Tucking the bees in for the winter

November 3, 2011

A strangely gorgeous day for November...17 degrees and sunny.

It is time to put the bees to bed for the winter...not that they go to sleep but the hives need to be prepared.  We put burlap on the lattice wall to the west of the hives to protect them from the north wind that whistles up our property.  They have a shed behind them and a wooden fence on the other side so I think they are good to go.  Their entrances face south so when there is a bit of sun in the winter they can come out and do some cleansing flights.  I also had to take the top supers off each hive to make them a bit smaller.  That way the bees will not spread out too much and get chilled.  Each hive was four boxes high and I wanted them to be only three boxes high.

I opened up Hippolyta first, and yes, I was completely protected in my bee suit and I had a lit smoker, in case you are concerned. The bees were all at the top of this hive.  To look at the frames, I had to brush tons of bees off each frame or shake them off.  The air was full of bees.  They weren't terribly angry but they did bump me a bit.  I emptied the box of frames.  There were two fully capped frames of honey and the rest were about half full.

I then went to Queen Elizabeth I.  All her bees were at the bottom so I didn't have as much work to clear the frames.  So strange how different the two hives are from one another.  The bees ignored me completely.  There were five fully capped frames of honey in the top box.  I took all the fully capped frames into the house for extracting and saved the rest for the bees.  I will give the frames back to the hives in the spring.  I left about 75 pounds of honey in each hive for them to eat over the winter.  That is more than I extracted over the summer!  I don't want to have to feed them any sugar syrup in the spring so I am hoping that I left enough.  Everything I read tells me that honey is better for them than sugar syrup.

Bill made reducers for the top entrances of the hives to keep the bees cosy and as soon as it gets colder I will shut down the bottom entrances completely.  So as not to confuse the bees, I will do it at night time and then place a branch in front of each hive.  The bees will come out and notice that all is not what it once was and re-orient themselves.  This means they will fly out, turn around and look back at the hive, re-adjust their internal gps, to know where the new entrance is.  If they just fly out without noticing the change, they will come back to the old entrance and flail about wondering what happened...like absent minded professors!

It is so warm right now that the bees are still bringing pollen home.  This is great since pollen is their protein and they need protein to raise the brood in the spring. I am close to leaving them to their own devices.  I have decided that I will not give my bees any chemicals and/or antibiotics.  This means that if they get mites of any sort or viruses, they are on their own.  I would rather lose the bees than have chemicals stored in the wax which is where the honey is stored.  They will have to become tough bees on their own.  I am pretty sure that I have tough bees...especially with that new black queen with the white stripe.  She looks like a fighter to me!

I extracted the honey from the seven frames.  It is a darker, rich honey with a slightly bitter after-taste...probably the golden rod.  So that's the last honey until next season.  It has been a sticky, sweet adventure.

Here are the last bits of colour in the garden as we move towards winter.

Red blaze maple

Rosehips with Japanese anemone in background

Backlit birch leaves

One last coreopsis bloom

Monkshood bloom

And on another, slightly dorkier note!  The Ontario Beekeepers Association had a photo contest for a

picture for the month of July in their 2012 calendar.  I had taken a picture of a just extracted comb of honey on my iPhone and decided to send it in for the contest...and I won!  My great prize is a copy of the calendar but I am happy to tell people that I am Miss July!

Award winning photo of honey comb

So wish me and the girls good luck for the winter.

Tour at Munro's Honey

Oct 29, 2011

The Elgin Middlesex Beekeeper's Association organized a tour of the Munro Honey and Mead operation in Alviston, Ontario...just west of Strathroy.  This is a real honey operation.  They run 3,000 hives and have them placed in the countryside...some as far north as Clinton.  They also send hives to New Brunswick to pollinate the blueberry crops.  This business has been a family business since 1914 started by the Munro's and was bought by one of the workers in the 1950's.

We were taken through the extraction room, the processing stations and where the mead is made.  What an operation!  The scale of everything is amazing.  The extractor holds 120 frames at a time.  The system of moving the frames is motorized.  They have a special room that is chilled to keep the supers full of extracted frames.  Chilling them keeps the wax moths at bay but doesn't freeze the frames so they can be given right back to the bees in the spring.  The honey is heated to 90 degrees to let it run more easily through the machinery.  Honey is pasteurized at 140 degrees so Munro's honey is still sold as unpasteurized.  They also collect the wax and sell it for candle making etc.  The wax is collected in plastic basins and the pile of wax was truly humbling.  To put this in perspective, I have been moulding the little wax that I have collected in egg cups and custard bowls!

Extracted frames in supers stored in chilled room

Basins of collected wax

Piles of wax ready to ship

All the gear in the honey room is made of stainless steel and is sparkling clean.  The extractor was the first one the company made in stainless steel at the request of Munro's.

Extractor that  handles 120 frames

Barrels of honey

The honey room

After we toured the facilities, we were treated to various meads (honey wine) and creamed flavoured honey butters.  Yummy!  Some of the meads were very sweet and some dry.  The honeys were flavoured with jalapeno peppers, cinnamons and fruits.  Good for glazing meats or just as a dip on salted pretzels.

Mead tasting 

Honey butter tasting

It was a glorious fall day and perfect for a drive into the country.  The tour was so interesting for me even though this operation is so much bigger than my little beeyard.  On the ride back we stopped to take some pictures of a very cool tree on the side of the road.  I will leave you with this image.

On the way back to London from Alviston

Do not get cocky with the bees.

Oct 23, 2011

All I wanted was to change the size of the upper entrance for the bees!

I have been reading a book by a beekeeper who doesn't use any chemicals on his bees.  His hives only have top entrances rather than bottom entrances and his theories made sense to me.  He has read enough and seen enough to believe that there is less issue with mould and condensation with the ventilation through the top of the hive.  So I wished to follow suit.

On Sunday, I decided that I would take the top off Hippolyta, replace it with a temporary top and cut the opening bigger, or rather, get Bill to cut the opening bigger.  Before I go on, let me describe what I was wearing...remember I said that black and red are not good colours since bees see them as colours of their predators, especially if they are fuzzy?  Need I say more?  I was wearing black fleece pants and a black fleece jacket.  I was not wearing any protective gear.  I did not light the smoker.  The only smart thing I did was in not asking Bill to take pictures.   So there are no embarrassing photos of what happened next.

I blithely used my hive tool to pop open the top of Hippolyta.  There were a lot of bees under the lid and some of them were looking at me.  I ignored these warning signs and shook the many bees to the ground in front of the hive.  I had barely placed the new top on the hive when I realized that the bees were entirely unhappy with me.  I had bees in my hair and was being dive bombed.  I ran.  I ran towards Bill and the house.  Olive ran with me, snapping at the bees.  I was shaking my head and I hate to admit it, I was yelling like a baby.  Of course the bees got scared too and by the time I was done, I was stung about 4 or 5 times on the top of my head.  Ouch!  Bill brought me a comb to comb them out and try to get the stingers out.

Of course when I went back with the newly cut top for Hippolyta, I was completely protected.  When I went to Queen Elizabeth I she didn't have any bees under the lid and had no interest in me at all.  Doesn't that just figure?  I switched out the top and now both hives have longer top entrances.  I put in a smaller reducer in the bottom of each.  They can spend the next week getting used to the top opening before I close the bottom entrance entirely.

The moral of this story is "Do not underestimate the bees"!  I had decided that my bees were gentle and calm but that was in the summer when they had lots of forage around, not in the fall when they are busy kicking out the males and readying for a long winter.  Just like us, they are cranky as the sunny days leave us.  Lesson learned.

It is fall, so I will leave you with some images of autumn in my garden.

Fungus on a dead elm trunk

Grasses 

Autumn sedum

Large fungus on very live Manitoba maple

Front garden with trains in background

Autumn is glorious!  Enjoy the apples and apple cider!

The story of the new queen

October 11, 2011

On this beautiful Thanksgiving weekend I decided that I should start to winterize the bees.  The forecast is for cooler days and the bees stop being interested in leaving the hive at 14 degrees centigrade.  For those of you that I have not bored with the details on what the bees do in the winter time, here it is.

As it gets cold the queen will be surrounded by all her workers.  The workers form a ball or cluster around her.  They whir their wings to keep the temperature at  the magic 22 degrees centigrade...just like they do in the summer to cool the hive.  As the bees on the outside of the cluster get too cold, they will exchange places with the bees on the inside of the cluster. The outside bees can access the honey that they have stored and will feed on it. When there is a prolonged spell of cold the cluster will get tighter and tighter.  The tighter the cluster gets the harder it is for the bees to access the honey so in extreme circumstances the bees can starve even though they are surrounded by food just because of not being able to move!  When the weather gets a little warmer the bees can move around more easily and feed on the stored honey.  The bees will also leave the hive when it gets a bit sunny and warm.  They leave on cleansing flights, which means they can go out to defecate.  They can hold it for a month if necessary!

It is really important that I leave enough stored honey for the bees to feed on for the winter...particularly for the beginning of spring when the queen starts laying eggs again and the larvae need feeding.  Lots of beekeepers feed sugar syrup in the spring to help them out but I am going to try to leave them enough honey to make it through...60-80 pounds.  That's the beauty of not being a farmer...it doesn't matter to me if I don't take every drop of honey to sell.

I went into the bees, partly to see if there was any honey that could be taken to extract, partly to take the screen from the bottom away and partly to see how the bees were faring.  There were so many bees, it was amazing.  I knew that I wouldn't be able to find the queen so Bill took pictures of every single frame in the bottom box for me to take a look at afterwards on the computer.

I definitely got both hives agitated by going through all the boxes...the air was buzzing with bees.  Bill got stung on his arm while taking pictures, so that's his first sting of the season.  We are pretty sure that Olive, the dog got stung too since she was busy snapping at them.  Wasps were around being end-of-season-stupid and I am pretty sure that there were some robbing bees coming around to see if they could score some easy honey.  I tried to work gently and quickly so that I could close them up but it still took a fair bit of time going through to the bottom.  I also know now why beekeepers always have bad backs!  You don't think about lifting with your legs when you are handling a 100 lb box of buzzing bees!

The deep box that is the brood chamber

Putting a super on top of the deep

 I think that I will going back into the hives in a while just to take off the 4th box from the top but for now, the bees are still working away.  After I finished working in both hives I came in to download the photos to see if I could find the queens as well as check for any diseases, mites etc.  Happily, I haven't found one mite in the hives and the bees seem to be very healthy.  While looking for the queen I came upon my first real bee mystery!

As I was searching for her majesty Queen Elizabeth I, I was looking for a brown queen...you may have seen her a few posts ago.  Imagine my surprise when I came upon a queen with a black abdomen and a white stripe at the bottom of the abdomen!  An entirely different queen!  I can only assume that when I was frantically keeping this hive from swarming back in June, I wasn't completely successful at eradicating all the queen cells.  One of them must have hatched and taken over the hive.  This might explain why the hive became more active throughout the summer.  If I take the advice of most beekeepers, I would try to replace this new, home grown queen with one from a queen breeder but I think that I will go with the instincts of my bees and see how they do.

New Queen Elizabeth I...she is centre left

I also found her majesty Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons and as far as I can tell, she has not changed so I will be going into next season with a 2 year old queen which apparently will have a very strong chance of survival and growth.  This will be interesting since I will be able to compare two very different hives next season if both hives make it through the winter.

Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons...centre left

Education moment:  The raising of queens is not a random act.   First, you need to know that all the female eggs that are laid by the queen are created equal until they are fed by the worker bees.  All female larvae are fed royal jelly for three days by the worker bees.  If they are then switched to pollen and honey diets they will become sterile worker bees.  If the worker bees decide that they would like to raise queens, they will make the cells of certain larvae larger and continue to feed these larvae with royal jelly.  This will change these larvae from sterile to fertile females.  These larvae then become queens.  They need a much larger cell because they are so much larger.  The workers will choose about 10-12 larvae to raise as queens...each a day apart in their growth so that they have a guaranteed queen if the first few don't work out.

What makes the workers decide to raise queens?  

There are two reasons for raising queens when there is already a queen in the hive.  The first reason is because the existing queen is getting ready to swarm.  These queen cells are called swarm cells and usually hang on the bottom of the frames.  Swarming is the only way a hive can pro-create.  Even though the queen is constantly laying and thousands of new bees are being born, this is not pro-creation.  You must imagine that the whole hive is one organism so to  pro-create, the hive must duplicate itself.  The queen must leave the hive with about 1/2 the bees to start another hive.  When the queen decides to leave, the workers who stay behind need a new queen and start raising them.  When the old queen leaves, the new queens hatch and the first one to hatch will quickly kill all the other queens in their cells.  She will then go out on maiden flights to be fertilized by drones.  When this is accomplished she comes back to the hive to begin laying eggs.  She will not stop laying or leave the hive until it is her turn to swarm.

The other reason for raising a queen is if there is an emergency such as the accidental loss of a queen or if the queen is showing signs of not being a successful egg layer.  These queen cells are often found in the middle of the frames and are called supersedure cells.  If one finds these, it's a sign that all is not right in the hive.  Beekeepers can get a new queen from a breeder at this point or let the hive go ahead and hope it all works out...like me. 

I'm not sure which happened with Queen Elizabeth I.  Guess we will know how successful she was next season...but I love the white stripe! 

Happy Thanksgiving!

October 8, 2011

It is a beautiful day and I have the use of a macro lens for my camera!  This will be a little photo gallery of my garden taken through this amazing lens..some from earlier this summer and some from today.  This lens is much more difficult to master than I would have thought.  Holding it steady is difficult and since I  like to wander through the garden without a tripod I find keeping things in focus is the challenge.

During my wandering this summer I discovered an Anise Swallowtail caterpillar on the dill plant. Apparently these particular Swallowtails are becoming more plentiful further North due to global climate changes.  I feared for its life since the plant was right beside the bird feeder so I brought it into the house and put it into a jar with lots of dill, a branch and some water.  It ate and ate and ate and then hung itself on the branch with silk strings.  There it hung for about a week and then it started to jiggle and jerk.  I am so glad I happened to be standing next to it as it started to pupate, because that is exactly what it was doing.  It looked like it was turning itself inside out...what we look like when we take a sweater off over our heads!  After a bit, it turned completely green and a ball dropped off its end and it stopped moving.  It turned brown over the next couple of days and now it looks like a dried stick.  I hope that it turns into a beautiful butterfly in the spring and, more importantly I hope that we notice when that happens so that we can set it free.  Here are pictures of it in its various forms.

Anise Swallowtail caterpillar on dill plant

Anise Swallowtail caterpillar hanging on stick ready to pupate

An old tattered Anise Swallowtail butterfly on butterfly bush flower

The following pictures are of various creatures in the garden...can't name all of them but I found them so fascinating, I would like to share them with you.

Some kind of wasp...now you understand "waspish waist line"...

Honey bee on the pink cosmos

Bumble bee covered in pollen, on the orange cosmos

Action at the composter

Too many grasshoppers this year...here is one sitting on a spent dahlia flower

Beautiful black and white wasp on the trumpet vine

Honey bee at the trumpet vine flowers...it goes through the back instead of down the flower since the flower is too huge.

We are plagued by snails and they eat the hostas but it's perfect to look at, isn't it?

Beetle on black eyed Susan...think it knows how gorgeously it matches?

Tomorrow I will show you cool seed pods and fungus around the property.  Hope you have lots to give thanks for on this lovely weekend.

The Sad Fate of the Drone

The following story about the fate of drone, the only male in the hive comes word for word from a wonderful, little book called "The Life of the Bee".  This was written by Maurice Maeterlinck, a Belgian playwright who was also a beekeeper.  It is a quirky, poetic book that deals more with the philosophy than the science of the hive.  In fact, the name of my honey, Waxen City comes from this lovely book.   It was written in 1901.  My copy is 1935 re-print found by my daughter in a second hand book store here in London.

THE MASSACRE OF THE MALES

If skies remain clear, the air warm, and pollen and nectar abound in the flowers, the workers through a kind of forgetful indulgence, or over-scrupulous prudence perhaps, will for a short time longer endure the importunate, disastrous presence of the males.  These comport themselves in the hive as did Penelope's suitors in the house Ulysses.  Indelicate and wasteful, sleek and corpulent, fully content with their idle existence as honorary lovers, they feast and carouse, throng the alleys, obstruct the passages, and hinder the work; jostling and jostled, fatuously pompous, swelled with foolish, good-natured contempt; harbouring never a suspicion of the deep and calculating scorn wherewith the workers regard them, of the constantly growing hatred to which they give rise, or of the destiny that awaits them.  For their pleasant slumbers they select the snuggest corners of the hive; then, rising carelessly, they flock to the open cells where the honey smells sweetest, and soil with their excrements the combs they frequent.  The patient workers, their eyes steadily fixed on the future, will silently set things right.  From noon till three, when the purple country trembles in blissful lassitude beneath the invincible gaze of a July or August sun, the drones will appear on the threshold.  They have a helmet made of enormous black pearls, two lofty, quivering plumes, a doublet of iridescent, yellowish velvet, an heroic turf, and a fourfold mantle, translucent and rigid.  They create a prodigious stir, brush the sentry aside, overturn the cleaners, and collide with the foragers as these return, laden with their humble spoil.  They have the busy air, the extravagant, contemptuous gait of indispensable gods who should be simultaneously venturing towards some destiny unknown to the vulgar.  One by one they sail off into space, irresistible, glorious, and tranquilly make for the nearest flowers, where they sleep till the afternoon freshness awake them.  Then, with the same majestic pomp, and still overflowing with magnificent schemes, they return to the hive, go straight to the cells, plunge their head to the neck in the vats of honey, and fill themselves tight as a drum to repair their exhausted strength; whereupon, with heavy steps, they go forth to meet the good, dreamless, and careless slumber that shall fold them in its embrace till the time for the next repast.

But the patience of the bees is not equal to that of men.  One morning the long-expected word of command goes through the hive; and the peaceful workers turn into judges and executioners.  Whence this word issues we know not; it would seem to emanate suddenly from the cold, deliberate, indignation of the workers; and no soooner has it been uttered than every heart throbs with it, inspired with the genius of the unanimous republic.  One part of the people renounce their foraging duties to devote themselve to the work of justice.  The great idle drones, asleep in unconscious groups on the melliferous walls, are rudely torn from their slumbers by an army of wrathful virgins.  They wake, in pious wonder; they cannot believe their eyes; and their asonishment struggles through their sloth as a moonbeam through marshy water.  They stare amazedly round them, convinced that they must be victims of some mistake; and the mother-idea of their life being first to assert itself in their dull brain, they take a step towards the vats of honey to seek comfort there.  But ended for them are the days of May honey, the wine-flower of lime-trees and fragrant ambrosia of thyme and sage, of marjoram and white clover.  Where the path once lay open to the kindly, abundant reservoirs, that so invitingly offered their waxen and sugary mouths, there stands now a burning-bush all alive with poisonous, bristling stings.  The atmosphere of the city is changed; in lieu of the friendly perfume of honey the acrid odour of poison prevails; thousands of tiny drops glisten at the end of the stingers and diffuse rancour and hatred.  Before the bewildered parasites are able to realize that the happy laws of the city have crumbled, dragging down in most inconceivable fashion their own plentiful destiny, each one is assailed by three or four envoys of justice; and these vigorously proceed to cut off his wings, saw through the petiole that connects the abdomen with the thorax, amputate the feverish antennae, and seek and opening between the rings of his cuirass through which to pass their sword.  No defence is attempted by the enormous, but unarmed, creatures; they try to escape, or oppose their mere bulk to the blows that rain down upon them.  ...And, in a very brief space, their appearance becomes so deplorable...the wings of the wretched creatures are torn, their antennae bitten, the segments of their legs wrenched off; and their magnificent eyes, mirrors once of the exuberant flowers, flashing back the blue light and the innocent pride of summer, now softened by suffering, reflect only the anguish and distress of their end.  Some succumb to their wounds, and are at once borne away to distant cemeteries by two or three of their executioners.  Others, whose injuries are less, succeed in sheltering themselves in some corner, where they lie, all huddled together, surrounded by an inexorable guard, until they perish of want.  Many will reach the door and escape into space, dragging their adversaries with them; but, towards evening, impelled by hunger and cold, they return in crowds to the entrance of the hive to beg for shelter.  But there they encounter another pitiless guard.  The next morning, before setting forth on their journey, the workers will clear the threshold, strewn with the corpses of the useless giants; and all recollections of the idle race disappear till the following spring.

In very many colonies of the apiary this massacre will often take place on the same day.  The richest, best-governed hive will give the signal, to be followed, some days after, by the little and less prosperous republics.  Only the poorest, weakest colonies--those whose mother is very old and almost sterile--will preserve their males till the approach of winter, so as not to abandon the hope of procuring the impregnation of the virgin queen they await, and who may yet be born.  Inevitable misery follows; and all the tribe--mother, parasites, workers--collect in hungry and closely intertwined group, who perish in silence before the first snows arrive, in the obscurity of the hive."


I hope you enjoyed this missive a little more than the simple: "the drone gets booted out of the hive in fall"!

My very own extractor!

September 2011

My extractor arrived in all its glory!  A beautiful stainless steel extractor for two frames at a time...no motor... just a geared hand crank that runs like butter.

Two frame extractor with bucket/strainer

I needed to see if there was any honey available so I could use this lovely piece of machinery.  Queen Elizabeth had 8 fully capped frames in the top box.  The third box had 10 fully capped frames for winter so I felt fine taking 8 frames to extract.  I had to move quickly as the wasps were attracted to the sweet smell of the honey.  The beeyard smells strong right now.  The nectar that the bees are collecting is mostly from golden rod.  

I used the brush to get the bees off the frames but they were less gentle this time.  I think the frenzy of getting ready for winter is upon them.  After I took the frames I got my gear off...have I mentioned how hot the gear is?  Then I went back to the hives to chase some of the wasps away.  While I was doing this,  a honey bee got caught in my hair.  I tried to shake it out but it panicked and ended up stinging me on the head.  My first bee sting!   I scraped my head right away to get the stinger out so it didn't continue to pump venom into me.  I'm sorry that the honey bee had to lose its life like that.  But now I know that I am not allergic to bee stings!  Silver lining...and I can finally say that I have been stung...and yes, it hurt.

Smoking the bees

Brushing the bees from the frame

I used some of our coolers to store the frames in...word of advice to any new beekeepers:  Do not use your coolers.  The propolis from the frames stuck to the plastic sides and though I was able to eventually scrape it off, it left stains.  

I brought the frames into the kitchen...Bill thought it might be a good idea to do the extraction outside but our experience with the wasps in the bee yard made us think twice about that idea.  A sticky kitchen is better than a battle with wasps over buckets of honey!  You might remember that when I worked with Roy, we used a heat gun to uncap the honey.  This time I did the uncapping with my capping scratcher.  The capping scratcher is like a comb with pointy ends.  

Uncapped frame...look at that honey

Taking off the wax caps with a capping scratcher

Extracting only 8 frames didn't take very long.    Once all the frames were empty I put them back into a super and gave them back to the bees to clean up.  They take the little bits of honey left in the cells and move them into other cells.  Once the wax is cleaned up I will store them in our shed for the winter.

Uncapped frame going into the extractor

Two frames in the extractor

Spinning the frames

Empty frame after spinning

My little honey operation has a name, Waxen City!  My daughter has designed a label for me.  It is a combination of urban and floral which perfectly describes our urban bees here in the middle of London, Ontario.

Label for my honey

Honey from Waxen City

I will go into the hives  after the autumn warms up again. I will finish extracting honey and then get them ready for the winter.  These last few days have been very cold and the bees are staying very close to home.  We have noticed that the workers are starting to boot the drones out of the hive so my next post will have to tell you that story.  It is gruesome!  Wait for it.  

By the way...you can click on any picture in this blog and it will fill your screen.  If you click on it again it will zoom in!

Back to School Education Post PART I

September 7, 2011

Fall is fast approaching and schools are back in.  What better thing than an educational post that finally answers all of your frequently asked questions?  Prepare for lots of reading.


 The Anatomy of the Hive.

The hives you are used to seeing in the fields are made up of wooden boxes and were designed in the 1880's.  Not much has changed since then.  Each box has 8-10 frames in it.  The frames I use have a plastic foundation on them that has hexagonal imprints on either side that the bees build their wax honey comb on.  These hexagonal cells (the hexagon is the structural form that provides the most strength using the least amount of material) are used by the queen to lay her eggs in and by the workers to store nectar and pollen in.  The cells are built on a slight upward angle so that the nectar does not flow out.  The bottom box of the hive is called the brood box and most of the eggs are laid there.  Some may be laid in the next box up which is called a super.  All the  boxes further up are also called supers and if they are primarily for honey, they are called honey supers.  There is an entrance at the bottom for the bees and it can be reduced depending on weather etc.  My hives have a top entrance as well which helps ventilation of the hive.

Here is a diagram of an exploded hive from Storey's Guide to Keeping Honey Bees:

My hives are painted blue and have drawings of Queen Elizabeth I and Hippolyta on the brood boxes.  I chose blue because I understand that bees love this colour.  They can see a number of colours such as blue, ultraviolet, violet and yellow.  They see black and brown as "aggressive" colours since predators such as bears have that colouring and they also see red as black. As a result these dark colours and red are not great choices for clothing around the hives! The reason for the drawings on the hives is to help the bees distinguish their own hive.  Bees are able to distinguish up to 4 characters.  They also have an amazing natural GPS that helps them navigate their way home.  If the hive is moved even 6 inches to one side, the bees will go directly to where it was before realizing that something has changed.  Some  bees will drift to other hives but generally they stick to their own.

The Bees:

A hive is made up of one queen, a few hundred drones (males) and many thousands of workers (females).  Hives can have up to 60,000 to 100,000 bees when mature...mine are might be between 20,000 and 30,000 bees right now but I'm not really sure.  Here are the 3 bees that make up the hive.

As you can see, the queen is twice as large as the worker.  She is an egg for 3 days, a larvae for 5.5 days, a pupa for 7 days and can live from 2-5 years.  She is capable of stinging more than once but generally only uses her stinger to sting rival queens.  The queen only leaves the hive once (except when swarming) and that is to be fertilized.  She will not be fertilized by any of the drones in her own hive which ensures diversity of genes.  The queen will leave the hive when she is born and will fly to a meeting place where all the drones from other hives also congregate and wait for virgin queens to come along.  The queen will fly high above the meeting place and the the drones will follow.  As she flies higher and higher, the weaker drones will fall off and only the strongest will continue and finally win.  The queen can be fertilized by up to 17 drones so she will have diversity of sperm at her disposal.  Each drone that was successful in fertilization will die since their sexual members literally get ripped out by the act.  The queen then goes back to the hive and lays eggs for the rest of her life.  She can lay up to 2,000 eggs per day and can choose which sperm will fertilize which egg.  I even noticed in my own hives that the bees being born looked different throughout the season as they came from different fathers.  From my reading and meeting other beekeepers I have heard stories of the queen laying more aggressive bees in response to attacks on the hive by skunks or racoons!  The queen produces a pheremone.  This pheremone lets the bees of her hive know where they belong and they will always come back to their own hive due to the pheremone.  The workers also spread this pheremone around.

The drone is the male family member.  He is an egg for 3 days, a larvae for 6.5 days, a pupa for 14.5 days and can live from 40-50 days.  The drone is incapable of stinging.  He has a great life generally.  He eats, sleeps, is cleaned up after by the workers and makes flights every afternoon in search of virgin queens.  If unsuccessful, he comes back to the hive to eat, sleep and be cleaned up after until fall.  He is then booted out of the hive to perish in the wilds.  More on this fate in another post.  Some writings suggest that drones are the cheerleaders of the hive and keep morale up so perhaps they are not so useless as some suggest.  My drones are black bodied and quite large.  When they are flying in or out, you can hear their buzz...a very loud drone. 

The worker is exactly that...a female worker who literally works herself to death.  She is an egg for 3 days, a larvae for 6.5 days, a pupa for 12 days and can live 6 weeks in the summer and 6 months in the winter.  The worker can sting only once.  If she should use her stinger, it will rip out with her entrails and she will perish.  She has 4 glands.  One produces wax, one royal jelly, one invertase and one for scent. Her 6 weeks of life in the summer are spent in various roles.  When she is born she immediately starts to work as a house bee.   As a house bee she performs the following tasks:  cleaning brood cells, attending the queen, feeding brood, capping cells, packing and processing pollen, secreting wax, regulating temperature and receiving and processing nectar into honey.   When she is in her prime, around 3 weeks she moves on to being a guard.  The guards do not let any bees or other insects not belonging to the hive in  They will attack and fly away with any strangers unless they are carrying pollen or nectar.  In that case they are welcome.  Drones from any other hive are also welcome.  I watched my guards attack a bumble bee and drag it away from the hive.  It was easily triple the size of one honey bee.  After being a guard the worker then moves on to being a forager, a very difficult and dangerous task.  The foragers go out into the wild in search of nectar and pollen.  They get a little help from the scout foragers who go out ahead to discover the best sources of nectar and pollen.  As young foragers, they fly out of the hive and hover for awhile as they check the position of the hive (set their GPS).  They hover, fly a little ways away, fly back, fly further and further until they are ready to set out.  I have seen the new foragers hovering around the hive like a cloud, turn to face the hive and then head out. I imagine that the honey bees in my own garden are the young ones who aren't quite ready for the railway tracks.  Foragers simply wear themselves out with flying and carrying nectar and pollen back to the hive.  Weather, birds, wasps and pesticides are some of the dangers the bees have to contend with.  Happily, London is "pesticide and herbicide free" so urban bees have a better chance of it.  The workers that are born towards the end of the summer are Winter bees and tend to be fatter which helps them adapt to the cold better.  They will live through the winter through to spring.

This is the end of Part I of the Educational Post.  Stay tuned for how the Queen is made, swarming, making honey and other interesting facts!

Extracting Honey with Roy

August 16, 2011

I met Roy, a local hobby beekeeper during a recent garden tour on our property.  He was interested in our bees and mentioned that if I wanted to learn about extracting honey that he would be willing to assist me.  At that time I thought that my own extractor would get here in time and wouldn't need his assistance.  However, it turned out that my extractor would not arrive until September and I called him up to throw myself upon his mercy.  Roy was only too happy to help.  Roy is retired and has turned his little bee hobby into a growing business.  He started with one hive and now has 16...most of the hives are in Aylmer on his brother's property but he has four hives here in London in his own yard.  He is starting to sell his honey and other products.

We chose a sunny day to do the extraction and I took part of the day off work.  It was a beautiful day and Roy was sitting waiting for me ready to go.  He had brought his own smoker, a blower, some boxes to put the frames into for transport and his bee suit. We were strangers with only beekeeping in common and we were going to spend an entire day together.  A daunting proposition.

We went into the beeyard and chatted a bit about how we wanted to work and then started.  

Getting ready

We decided to start with Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons and as it turned out, queen of honey production too as it turned out!  Roy had a battery driven blower that he wanted to use to blow off the bees from the frames.  Roy quickly realized that my bees are very gentle and didn't need blowing.  After the first frame we both switched to brushes and brushed all the bees off.  Roy used a natural bristle paint brush and I used a natural bristle drafting brush. Both worked.  

First fully capped frame

In Hippolyta we found 14 frames of fully capped honey available for the taking.  After brushing off each frame we placed it in a box with a lid so that the bees wouldn't try to go back to it.  The bees were great while we worked on Hippolyta and Roy and I worked really well together.

We finished Hippolyta and then moved the boxes full of frames to Roy's truck.  We then opened up Queen Elizabeth I.  She had 10 frames of capped honey and we went through the same procedure with her.  Generally the bees were uninterested in what we were doing but one found a weak point between Roy's glove and sleeve and stung him through the cloth.  This was the only sting of the day.  Sweat was pouring down our faces and fogging our glasses but I found it rather comforting to share these difficulties with a fellow beekeeper.  We finished Elizabeth and got out of our suits to share a welcome glass of lemonade on our deck.  I showed off my gorgeous food grade buckets that I bought  here in London.  Bill had installed honey gates bought on-line from dancing bee apiaries.  Roy was suitably impressed...and envious!

Gorgeous honey buckets

Loading up the boxes at the truck.

The whole process of taking all the frames from the hives and clearing them of bees took us about 1 1/2 hours.  Roy headed home and we had a bit of lunch and then I went to Roy's house with buckets for honey and wax.  The next step in the process would be extracting the honey from each frame.  Roy has an extractor that can handle two frames at a time.  It is a hand turned extractor.  Roy is lucky to have an extra kitchen in which to do his honey work in.  It has a fridge, stove, lots of room and most importantly, a double sink to clean up in...honey is a sticky business.

Two frame extractor with bucket and strainers

Before we can extract the honey we must take the wax off of the cells.

Education moment (yawn):  Foraging bees bring nectar back to the hive and give it to house bees who change it from complex sugars to simple sugars by adding invertase to it.  The house bees put this changed substance into the wax cells.  The nectar is about 80% moisture when it arrives and needs to be ventilated to a moisture content of about 17-18% before it is considered honey.  The bees do this by whirring their wings...from outside the hive as well as inside it...that's where the buzzing comes from.  They are constantly ventilating to either warm up the hive or cool it down to 30 degrees.  Once the honey is the right moisture content, the house bees cap the cell with a thin layer of wax.  After a frame of honey has about 80% capped cells on it, it is ready to extract.  If a frame has too many uncapped cells in it, the honey will be too full of moisture and will ferment.  

Back to our extracting adventure!  The wax on the cells can be taken off in a number of ways.  Roy is a creative beekeeper and accidentally discovered that he could melt the wax with a heat gun.  It is extremely slick.  We took off the wax on one side each of two frames and put them into the extractor which is really a large centrifuge with a geared turning handle on top.

Melting the cappings

One side completely melted

Melted wax with honey and debris

Cappings from the cells

The frames go into two baskets in the extractor.  A few spins of the handle and the frames come out.  The other side is melted and back into the extractor it goes.  We then inspected the frames to see if all cells were emptied.  Any cells that were still capped we opened with the capping scratcher and then it all got spun again, once each side.  It is a time consuming  process.  The opening of the cells with the scratcher gives us some wax from each frame and we scraped that into a pot. Once all the frames were done, we ended up with a bunch of wax scrapings ready to melt.  Roy melted it down so that the wax would separate from the honey and the debris and I could take it home to melt it down once again.  I was excited about the beeswax since I know that the ladies in the wardrobe at work would be able to use it to strengthen their threads and also to keep the thread from tangling.  I am not particularly interested in crafts but the idea of the beeswax having a practical purpose is appealing to me.

Honey flowing from extractor through 2 strainers into bucket

72 lbs!!!

Frame going into extractor

We extracted 72 lbs of honey from the frames!  Each of my beautiful buckets was 1/2 full of incredible golden honey.  24 frames with 3 lbs of honey on each one...the math that I was told to expect was indeed correct.  After the lengthy clean up, I headed out with the precious honey and the empty frames.  I was at Roy's for about 3 1/2 hours including a little tour of his beeyard.  As soon as I got home I gave the empty frames back to the bees.  I know that they will set to work immediately to clean out the wax cells and repair any that I wrecked to make them totally pristine.  Then the foragers will start to fill them again with nectar.  There are still some weeks of summer left for honey production.  There may even be another harvest in September...eeek....as long as I leave about 60-80 lbs in the hive for over-wintering.


Of course, the first thing Bill and I did was taste our honey and then pull our first bottle of 100% pure honey made by urban bees.  It has a flavour of sage! Probably from that patch of sage in my garden I talked about earlier.  We are very proud and here are pictures of Bill pulling that first bottle and a picture of our beautiful first bottle of honey.

After the bottling I decided to melt the bit of wax that we collected.  I  put it into egg cups to make small chunks of beeswax for the wardrobe to use.  The wax smells sweet like honey and has a lovely warm yellow colour.  It's almost good enough to eat!


So that is the extracting adventure.  I learned so much and loved being with another beekeeper while I worked.   All in all, it was a lovely day and extremely fulfilling.  Now for the bottling, labeling and best of all, eating!  Yummmmm.