My Home Among The Hills

We’ve had a fairly cold winter so, unlike most years, I have not been able to simply look outside and see if the bees are flying to know they are ok.  I prepared the bees this fall by treating them with various things to make sure they were healthy, I made sure they had plenty of honey and pollen to eat through the winter and then I crossed my fingers.

A few weeks ago, we had a warm day and I was able to check the 4 hives at my house.  To my dismay, 2 were dead-outs.  All of my hives at other locations are fine so I was surprised to find some at my house that were gone.  We live atop a hill in Charleston, WV and we get serious wind.  I have a windbreak around them but I suppose that the extreme drafts might have gotten to them.  That is the one characteristic that separates the hives at my house from the ones I have elsewhere.  It has been said that one cannot freeze bees…if they stay dry and not too windy.  If either problem exists, all bets are off so I figured I fell prey to the wind.

Heads down in the cells...telltale sign of starvation

I opened the hives and immediately knew that the wind was not to blame, but rather the cold…sort of.  You see, my bees didn’t freeze, but rather starved to death.  The cold makes bees cluster together.  As it gets especially cold with no warm days interspersed, the bees cannot break their cluster.  Without breaking cluster, they cannot move through the hive either.  Since their honey stores are spread throughout the hive, they need to be able to move around periodically to eat.

Some honey nearby where they were clustered

Plenty of honey one more frame over...

So, I opened 2 hives and saw the tell-tale signs…bees still clustered together,  many bees with their heads deep in honeycomb cells, and honey nearby, but not right where they died.

I hate for a colony to die, and when it is related to something I might have done wrong, it irritates me even more (fortunately, that doesn’t happen often anymore).  But when it’s due to nature, I guess I feel a little bit of relief.  It’s never fun, but it is a reality of beekeeping.  So, I just hope for warmer days here and there so the bees can move to food and also for a quick Spring!  Come on Spring!

Every year, on the hottest day in August, we harvest honey.  In WV, the honey season basically runs from Tax day (April 15) to Independence Day (July 4).  That’s a rule of thumb of course and some will disagree but this is easier for me to remember.  Anyhow, we always wait from July 4th until some day in August.  We don’t usually wait for the hottest day of the year on purpose, but it just seems to work out that way.

Hives are pretty typically built of 2 deep “brood boxes” which house the baby bees, pollen, and honey stores for the winter.  Most beekeepers use 2 deeps because the queen (which lays up to 2000 eggs per day) will remain busy in the space contained in 2 “deeps”.  Anyhow, around honey season, I add additional supers which are identical to the “deeps” except they are shallower.  Guess what they’re called…yup…shallows.  They are also called honey supers, shallow supers (actually, I use Illinois or medium supers which are between shallows and deeps in depth).  So, typically, the queen lays eggs around the bottom boxes and the workers store honey in the upper supers.  Some folks use a queen excluder to make sure the queen can’t get up into the supers to lay eggs.  I have never found it necessary and the one year I used an excluder, I got significantly less honey.  It’s a religous debate for some beekeepers…for me, I skip the excluder.

Ok, so we put supers on in April and wait.  Last Saturday was the hottest day we could find in August so we caught breakfast at Panera Bread and then started pulling honey supers off of the hives around 9am.  Now, as you might imagine, the bees are not thrilled about some white-suited beast taking the roof off of their house and removing their food.  I always joke that if I didn’t harvest honey, they wouldn’t feel appreciated or needed though.  Some folks jerk the entire super off of the hive (which can weigh 40+ pounds) and try to manage the sticky honey, the weight and the angry bees.

For me, I prefer to remove individual frames from the supers and shake the bees off back into the hive.  I don’t use a smoker because I would feel terrible if my bees ended up with a smoker’s cough.  I have found that I don’t need smoke and my bees are more calm for it.  Anyhow, I remove frames, shake the bees off and carry them to house where my lovely and brave wife accepts the bee-less (usually) frames.   This method would be completely unmanageable for a larger scale beekeeper but I am able to manage 10 hives this way.

Once all of the honey is off, we load the frames/supers from the house into the van (very quickly so the bees don’t reacquanited with the liquid gold).  We removed honey from my house and my in-laws’ house and then headed to Emily’s grandparents’ house where we removed the remaining honey and began the extraction.

Honey extraction is pretty basic…we make sure 80% of the honey cells are capped.  Honeycomb holds the liquid as it makes its transformation from nectar to honey.  The bees add enzymes and other magical stuff and then remove the excess moisture from the honey (by fanning it with their wings).  Once the honey gets below 18% or so moisture, they put a wax cap across the top of the honey comb to keep dirt ad additional moisture from getting back into the completed honey.  So, we make sure that the majority of the honey is “ready” as deemed by the bees.  I test the honey on my own for moisture content using a refractometer, just to be sure.  Honey that is too moist can ferment and that would be a waste.

So, once we cut the cappings off of the comb, we put them into my extractor which spins the frames around.  The spinning slings the honey out of the honeycomb cells on to the sidewalls of the extractor.  We open a drain at the bottom of the extractor and run it through a coarse filter and into jars.  We then add a lid, and we’re done.  The honey goes through no other processing.  As long as the lid is kept on so no moisture can get into the honey, it will not go bad.

So, that’s all for harvesting honey.  We worked until around 6 pm.  Emily’s parents and grandparents did a tremendous amount of work on the harvest and it would be almost impossible to do this work without them.  I appreciate their help tremendously.  We collected approximately 176 pounds this season so I am pretty pleased.  I’ll write again on how we clean up the “wet” supers once we remove the bulk of the honey.  That’s an entirely different adventure!

By the way, you can check out a few previous harvests here.

Next Monday, we are going to have a crew at our house doing pretty extensive foundation work.  Our home, like many in Charleston, is built on the side of a hill.  Eventually, gravity takes its toll and begins to slide those hillside houses down the hill.   So, in preparation for the work, I have to move 3 of my bee hives which are fairly close to where the work will be done.

Bees are highly visually oriented.  They note the location of their hive by the landmarks they identify as well as the very look of the entrance of the hive (no, believe me, I have asked my bees!)  Shortly after bees emerge, they do a few tasks but quickly begin to take orientation flights in front of the hive.  I can always tell when they start as there will be a big swarm of bees hovering in front of the entrance as if they are approaching the hive.  Each day, they do this for 15 or so minutes and then they are done for the day.

So, to move a hive is to totally mess up all of that training.  Most folks suggest that if you have to move bees, you move them several miles away so that the bees have nothing in the least bit familiar about which to orient.  Indeed, if you carry bees several miles away, they will reorient and find the new location of their hive when they take their first flight after the move.  Some people make the mistake of simply moving their bees a few feet to a few hundred feet and they find that the bees return to the original location (to which they are oriented) after their first flight out of the hive at its new location.  Of course, that presents a problem.  I don’t want to move my bees miles away for the 2-3 days while the workers do their thing on my foundation.  I also can’t just move the hive 100 feet to a safe location.

(If the video above doesn’t work on your machine, please try this one)

Luckily, I am the bee-whisperer.  I talked to my bees and they said, “well silly, just force us to reorient in our new location.”  I always move my bees at night (which is a dangerous proposition by itself).  The bees should all be in the hive at night.  That means there is more weight and more stinging insects.  It also turns out that bees know they aren’t supposed to be out at night so if I mess with them, they take offense.  In fact, generally the only things that disturb bees at night are bears.  They react to beekeepers in the dark as they would a bear…unpleasantly.  By moving them at night, however, I can be assured that all of the bees are in the hive and I won’t leave stragglers.  I simply move the bees to the new location and then stuff grass, straw, sticks, etc into their entrance.  When they come out the next day, the immediately know that something is different so they reorient to the new location.  Without the stuff jammed in their entrance, they apparently never notice the difference.  Anyhow, I have moved bees many time using this method and never had a problem with them returning to the old location.

Most things about bees are pretty straight forward if one takes time to talk with the bees (reading a few books doesn’t hurt either)…