped keeping bees, I doubt that it has any potency left but all the frames in these boxes will get rotated out with new ones just as fast as possible. This wax will not end up in the wax melter, it is destined for the burn pile.
Finally I was able to get to the top box, this was similar to the first box but I was able to get frames out to inspect each one. I saw no brood but did see capped honey, pollen and the queen, I also saw some of the two gallons they took down the previous night. I removed some of the unused frames and reset the box with the brood I had taken from the original bottom box, brood to the center, then honey and finally pollen on the outside.
This gives me a nice two deep hive that has a fair chance of surviving the winter.

The old base was cleaned of muck ( and wax moth maggots) next it will get pressure washed and repainted.

Just a quick note on the farm hives, they are all taking feed, they appear to be in good shape going into the fall, although I think they all could use more stores. I checked one of the inspection boards that has been in all year and it had a lot of mites. I am not too worried as what I was looking at represented a full summer of mite drop and unlike last year I do not see deformed bees walking around. This is the second year my packages have got mites, I do not think the book is right when it says not to worry for mites during the first year of a package hive.
I will be very happy when MAQS get approval.

Its not going to be pretty

2010-10-06T08:14:00.000-07:00

I was not able to do an inspection yesterday on the free hive as they were still a little on the hot side from the move. We were able to put a top feeder on with a couple of gallons of syrup in it, hopefully it will mellow them out a bit.
Now this was a swarm that had moved into some unused/abandoned boxes, I was not expecting it to be clean and pristene, this morning it is only 50 degrees out and I went into the yard to get an empty box, I looked at the entrance and there were lots of white maggots on the landing board. These are from the wax moth that I am sure are pretty bad in the bottom boxes. It is supposed to be nice today so I hope to be able to open them up and get things cleaned up. I am expecting to be able to reduce them down into two boxes, if its really bad it might end up being just one box.
I may even just move them frame by frame into new boxes.

Added a new hive tonight

2010-10-04T21:10:00.000-07:00

I was asked if I would like to remove a hive that was a swarm that moved into unused equipment. The property owner did not have time for bees anymore due to work and the people next door had complained in the past (and poisened a hive) that they just wanted them gone. Of course I said yes.
The owner had a bunch of old equipment stacked on the end of his house and they said that most years they get a swarm or two moving in. They had most of the boxes stacked so as to not let bees in but one three deep setup was just the hive standing apart, and this is where the bees were.
It was moderatley warm today and lots of bees were flying, we did not have much room to move and it was a little crowded, within seconds we were covered in bees but they were not angry just landing on us. I have never seen anything quite like it, every single bee was loaded with pollen, bright yellow and orange, lots of it.
As this equipment was old I wanted to check it for disease, a quick look in the top box showed it looked pretty clean, and packed with pollen, other than that it was pretty light. I did not go into the bottom boxes as I wanted to use the bees work to glue everything up to help in moving the hive.
We used lots of smoke to try to encourage the bees to get back in the box, then we tied the box up with some straps, closed off the entrance with some hardware cloth, and with the help of a dolly we loaded it into the back of the truck.

We did not get home until after dark and that is where it got a little tricky.
We lifted the hive off the back of the truck onto a dolly and Anna got stung in the butt, a few seconds later she got nailed in the thigh. I had her stand in the lights of the truck and I could see she had lots of bees on her. I had her go stand in the dark and pretty quick the bees left her. I wheeled the boxes over to the stand and with little fuss put them on a pallet, then in the light of the truck I could see the bees pouring out of the front of the box. At this point I decided to leave them alone for the rest of the evening, we will remove the entrance block tomorrow (it was not working anyway) I will do a full inspection and get some feed on them.
At least I did not get stung.

Sugar buying time

2010-09-25T21:28:00.000-07:00

Its the time of year to start getting the bees ready for our long winter. Last night I brought 100LBs of sugar. I mixed 50Lbs up with just under 5 gallons of water, this will make 8 gallons of syrup and is about 1.5:1 which I prefer over the 2:1 most people say to use.
Today I headed out to the farm to remove the last of this years harvest and to start feeding.
I only removed one box of honey from one hive and on two others I left them a box, two reasons for this, first I did not want to pull frames that had a lot of uncapped cells, second I want to see if these hives fair any better with extra honey left on them.

I put 1 gallon bucket feeders on the other hives, I did not have empty boxes to put over them so planned to come back later in the day to fix that. When I did return I found a lot of bees flying and a couple of buckets had large numbers of bees on them.

These pictures were taken using my phone so not the best quality. Click on them to get a bigger view.
Here you can see all the bees flying. Although there was a lot of flying going on, there was no signs of attempted robbing at any of the hive entrances.

Here you can see the bees on the buckets.

I covered the buckets with a box and lid, the bees were not happy, I tried to place an entrance reducer on one of the hives but the bees were just boiling out, I gave up when I saw bees trying to sting me through my suit. They were much milder an hour earlier. One thing I am pleased to see is lots of bees in every box.
I also notice the girls are working hard to kick the boys out, guess the party days of summer are over.

I have decided not to combine the weak hive at the home yard, I am just going to feed them and see if they come through. The other hive that used to be queenless until I combined it is also going to get lots of feed now that I have confirmed the queen is still in residense.

After a nice day today it is supposed to rain tomorrow and then be nice again on monday, that is when I will try to get all the feeding completed and get entrance reducers put on.

Home yard update

2010-09-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

Today I actually got home and it was not raining. Here is a breakdown of each hive.

Hive 1.
This was the swarm I got from the lumber yard, originally it was huge but it had several issues with queens and just never really did anything. Not much had changed, they had maybe three frames in the top box and four in the bottom, they had been packing in some supplies and I could clearly see where brood had been hatching out. At this time there was no brood, I did see the queen and she was a little small and not very impressive. I am going to combine this hive with hive number 2.

Hive 2.
This was a hive built up with bees I got from another beekeeper, I only looked in the top box as they have been really busy, the first three frames I looked at were full of capped honey. I am going to place this on top of hive 1 and let it go through the winter in three deeps.

Hive 3.
This was a swarm I got from lake stevens, they are going strong and are a propolis producing machine, with some help they should make it through the winter.

Hive 4.
Another swarm hive, but this one was the one that went queenless, at one point it had a laying worker and ugly looking drone cells in clumps all over the place, I made a split, added a queen and then combined. The have removed all the ugly comb, no signs of the queen laying, and I did not see the queen but they were not acting like a queenless hive. I am not sure about this hive, there were a lot of drones so it might be smaller than it looks, I am going to look again this weekend and if I cannot find the queen I may combine them.

Hive 5.
This was my surviver from last year. They are doing well, I got one super off them earlier and put it back on wet for them to clean up. The continued filling and I got another five frames off them today, I left a couple of frames on them to move down and will remove that box here in the near future.

Hive 6.
This was a package. I got one super off them and they have the best part of a super still on them. I am going to overwinter them with it just to see how they fair.

This weekend is supposed to be good and I will start feeding in earnest.

Stupid or stuborn ?

2010-09-21T19:40:00.000-07:00

Tonight we went to take some supers off. When we got to the yard I found I had no gloves. Even knowing that the bees would be in a bad mood I decided to go help out anyway.
On the second box I got nailed in the hand. I headed back to the car and Shannon and her daughter continued on with the work. I have heard of a trick where you take a penny and place it on the sting area, this is supposed to help with the pain of the sting and the swelling. So far it appears to be working, no reaction and 2 1/2 hrs have passed. Just to be safe I took a couple of benydryl when I got home.
I knew it would happen, but did it anyway.

Allergy update

2010-09-21T10:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a milestone in my treatment plan.
Finally after several weeks of four shots a week I have reached the 50% bee venom shot.
What this means is that now I only need to go in once a week for the next several shots, eventually we will be at 100% and once a month.
I had a couple of shots that needed to be repeated as I had small localized reactions (swelling & redness) but other than that it is going according to plan.

The weather has just been terrible, we put bee escapes on last week and have not been able to go back due to steady rain (weatherman calls it showers). Today is looking up and we hope to pull the last of this years harvest from the hives tonight after work.

I am just about sold out of my blackberry honey and already have a couple of pre orders for Wildflower and Knotweed. So far sales have gone just as well as I could have hoped for, I may well be completely sold out by thanksgiving.

Woodinville farmers market

2010-09-11T20:47:00.000-07:00

Today I was selling at the farmers market. We were there as part of the annual bee extravaganzer that they hold every year. We sold some honey, sold even more comb honey and had a great time. This is one event I look forward to every year. Thanks to Val Schick of Vals creations for setting it up.

Evergreen State Fair Results

2010-09-07T13:00:00.000-07:00

Well for our first year we had pretty good results.

Here is the breakdown of the scoring,
Degree of Desity (water content) 15%, score 19/20
Freedom of crystals, Score 10/10
Degree of cleanliness and freedom of foam, score 29/30
Cleanliness and neatness of containers 9/10
Uniformity of containers, score 10/10
Flavor, score 20/20

Total score 97/100
According to Agricultural Marketing Service of the USDA Section 52.1400 any Score above 90 makes it US Grade A.

The Wax did even better.

First place and Best of Division scoring 99/100. Losing just one point for blemishes.

Comb Honey also did very well.

Another Best of Division and with a score of 98/100.
I guess the bar has been set now to try to do better next year.

Surgery is over

2010-08-27T18:30:00.000-07:00

Today was the day I had my carpal tunnel surgrey on my righthand. Everything went well and I was back home in just a few hours. Just to prove what a small world it is one of the nurses is a new beekeeper that I have met in the store a few times. Nothing better to relax you for surgery than talking about bees.
So far no pain and hopefully that will continue. For the next several weeks no lifting for me so Anna is going to be doing all the work.
Yesterday was the start of the Evergreen State Fair it rained pretty much the whole day, it was a slow day but the weather is supposed to get better. If I am up to it I will be at the booth tomorrow.

Pictures from an inspection we did earlier this year

2010-08-14T14:11:00.000-07:00

I need to thank Vince and Anna, owners of the Caruso Hillside farm, they took these pictures from an inspection we did earlier in July. If you Live in the Snohomish area and like fresh organic grown produce you should check them out at the Snohomish Farmers market on Thursdays.

Here are some bees on the topside of the inner cover, you can see the propolis line from the feeders I was using back in the spring.

Here is Anna preping the fume board, I am not too keen on the finger pump bottles and would rather use a trigger spray.

Here I am placing the fume board on the hive. I prefer the use of a fume board over a bee escape for two reasons, 1. it is quicker and 2. well lets just say I got a call from another beekeeper using escapes and they forgot that their inner cover also created a top entrance, in just two days all 40 LBs of honey was robbed out from the super as the hive bees were not there to protect it.

You can see that the bees just love to burr comb plastic. We could not remove the whole box for inspection until I used a wire to cheese cut between the two boxes.

Although a pain to assemble the bees really seemed to like this comb system, however you need to be very carefull. These plastic frames have little or no structural strength and wanted to seperate or collapse when we removed them. They are somewhat fragile when empty and very much more so when full.

Here is one frame that they are doing very well on. Each frame holds sixteen cassettes. And each box holds 8 frames.

This one has a little way to go to be ready for harvest.

Some of the frames were pure blackberry and some were a mix with either fireweed or knotweed. You will see that they like to keep the types seperate in there own cells, should make for some interesting comb flavors.

Queenless Hive

2010-08-14T11:12:00.001-07:00

I finally got around to checking on my hives at home last night.
I have 6 hives in this location and four of them are swarms I collected this year. This particular hive was the big swarm I got from a Lake Stevens front yard. Originally it filled two deep boxes and I just left them alone to do their thing.
The top box was a mix of partially drawn out frames with some capped honey but in shallow cells, towards the center we started to see eggs and groupings of drone cells, not a uniform pattern all all over the frames. On one frame at the bottom was a cell that kinda looks like a queen cell but I think it has to be a drone as there is not signs of a good laying queen. The bottom box was similar. To correct this we got a new queen from beezneez and made a split from one of our good hives, we put the queen in this split and once she has been freed and accepted and laying we will do a combine with the drone hive.

What I think may have happened (seems to be happening a lot with swarms this year) is the swarm queen was replaced and the replacement failed to mate and is in the hive laying but can only lay drones. I say this because the cells only have one egg in each cell and a laying working will often lay multiple eggs in a cell.
We will be going through this hive before we do the combine to see if we can find the culprit

This is another reason why I laugh at folks who offer to pay for swarms.

Allergy & Bee updates

2010-08-12T20:11:00.000-07:00

I have been getting my allergy shots four times a week, two shots in one arm and one in the other. Earlier this week I got a call from the Dr, they had made an error when they gave me the skin tests when the nurse used the wrong concentration of venom for the tests, so I needed to go back for a new set of tests. Some folks might get upset when this kind of error is made, not me. The nurse was very apologetic but I told her the only people who never make mistakes are those that never do anything, and as long as she learned from it then no harm done. After the test I got the news that I am not allergic to any other stinging insect, only honey bees. So now I still need to go in four times a week but only get one shot with each visit.

Bee Updates.
A week ago we moved the bees from our north yard to the farm. This accomplished two things, 1. the bees are now in two yards instead of three for the winter. 2. The bees at the farm have a good chance of getting fireweed and knotweed.
We checked on them yesterday and as hoped they are bringing in fireweed, dont know yet if it will be enough for a harvest but keeping my fingers crossed. We will know for sure in another week.

Harvest.
The first harvest gave us about 150 LBs of sweet blackberry honey. We also took off about 45 sets of comb honey. I have been selling the honey for $11 lb and the comb has been selling for $4 per pack. So far just to folks who know I keep bees we have sold about $700. Not bad for the first harvest, now just need to finish the season strong.
A common theme among the folks who buy my honey is how different it tastes from the stuff they buy in the store, I point out to them that the stuff in the store is blended, pasteurized and in many cases adulterated and there is no contest with my honey.

First harvest of 2010

2010-07-31T11:04:00.000-07:00

The blackberry flow is just about over, and looks like the fireweed and knotweed is going to be early. I am not sure if I have much of either close to any of my yards but I needed to start pulling the boxes so they could be put back on empty just in case.
I only have a small kitchen which is almost a good thing, it was easy to clean it down in preperation for the harvest, a plastic drop cloth on the floor really helps. The extractor is a 6 frame radial rented from Beezneez in Snohomish, I own the uncapping tank in the background and sure glad I bought it as it made life a lot easier.

Here is one of the frames before it was uncapped.

Here are uncapped frames waiting for the extractor.

A look inside the extractor

Wax cappings, once everything is harvested they will be put into the wax melter.

From the first 18 frames I got 5 gallons of pure white blackberry honey, I will do another 20 frames tonight.

Club Picnic

2010-07-25T19:48:00.000-07:00

Our club picnic was today, we had a great turnout with about 50 or so in attendance. I am pretty sure everybody had a great time an as usual plenty of good food.

At our club gatherings even the bees are welcome.

We had a gadget contest where members were asked to bring anything they have built to help in their hobby. I entered my bee vac and my solar wax melter. There were several entries and I took first place with a wax melter. I am now the proud owner of a cedar garden hive top.

Harvest updates and another swarm

2010-07-14T21:26:00.000-07:00

So my earlier prediction of 300 - 400 LBs may be a little on the high side. Today we did a more thorough inspection and got a better idea of what each hive was upto.
At the north yard things are progressing but one hive has hardly touched the super and another the queen moved in and layed wall to wall brood. From this yard I am estimating 60 LBs.
At the farm things are moving along nicely, no brood in any super and they should fill up if we have a good two weeks. From this yard I am hoping for 150 LBs.
At the home yard things are progressing more slowly. My biggest dissapointment is the hive that survived from last year, they are working slower than I would have liked, starting to think my home yard is not in the best place for honey. From the home yard I am hoping for 60 LBs.
If all the yards make the estimates then our harvest could be in the region of 270 LBs.

Here are some random pictures we took today.
Here if you look closely you can see eggs and larvae

In this picture you can see the band of honey above a very nice brood pattern.

Later in the day we got a swarm call, it was a big swarm in a small tree, I placed the nuc on the grounds and gave the tree a good shake.

As you can see from this picture it was a big swarm, it was about this time I started to think it was too big for the nuc I was using.

I had to improvise with a deep I had in the truck.

Here you can see the bees marching into the box, a sure sign we have the queen.

Finally, here is the solar wax melter I built. Based on the few days of use I have one modification to make, the plastic tube needs to be shorter, other than that it works really well.

Busy weekend

2010-07-11T22:38:00.000-07:00

Saturday saw me finishing up my latest batch of Nuc boxes they have become a best seller especially with all the swarms around right now and I am having trouble finding the time to make them. Then I built my new bigger solar wax melter (pictures coming). Sunday we were making up a set of comb honey containers. We are using the Bee O Pac system and after applying a thin coat of wax to the containers (not in the instructions) we placed them on our strongest hive to see how they do. At the same time we waxed up two more supers of pierco frames. We dont need them on any hive yet but we need to be ready.

The wax melter passed its test with flying colors, we went through two five gallon buckets of comb and it handles it easily. Tomorrow is supposed to cool down a little and I will use that down time to paint the melter. As of today we have 13 hives, 9 hives had 10 supers on them and one comb honey super. If they complete out each super we could have between 300 - 400 LBs of honey.

Swarm update

2010-07-08T20:58:00.000-07:00

Checked to see how they were doing tonight, I was very supprised. This swarm was even bigger than I realised, with a full ten frames of bees, in the picture below you can see that this frame has comb started over nearly its entire surface, this was repeated on all ten frames and some even had honey stored. We spotted the queen and to be honest she was not that impressive. I may end up replacing her, time will tell.

This is after just 24 hrs.

Swarm with an audience

2010-07-07T20:45:00.000-07:00

I always seem to get the hard ones.

Today I got a call for a swarm that had landed in a tree right in front of a restaurants patio seating. I was able to just back up to the tree and get to them by standing on the tail gate. The truck is blocking the view but there were several couples sitting and watching while we worked, and taking pictures

The plan was to hold the box under the swarm and just shake them in, and it almost worked.

I held the box up but when I shook the branch it snapped off and I was left with the box in one hand and the branch in the other hand.

Once we got most in the box I put the lid on and vacumed up most of the remainder.

Setup at home was easy just take the box and set it up on a base and add a lid. As you can see from the following pictures there were no dead bees in the box, I am very happy with the way this vacum is working out.

The whole exercise only took about 45 minutes and about another 10 once we got home.

Another cutout call - sort of

2010-07-06T11:56:00.001-07:00

So yesterday I got a for some bees that were in an old trailer. The story was that they were preping it for paint and bees were coming and going from one of the old tail light fittings. When I got there it was not really the kind of trailer I was expecting, it was 25 - 30 ft long and had been set up for somebody to live in. It had a permanent roof built over it and it was showing its age. The exterior was aluminum held in place by extrusion riveted on the edges. The owner did not want me removing the extrusion as he was concerned that with the age and condition of the frame we would not be able to find anything solid enough to re fasten it to. I went home and picked up the bee vac, I was pretty sure I was not going to be able to do much given the limitations but I was eager to try out the vac and see how it worked. I spent about 30 minutes sucking up any bees that were coming and going from the entrance, then when that activity slowed I removed the tail light assy.
Behind the light I was supprised to see that the space between the inner and outer wall was about 6" with just a 1" layer of insulation. Using a flashlight and a mirror I could see that the bees headed up once they were inside but I could not see any nest, given the amount of room to move around these bees could be anywhere in the roof.
As I said the owner did not want to take anything apart so at this point my work was done, I gave them some information as to what to expect once the nest starts do drip honey on the ceiling and they may call back but I kinda doubt it. They are going to seal the entrance, but with the bees having access to the whole wall space all over this trailer I fully expect them to just keep find new entrances.

The bee vac test was a complete success, I only sucked up maybe 300-400 bees and once I got them home I opened it up to see how they did. Only two dead bees in the bottom of the box that is a vast improvement on other vacs I have seen used. I took the box and added it to the top of another hive to introduce the bees to, today we will remove the box shaking out any bees still in it.

Allergy update

2010-07-05T11:09:00.000-07:00

Well the blood test came back and it is positive for honey bee allergies. This means that the reaction I had was not just a one off occurrence. The allergist that I saw is really cool and although she thinks I am nuts (all non beekeepers think I am nuts) she is going to put me on a fast track desensitization treatment. There are a couple of things she told me about this treatment, They don't do this for everyone as it has an increased risk over the regular course of treatments, but due to my hobby they placed me in a high risk category so I qualify for the fast track. Fast track means I get to go in twice a day, after each shot I have to be observed for 1/2 hr to make sure I don't have a reaction. The good news is that anti allergy treatment for insect venom is far more effective than regular allergy treatments.
Prior to this course starting I have to go in for some skin scratch tests so they can gauge the reaction and from that they will calculate what the venom dose in each shot will be. I go in for that test next week and expect the treatments to start soon after.

Due to this allergy several things have changed, no more inspecting yards on my own, Anna will need to be with me every time, although to be honest I have checked the hives at home with no one around, also I have purchased a full bee suit to use if we have days when the bees are a little less friendly. I also make sure I have the cell phone in my pocket and an EPI pen in easy reach.

One thing I did find out about this allergy, Commercial beekeepers and/or beekeepers who get stung on an almost daily occurrence pretty much are receiving there own desensitization treatment and are less likely to develop a reaction. Hobbyists who only get the occasional sting are 20% more likely to develop a reaction than a member of the general public. I had heard this before but thought it could be one of those rumors but the allergist I was seeing confirmed it to be factual.

For anyone wondering about the attic cutout, well turns out they were not honey bees, at a distance they sure looked like bees but when we used binoculars to get a better look they were in fact wasps. The thing is there were a lot of dark bees flying around so there is a nest around this property somewhere. Just glad we figured it out before we started cutting.