Oak Orchard Honey

I didn't have any fresh eggs to place in the trapout, so I contacted Jill at www. bloomfieldhoney .com/ ‎. She was great and sold me a laying queen so I was able to get things all set up. Here is the video of what was done. I'm going to go over and remove the cone from the tree to allow the new established hive to rob-out the old hive in the tree. I assume there is a lot of honey left behind and I want this new hive to build up enough stores to make it through winter. With only one hive really established back at our apiary, we won't have much honey to harvest this year. Hopefully, if we continue to grow we will be able to split some hives in the future.

Well, the winter went okay except we lost one of the two hives... the Washington. As you may know, I've decided to name the hives after the US presidents to help me learn them as I go - ha! Time to try a trapout from a beehive in a tree out in Bergen, NY. The owner is highly allergic to bee stings and would like to walk along his wooded path without worry. He is glad to have the bees taken to a new home. So, I set up the trapout and was ready to pull a frame of fresh eggs out of the Jefferson hive, but... no eggs. I knew the numbers had dropped after a predicted swarm, but I thought the old queen would still be doing her job. Not from what I saw. The whole brood box was empty and clean. Lots of bees though. The numbers looked strong. So, I called Jill at Bloomfield Honey Farm and she set me up with two laying survivor stock queens for $30 a piece. She will have them for us today in queen cages with attendants so I can go out tomorrow and get the trapout started as well as re...

The mid-summer harvest went well. Both hives seem to be building up at about the same rate. We were able to extract a medium super off each hive leaving four mediums for the bees. The last frame on each super had not been fully drawn out so I swapped them out for one of the empty frames on the supers I added. This is one of the reasons I will be switching over to eight frame mediums; those outside frames are hard to get drawn out. Also, in eight frame mediums the bees are less likely to eat themselves into a corner and not be able to move up into the honey stores.

I have been really enjoying Craig's podcast about organic hive methods. A couple of things have been repeated enough times in just a few episodes to make me understand their importance. 1. I need to stop with the large cell foundation for reasons made very clear by Craig and his guests 2. I need to switch over to 8 frame mediums for all my hive boxes, again for various reasons. 3. I need to re-listen to the pod casts and write down a few things that will make me a better keeper. The things I am hearing help me to better understand the nature of bees. I always felt that if I had to keep the bees alive by artificial or pharmacological methods I would need to just get out of the hobby. It sounds like I can have success without introducing foreign materials into the hives - that's perfect... Link:  http://somdbeekeeper.com

I put a pool in our backyard... It was a very dry start to the summer, and the bees were very happy to hang out at the pool with us. My family was not so cool with "swimming with the bees". So, I packed up the two hives and drove an hour away to our feral apple orchard on the south shore of Lake Ontario. The bees now have a two acre pond to draw all the water they need. The fall season will last longer there because the lake will moderate temperatures for a while. They will also get a later start because during spring the temperatures will stay significantly cooler than it will be just a few miles inland. This will be an interesting new start.

On the second day of my very first screen-cone trap-out I was called by the homeowner to tell me the hive boxes (two mediums) were overflowing with bees. He said they were hanging off the front entrance in a long beard. I didn't need a bunch of bees running out of space on a house only twenty feet from the busy sidewalk, so I hurried over and swapped it out for another two- medium hive. I'm trying to switch over to using only medium boxes for brood and honey supers to make trading out frames simpler. I cut down a deep that had ten frames of empty comb and made the whole thing into a medium. It all went pretty well except for all the wire I had to cut. The three inches of comb strips left over were tied to new frames for the a nuc. I left the second hive on the house for a week and a half. I had to get help to lower the hive to the ground. They had loaded it up with a lot of honey. It felt like sixty pounds or so. The picture shows the Washington hive on the left that was ...

So, I watched the "Trap-out King" video quite a few times to pick up on the finer points of the trap-out. I got myself some aluminum window screen and some wire to sew it together with, along with some fresh eggs - I hope. Man, those things are small. I kept thinking I saw them in the cell and then it looked like... a mirage - I just convinced myself that they were there after a while. The homeowner was kind enough to make this really nice hive stand that can be seen in the video. The hive boxes were full after only a day - bees hanging off the entrance, so I went back and placed another set of boxes just like in the video. I took the full hive back to my apiary and looked inside - it was packed with bees. I'll see if I can get another sizable colony out of that house.

I always like it when I see people giving a name to a hive. It really seems to make the hive more than just a bunch of hard-working bees. Also, it seems like it might help my memory of what's going on in the hive if I allow it to have an identity. So, out of a sense of pride and the desire to know stuff, I'm going to name my hives after the Presidents of the United States of America. This is an amazing group of people by all accounts. I'm an elementary school teacher, and so it is, I have the duty to know important stuff like this to further the education of our young people. The problem is, after I get to Madison my memory kind of fades out until I get to Eisenhower ; that's were I pick up the trail again until I make it to #44. I guess I know the order of fifteen of the presidents. Knowing this probably, and somewhat sadly, puts me in the neighborhood of 99th percentile of Americans. If-ever-I-can-get to forty-four hives, I'm gonna have a wealth of knowledge ab...

Bees all in one corner It appears that my hive #1 that I started out with two years ago as the strongest hive has succumbed to starvation. I have read that the bees can get separated from plenty of honey (in this case a full medium above them) by eating their way into a corner. This is what looks like happened. I was out in the bee yard in February after a long snap of cold weather and rapped on the side of the hive to hear the familiar sound of bees and heard nothing. I kind of knew then that it was not good. It was finally 50 degrees today, our warmest day since back in November - I think. I went out to see what had happened. While my other hive buzzed with activity, along with pollen coming in, I tore into hive number one. Bees in cells I cleaned out the hive and and wondered if it had been ventilated well enough because it looked very mildewed. I also saw in one corner of the brood box a small but concerning amount of mold growing on two of the frames. I would be very inte...

Another amazing Gigapan shot of bees at the elusive almond groves that I have only read about. Click image above to see full-screen image.

The amazing technology of Gigapan allows you to look closely at every cell of an unhealthy frame of comb. Click on the image to view the full screen version of the picture above. Other bee related images can be found by searching for honeybee in he search window at Gigapan,org .

Thinking about spring; I've always wondered why spring isn't capitalized. I'm not sure, but I imagine that the Victorians capitalized Spring. I'm going to start capitalizing Spring, and if I am confronted by a semanticist I will say that I am using it in the form of an apostrophe (which I just found out today from a poet friend, is a usage form when addressing inanimate object as if they are people) This seems to work for Spring. So, I'm waiting on Spring along with everybody else. I guess the beekeepers are ones who feel that it must come as soon as possible. I imagine most people in Upstate New York are tired of winter by now, but the beekeepers know that out in the bee yard there are dark boxes where time is of the essence.

Seems Aristotle lived from 384-322 B.C., and he is pretty much considered to be one of the greatest thinkers of the ancient world. He had a the cool job of educating the son of Philip, King of Macedon the famous Alexander.  Aristotle maintained a very close relationship with Alexander the Great and was in position to study much of what existed in Alexander’s Greek empire, along with the art of beekeeping. A collection of his writings on the subject can be found at http://www.beeclass.com/DTS/aristotle_on_bees.htm One interesting observation mentioned in Aristotle's writing is the use of Thyme: ...there is another disease, which is like a wildness in the bees, and causes a strong smell in the hives.  The bees should be fed on thyme, the white sort is better than the red.  They suffer the most when they work with materials affected with the rust.

 Aristotle's remarks on drones is interesting. I wonder if they teach this at business school today?: The drone is anoth...

Picture of the sun this morning. School is almost over for the year. On June 24 all the paperwork for the year has to be handed in by 11:00 a.m. and I can walk out the door. In the next couple weeks I have two trap-outs I'm going to try for the first time. I've read the blog posts, looked at pictures, and watched the videos. One of the colonies is in a tree that is up pretty high in a tree, so I'm going to get a travel-lift from my brother to reach that one. The other is in an inaccessible area of an old house that is the grandmother's home of a teacher I work with. I should get some interesting posts on my blog from those situations. Not too interesting - I hope. About two weeks ago the catalpa blossoms emerged, but I really haven't seen any real honeybee activity on any of the blossoms. June 5 was the first day that I noticed them, which seems earlier than last year. I think I posted the bloom date on the BeeSource forum last June after school ...

The end of the school year is coming up fast. For me this is always a mad dash to the finish. I've got projects that students have started that need to be wrapped-up, and bookkeeping that needs to be entered... I've got a picture of my new method of protecting my ankles with my bootlaces that works very well and makes me look a lot like the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. If I only had a brain... Last weekend I was picking up a piano that was a Mother's Day gift when my "A" hive swarmed. My wife was out in the backyard when it happened and she told me it was amazing. By the time I went out to see where they were - it was too late. They had left the area to parts unknown. Yesterday I went out to my $300 beekeeping shop (well-beaten travel trailer) got my tools ready and headed down the hill to see what had happened. Luckily for me Matt, a local beekeeper showed up just as I was struggling to light my smoker. After a lesson on how to make fire we walked the path ba...

It's really cool to finally get to hear Michael Bush speaking after reading so much from him on bushfarms.com . I thought I would give this video a place to live on my blog so I can come back and listen any time I like. I'm not sure when-and-if I will ever get to the point of raising my own queens, but life is an exciting journey and one never knows. (PowerPoint slide link) Today was very windy, so I never got a chance to look inside the hives to see how things are progressing. I did add medium supers about a week ago because both hives looked as though they have a lot of capped honey in the top medium and they were running out of room. When I got home one day this week I slid the cover back to see if they were building comb, and I could see that they were - that's always exciting. I've ordered six more mediums and frames from my friend Joe Caton at BeeManDirect.com along with some other things - like a bee brush. Ive been grabbing handfuls of grass to sweep the bees a...

So, 34 million years seems like a long time... It's pretty amazing to be working around insects that have been doing what they do for so long. From Wikipedia: Honey bees represent only a small fraction of the approximately 20,000 known species of bees. Some other types of related bees produce and store honey, but only members of the genus Apis are true honey bees. The first Apis bees appear in the fossil record at the Eocene-Oligocene (around 34 million years ago) boundary, in European deposits The origin of these prehistoric honey bees does not necessarily indicate that Europe is where the genus originated, only that it occurred there at that time. There are few known fossil deposits in the suspected region of honey bee origin, and fewer still have been thoroughly studied. There is only one fossil species documented from the New World, Apis nearctica , known from a single 14-million-year old specimen from Nevada. Honey bees represent only a small fraction of the approximately ...

Everywhere I look I see the beauty of an early spring in Upstate New York. The only exception is for the catalpa trees. As I understand it, the catalpa that grows here in this climate is the most northern variety of a tropical species. Also, the name catalpa was writen in error by an early botanist. The name originally being catawba after the Native American tribe Catawba. When the catalpas in this picture have leaves, I'll know warm weather is here to stay. It will be interesting to see if the blossoms are a big hit with the honey bees.

This is a test to see if I can upload movies from my iPhone. I was out at sundown and tried a 15 second movie of the evenings's activities. Now I just have to figure out why it's sideways...