Anyhow, the first place we stopped was over at the bee yard. We are registered with the Department of Agriculture so we are honest to goodness farmers…bee farmers! Most Januaries, the bees remain inside the hives and cluster together (and sort of vibrate) to keep warm. Honeybees do not hibernate. They are cold-blooded of course, so they slow down if they get too cold, but if the hive is healthy, they remain relatively warm inside the hive and do just fine.

The best color for a beehive? The color of cheap paint!

So, this January has been super warm as Januaries go so the bees were out when we visited the bee yard! Here is another interesting fact about bees…barring nosema (bee dysentery), bees will not poop inside the hive. So, winter can be a mighty long prospect if there are not nice days here and there. Nice days for a bee basically means above 43-45 degrees so they can leave the hive to…uh…catch up on some reading if you know what I mean.

Click above for a video of the bees flying. If that version won’t play on your machine, try this link

This year, the bees are feeling good! They can poop pretty regularly, they have a chance to break up their cluster now and then to move inside the hive for food, and they give me something to watch! So, my friends, please enjoy my January bees with me for a bit. They are always delightful and especially so in the wintertime!

Bears don't read very well...

Not much will really stop a hungry bear, but the official recommendation is to enclose all “country bees” in an electric fence.  When a bear attacks a hive, the bees always come out in great number to ward off the attack.  Bear fur is typically too thick to present a problem.  The only sensitive place on a bear is apparently their nose/mouth area.  While my electric fence is a little more “juiced” than a bee sting, most folks agree that a bear has to learn about the fence with their mouth or nose.  I’ll talk more about that another time, but it makes sense that an electric fence properly set up should deter all the Poohs out there.

So, you may be wondering how solar power can deliver enough juice to make a bear even notice it was there.  It turns out that the people who make electric fence controllers make a version that runs on DC (i.e. deep cycle batteries, not house current which is AC).  The controller I bought is designed to power up to 25 miles of fence.  All told, I have maybe 1000 feet of wire strung on a few poles, so the charger will deliver a good shot when it fires.  I won’t bore you with the calculations about the capacity of the battery but it is roughly the size of a car battery just for perspective (a car’s starter battery would not work here though…this application needs a long continuous  draw on the battery rather than the quick hit when you start a car)

The battery, fence controller, and charge controller

The instructions show that the fence will run for 2 weeks on a fully charged battery of the proper specs but I do not want to have to worry about whether the battery is still charged if I don’t make it out there for a few weeks.  Instead, I bought a solar panel and a charge controller to keep the battery full.

See? It's pointed south

I pointed my solar panel south and angled it to the optimal angle to get direct sun.  Output wires from the panel go into the charge controller which regulates the power going into the battery.  The charge controller makes sure the power is the proper voltage and that the battery does not get over or under charged. The charge controller also has a “load” connection so I connected the fence controller to that connection and we’re off and running!  All of the charging/controlling/shocky-shocky stuff is inside a beehive surrounded by my other beehives as a sort of a theft deterrent.

Oh, by the way, without thinking I tried to use a regular household switch at the gate to turn the power on and off.  Of course, the fence controller pushes somewhere around 10,000 volts which didn’t even slow down for the switch rated for household current of 110 volts.  If you want a switch, make sure you get one rated properly…same with any wire you may need to use (I only used fencing wire which handles the charge nicely)

So, I hope some of that makes sense.  So far it is alive and well.  Let me know if you want more details…

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it?  As you might have guessed, it was anything but.  Of course, any test of one’s mettle always makes for a good story if nothing else.  To ease the move, I decided we would mostly enclose the bees with screen and other stuff the night before.  To enclose the bees the morning of the move would only stir them up and make the process miserable.  Each hive got the screen treatment except for a small access ares for the bees to come and go.  The plan was to screen that final access point, throw the bees in a truck and go.

My father-in-law and I started before sunrise to carry the bees from his back hillside to the truck.  So, we grabbed ahold of 150 or so pounds of bees+hive+honey and prepared to stumble down the hill, guided solely by the sweet glow of the…yeah, it was dark.  We tried to carry a heavy bunch of bees down a hillside in the dark.  FAIL.  Oh don’t get me wrong, gravity works and we got the bees down the hill and into the truck but it wasn’t fun.  Luckily, the first one took us so long that it was daylight before we got to the next ones and they all went pretty smoothly.

We finished the electric fence of doom a week or so ago so hopefully any bears, raccoons, or bee-lovin’ dinosaurs will find that my bees are not on the menu.  I still have 4 more hives to move but it was such a relief to get the first batch moved to their new address in the country!

When we process honey, we uncap the honeycomb on the frames, place it in the extractor, run the extracted honey through a kitchen strainer to remove cappings and pour it into a bottle.  That is the extent of our processing.  Besides making a more pleasant looking honey, we run it through the strainer to harvest the wax cappings in particular.  So, I collect the wax cappings from when I use the knife to uncap the comb as well as the little bits of cappings that come out in extraction and let them drain (as both are covered in/full of honey still).  The bees are given access afterwards and they complete the bulk of the clean-up for me.

After the bees have their time, the cappings get thrown into my solar wax melter.  It’s basically a black wooden box with a baking pan and a bread pan inside, covered by a sheet of plexiglas.  The box rests at an incline so it faces the sun properly.  The baking pan has 3-4 small holes drilled in one edge at the bottom of the incline, and the bread pan sits under those holes.  As the sun passes through the plexiglas,  it heats everything inside like crazy, just like any greenhouse would.

The honey begins to melt and runs down through the small holes into the bread pan.  Any bee parts or other detritus are too big to flow through the holes.  Honey sometimes flows with the wax but the melted wax floats on the honey very nicely.  After everything cools, the wax hardens and comes out very clean.  I pull the wax out, feed any honey to the bees and marvel at how awesome the wax looks.  And let me tell you, the smell is incredible!

So, once the honey is cleaned (and yes, truthfully, it sometimes takes a few runs), it can be used for anything where wax is needed.  Usually, people make candles but folks also use it in soap, for quilting and woodworking (as a lubricant) and for handlebar moustaches!  Honey is a major crop from the bees, but wax is also significant and just plain cool.  And what better wax to process honey than with the help of the same sun that allowed the bees to make it in the first place!

 

I have previously sworn off smoking the bees and the smoke/no-smoke argument is a religious debate amongst beekeepers.  Personally, smoking bees leaves me with a bad cough and I can never find rolling papers anyhow.  Um, no, actually, smoking bees with a smoker is what I mean.  After last year’s episode, I decided that for the harvest, I would return to using smoke.  As much as I hate to admit it, I am certain that the smoker made our harvest easier.  For most interactions with the bees, I still do not think that using a smoker is necessary, but harvesting is not a typical interaction.

Brood (aka baby bees) on the left, honey on the right.  Don’t confuse them on harvest day!

So, we pulled off all of the honey from the hives and promptly headed off to a soccer-palooza in the heat of the day.  It was fantastic to…uh…have a break in the middle of honey harvest.  After 4 or so hours of  ball kicking, we returned to the honey-house and worked until every drop of honey was extracted, bottled and/or licked from our sticky (but exceedingly clean) fingers.

Click: Honey Flow Video                             Click:  Bees Cleaning Honey Supers

It’s great having bees.  We don’t pay for honey any more, but I am not sure you could say honey is free.  We definitely take our licks and they seem to be free though.  My back is sore and my arms are tired.  All told, we harvested around 150 pounds of honey which is much less than I expected or hoped for but it’s better than none!

Of course, the title to this post is a nod to the awesome Dire Straits Song linked here!  Nothing at all to do with bees unfortunately…

More info about my bees and beekeeping

Aren’t these daisies pretty?   They are everywhere in the hay field…

Our new place is outside of Charleston in the country so, of course, there is a potential for bears to be around.  If you remember your Winnie the Pooh, bears tend to like honey.  A determined bear cannot really be stopped, but a good electric fence will dissuade all but the most determined bears from messing with the bee hives.  So, the beginning of our bee farm has to be a good electric fence.

We found a nice sunny spot on the property away from where we plan to do most of our other messing around.  Emily, the kids and I laid out what is to become our first bee yard at the new place.  We set 4 corner posts in concrete.  Being thrifty as I am, we decided to hand dig the fence post holes.  When I put our fence in for the dog, I ran into all sorts of roots and rocks but the digging at the bee yard was easy…apart from the fact that we had to dig 3 foot deep holes.  It was warm and humid so we took turns digging.  Abigail and Isaac both wanted to help so I was happy to oblige…and they earned their supper for sure!  Really, the kids were great and a big help.  Let’s hope they will help with the bees too!

So, we will let the posts set up this week and add the rest of the supports, posts, wire, etc next weekend if all goes well.  After digging the holes, we are committed so the bee farm is officially underway!  Who knew a few fence posts would make me so excited!?!

Stay tuned tomorrow for a funny story about our posts!

As soon as we pulled in, a crowd gathered and watched us do our normal routine of surveying the swarm.  It wasn’t the biggest swarm I had ever seen but the manager had picked out the fact that it was a big swarm.  It was in the very top of a cedar tree.  Cedar trees are sort of flimsy at the top.  Unlike an oak or maple, the cedar doesn’t really have big branches against which one can lean a ladder.  It has been my foolish tendency to just go for it when it comes to swarms.  I just threw the ladder up against the green of the tree and climbed my way up.  I always carry loppers (is that a local term or what they are called?  Long handled tree pruners, anyhow) to cut branches.  The funny thing is that when you cut a swarm out of a tree, you need to hold onto the branch with the bees on it.  Of course, it also takes two hands to run the loppers.  I learned the first time I did this that I can hold onto the swarm with one hand and brace one handle of the pruners against my neck.  I use my other hand to close the loppers and cut the branch.  Now let me tell you, doing that leaning into the greenery at the top of this flimsy tree with a swarm of bees was interesting!

marching into the hive...

So the crowd continued to watch as the three of us did our thing.  We transferred the bees from the branch to the hive I brought along.  I gave the branch a good shake and the bees mostly fell into the box, but some fell onto the sheet I had under the box (another lesson I learned…put down a sheet first.  It looks more impressive and help me keep better track of the bees as they walk into the hive).  In a few minutes, it was clear I had the queen as the bees on the sheet and from the tree ended up working their way right into the hive.  We packaged up the hive and hauled it off in the van (much to the dismay/excitement of our audience).  I really like the “performer” part of catching swarms.  Hauling bees in the van is sort of the grand finale!

safe as can be!

Two things sort of struck me about this capture.  First, people were amazed that I let Abigail be so close to the swarm.  She was a great helper and loved every second.  The funny thing is, she had on a full bee suit so was at lower risk than the people around us who were concerned for her safety.  Silly people!  On the way home, she asked me over and over, “Why were those people looking at us?”  I explained that people were surprised at a kid working with bees, and even more so a girl kid working with bees.  I told her they were probably seeing a swarm of bees for the first time ever, and so on.  She talked about it all night long.  I think she was sort of proud more than anything.  I am still smiling about it…

fascinated!

The second striking thing was a man who walked up as we were doing our thing.  It was clear he was drunk.  He walked right up to us and began to talk to us far closer to the bees than I really liked but he was so curious about the whole deal.  He ended up sitting right beside our area and asked all sorts of questions.  He asked about the queen and I said she was bigger than the rest.  He said, “Bees have three parts, right?  The abdomen, thorax and head, right?”  He must have sensed my surprise because, with a smile on his face, he added, “I may be homeless but I’m not stupid.”  ”No sir, you are not.”  That brief conversation really turned my prejudice on its head.  I shook his hand (which I think surprised him) and we parted ways.  I think we both ended up with a pretty cool story to tell, though they are undoubtedly quite different.

Anyhow, I had a really great time catching this swarm.  The audience was fun, having my family along was great, and the homeless man was sort of good to remind me to listen to people before deciding that I know their circumstances.  Bees always teach me something…

Here are some more of my bee adventures and here are pictures of many of the swarms I have captured.

My helper

Most queens are egg-laying machines, capable of laying up to 2000 eggs per day.  When a hive gets too full of bees, spring fever hits and the colony makes preparation to swarm.  Swarming is a natural reaction to over-crowding and is the typical way the species propagates.  The old queen and a bunch of workers (half give or take) will leave the hive and find a new location.  Prior to leaving, the workers make several queen cells (they feed fertilized eggs/larvae the proper amount of royal jelly and the larvae will turn into a queen) so the remaining colony will still have a queen after the swarm leaves.

Lots of worker brood in the pupal stage...changing from larvae into bee. The flat cardboard-colored covering gives it away

Note the white larvae. Once the eggs hatch, the resulting larvae eat and eat and grow into pretty large "worms". They eventually are capped over (see above picture) and pupate. This stage is the conversion from "worm" into bee.

An observant beekeeper will watch for the Spring build-up and may consider splitting a colony that grows too big.  Swarms are a lot of fun to watch and to catch, but a beekeeper runs the risk of irritating his neighbors or losing the colony to the wilds.  I prefer to split a colony before it gets the urge to swarm so I can retain all of my bees.  So, last night I split a few of my “booming” colonies.  I simply take 3-5 frames with a mixture of bees, brood, eggs, pollen and honey and move them to a different hive box.  I make sure to leave the queen in the original location.  The original colony will remain strong as the queen finds she has lots of room to lay more eggs (in the empty frames I put in place of the ones I removed) and the colony will make lots of honey.

Notice the different bands...the outer bad has a somewhat wet looking yellow cap over the honeycomb. That is capped honey. Inside of that is a yellow paste down inside the cells. That is stored pollen. Inside of that band is more capped brood. The "nest" always has these bands of honey, pollen and brood.

The new colony will feed royal jelly to a number of eggs (in essence, making their own little swarm condition without actually flying off) and end up with a queen in 3 weeks (if all goes well).  The split probably won’t make honey this season as they have to hatch a queen and wait for her to get to full egg-laying capacity, but they should be strong going into the Fall.

Lots of pollen stored by the hive. This is protein for the bees and essential for raising new bees

I was able to find a few queen cells in the original hives so I took them and put them in the splits so I know there is a queen already pretty far along in the development process.  These splits have an even better chance of having a good queen and growing rapidly since they won’t suffer the 3 week delay to make a new queen from scratch.

Too bad it is blurry but this is one of the queen cells I found...a new queen in the making!

I make splits every year and have great luck at it.  I will probably re-queen these splits later this season or maybe next spring as I want to maintain genetic diversity, but in the short term, I now have more colonies than I did 2 days ago and I will almost assuredly make more honey than I otherwise would have made.  Honeybees are so cool!

Some beekeepers find it necessary to add pollen patties about this time of year to prime the queen for early egg production.  Of course, early eggs mean early bees which usually makes for a strong colony when the honey flow begins in a few weeks.  With so many maples so close, we do not need to put pollen into the hives.  I have been into the hives this time of year and sometimes there is so much pollen that I worry the queen won’t have room to lay.

Look closely at all of these pics…the yellow stuff on the bees’ back legs is pollen!

Anyhow, the bees were out and doing their thing and I, as always, decided to hang out near the hives and stick my nose into the doorways so I could smell the smells of the hive.  Unlike a few weeks ago, I managed to avoid being stung.  I love summer plenty but I think I might just like this time of year more than any other time.  This is the time of year when stuff starts to come alive again…including me!

I thought the pics were especially nice so I hope you enjoy my bees (from afar) as much as I do!

Bee poop

So, there I was watching Emily work, just minding my own business when a bee reached out, butt first, and stung me right in the eyelid.  She stuck there for a few seconds, buzzing and trying to fly away.  Though it would have made for a cool picture, having a bee attached to my eye, my first reaction was to get her off before any more venom got injected.  As you might guess, a sting in the eyelid swells up pretty quickly.  I guess I have developed a bit of an immunity because my eye did not swell like it did the first few times I was stung in the eyelid (yes, it’s happened many times).  Still, I looked a bit freaky for a few hours.

A little puffy under my eye

Swelling is spreading out...ugly pic though

Well, spring is my favorite season so a little taste of it makes my day.  Seeing the kids all muddy and the wife washing the cars…it just feels right.  If only my bees had a better sense of humor about my sticking my nose in their business.  Maybe this spring I will try to train them better…I’ll keep my eye on that…