White Comb

I inspected two of my hives for any indication of swarming. There were some swarm cups present but none had any eggs in them. The honey crop looks good.
Here are some pictures of the honey super that I put on top of my super strong hive on July 19th. It was completely brand new everything. The bees had to draw out all the comb and fill it. They are probably 3/4 or more full now. They are starting to cap some of it. The frame shown is an outermost frame. The honey is super clear and the wax is pure white. There is an alfalfa field which had been in full bloom for the last couple of weeks. I imagine my girls got a bit into that.

See propolis attached to the bees legs on the right!

Outside frame

dripped honey from frame manipulation. See how clear and tongues out!

Under the top box.

A true maze of connecting comb through queen excluder.

By using short honey supers, I will be able to lift them off! It should also allow me to get different types of blooms with different tastes!

Caged Queen Released

Saturday I went to check on my queen cage. The candy plug on it was eaten through but not enough for the queen to get out. She was looking well fed and the bees were very much interested in her. As the picture shows, I had the queen cage jammed into the surrounding wax.

Queen cage suspended in wax. Bees are interested!

This is one of the frames I pulled out. It looks ready for the queen to start laying eggs.

Frame of pollen and empty cells. Ready for the new queen to lay.

Honey bee on latest bloom.

The evening was quite interesting. I partially took care of the skunk epidemic on the farm by using the "high speed lead poisoning" method. What a stinky job!

News Article: Man lights beehive, sets house on fire

This article gave me a bit of a chuckle.

Like Einstein once said: " Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I am not sure about the universe"

The sad thing is that this town is a 2.5 hour drive from my place.


Man lights beehive, sets house on fire


By QMI Agency


BARRIE, Ont. — A man accidentally set his house on fire while trying to rid his home of bees.

Authorities say the man was trying to light a bees' nest on fire Wednesday night and some sparks caught on the house.

An off-duty Barrie police officer saw the man was in distress and ran to help. He grabbed a garden hose and tried to douse the fire, and a neighbour, a retired firefighter, arrived at the house with a fire extinguisher.

"We've had calls in the past week regarding insect nests and there's been poor judgment on the part of those trying to get rid of them," said deputy fire chief Rick Monkman.

The fire was brought under control by the time on-duty firefighters arrived on scene.

The homeowner was taken to hospital with minor injuries.

Monkman said residents should refrain from trying to burn nests.

"They should either use the proper agent to rid the area of insects or call an exterminator," he said. "If they aren't sure what to do, they should leave it to the experts."

Miracle

Its' a whole other story today. A couple of little miracles happened today when I was re-assessing my hives and trying to fix the potential mistakes I made last night in my knee-jerk reactions.

When I got into the house my wife told me that her cousin was coming to visit in the next day or so. She happens to live right near my bee breeder. He sells Buckfast bees. I called him up this morning and it is not a problem to pick up a queen. He told me that he recently received new stock from a breeder in Denmark. I wonder if this is his supplier:

Denmark Buckfast

This means that I will have to undo my nucleus box being placed on top of my hive. I decided that I would also search through my hive to see if a queen from that hive was in it. Because I do not want to have to pay for queen and have it killed because there is already a queen present! That is an expensive waste. Here is where the biggest miracle happened. I opened the lid and saw that they had not extensively chewed through the newspaper used to combine the hives. I picked up the first frame and I found a queen! She was smaller than normal and she was scurrying around along the edge of the frame. I could not believe it! She was not very big, actually the smallest queen that I have ever seen; which makes me think that she is likely a virgin queen. The queens go for their mating flights and then come back and the workers feed them to make them larger. I took out the frame with the queen on it and put it back in the nucleus box and then I retrieved the remaining frames and shook them out to bring down the population a bit; they are overcrowded in the small nucleus box. I then put my queen excluder back under neath my honey super.

Tomorrow I will be placing the new queen into my hive with a candy cage.

I also checked the green hive and it looks like their queen is laying very well now.

Honey anyone?

Chaos

I have finished bottling and started selling my first crop of honey already. It looked awesome and tasted delicious. This is by far the most honey I have ever bottled at a time but since I started selling it before I even finished bottling it; I am still not quite sure what the tally is.

Wax and other debris is filtered out of the honey before bottling.

Double filtering from a coarse to finer final filter

In other news; I just checked my hives tonight and the white hive did not have a laying queen! If you recall the last post, I recombined a caught swarm with the rest of the hive body in an attempt to re-introduce the queen to the hive. It apparently did not work. I currently just added my spare nucleus hive on top to combine it with the white hive in the hopes of its queen taking over. I do not even know if that will work either; since they appeared to also be queenless and to have recently swarmed!

Newspaper combine on left side

It looks like my best option may be to buy a mated queen and to introduce her as soon as possible.

The green hive appears to have a laying queen but she has not laid many eggs yet. It appears that she has just started laying in the last couple of days.

Forks of the Credit: Beekeeper

I had the pleasure to meet another beekeeper who lives and manages 20 hives in the picturesque Niagara Escarpment  near the small town of Forks on the Credit, Ontario. He has a beautiful location with the Forks of the Credit river raging through his backyard. His hives are located on the other side of the river and his bees primarily forage on basswood trees; which produce a lot of nectar in the right conditions.

Interesting bottom board. This hive is sitting on a scale!

Hive sitting on a scale.

 Hives sitting on a scale are excellent ways to monitor honey flows and the general condition of the hive. This beekeeper has two separate scales and compares them regularly. I need to find a scale like this at an auction sale!

A treasure chest of bees! Swarm collection and relocation in action.

Hive with 5 mediums of honey on top!

A lot was learned in our short visit. He has an interesting method of running his bee yard. In the spring time he splits up his strong hives and lets them raise their own emergency queens and he tries to keep young queens in his hives at all times so that they do not swarm. I am reluctant to split my hives up all the time because I want to remain as a small beekeeper. It is always nice to get to meet an experienced beekeeper so that wisdom can be passed on.

Swarm Mayhem: Part 2 of 2

I decided it would be a good idea to inspect the hive which the swarms came out of; so I took the one hive apart and cut out dozens of capped cells. I found my one ugly frame and decided to replace it with a new frame; so I set the other frame out away from the hives to let the bees clean it up. It alone had 5 queen cells on it. As I was inspecting the boxes, I noticed that there was no young larvae on any frame; meaning that the queen had stopped laying a while ago. The queen stops laying when she is ready to swarm and the bees make her essentially lose weight so that she is ready to fly away when the time is right. Because there was no laying queen in the hive, I decided to leave two queen cells in one of the hives. The plan was to combine back my one caught swarm on top of one of the hives using a newspaper combine.

Queen emerging from queen cell!

Queen cleaning herself (see legs wrapped around her head)

A Queen meeting one of her servants

The frame that I removed was full of queen cells and I had the opportunity to watch and take pictures of a queen emerging. I then took many pictures of the queen crawling on my hands. The queens were emerging within minutes of eachother. It was incredible. I ended up leaving these queens to die out in the grass. Yes, very harsh thing to do but I am sure glad that I acted when I did because if not the hive may have thrown even more swarms!

Capped honey frame!

I decided that harvesting honey now would probably be my best option to get more frames for even more honey gathering. My wifes' uncle was kind enough to offer to extract my honey for me. I am looking forward to see what the honey tastes like.

Swarm Mayhem! Part 1 of 2

Sunday morning I went to visit my hives (in my backyard) and thought that it looked like a lot of commotion was going on. I then realized that my hive was swarming out. So I ran into the house and grabbed my video camera and took a video. I will have to figure out a way to post it on the internet; which will probably require getting a youtube account. More to follow on that front...

In the meanwhile, here are two swarms that I attempted to capture.

Largest swarm located 8 ft off the ground and around trunk.

Smaller swarm located 6 feet off the ground and dangling on a branch!

The large swarm obviously was the more attractive swarm to catch but it was right against the trunk of the tree and up 8 feet. I shook the swarm into a box half a dozen times but I never caught the queen. They kept flying out the the box and back to the tree. The weather was also incredible, with the temperature at 30C and with the humidity it felt closer to 40C. After spending an hour or more trying to get the swarm hived, I turned my attention to other things.

I did not have a problem to drop the second (smaller swarm) into a nuc box. It took two tries but then I set the box on a step ladder and the bees accepted it. I must have captured the queen on the second attempt.

I decided to inspect the hives which had swarmed. I noticed that my honey boxes were right full. Due to procrastination I am a bit low on frames; so I decided that it would be a good time to do an extraction session.

Lots of honey. Look how thick that frame is!

The queen excluder ironically had queen cells all over it! How did the queen lay in them?

Multiple queen cells located on queen excluder (between honey box and rest of hive)

When inspecting the hive I saw that a drone bee had a varroa mite on its back. This is not good news. It is definitely believable that the mite levels in the hive is very high, but it always bothers me to see mites on the bees. I will have to treat when the honey season is over.

Mite on a drone bee. Mite levels must be high!

While doing the inspection I noticed that there was no young brood in both of my hives. This is because the queen has swarmed out but it may cause a distruption in the mites' reproductive cycle as well. Time will tell.

To be continued!

Newspaper Combine Hive: Doing well...

It looks as if the bees have cleared out all of the newspaper from between the two boxes. I had the chance to inspect all of the frames to see how my new queen was laying. She originally was laying double eggs fairly often but it appears as though she has gotten rid of that habit.

Look at how many bees are in the bottom box!

I also got a chance to check out my 'swarm hive' from last year and they are collecting quite a bit of honey.
Here are some pictures of a partially filled frame.

Half filled honey frame

A closer look at the wax foundation. You can see right through to the other side!