Thursday, January 31, 2013

2012-11-11: Veteran’s Day in the Bee Yard

I was up at my parents and did a quick check on the gals.  Some were dutifully serving Queen and Country and were out foraging.  Some were even coming back with pollen, which begs the question, what is blooming in November in Vermont?

2012-11-11 14.40.11 Bees with Pollen

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

2012-10-27: Feed the Weak

2012-10-27 16.36.22

I visited the bee yard with two objectives.  The first was to place strips of hardware cloth (a wire mesh) into the bottom entrances to keep mice from entering the hives and nesting over the winter.  The second was to add feeders to the nucs and Red who I thought needed some extra food to get through Winter.

The hardware cloth went in well.  Folding them in half along the long axis made a nice wedge shape that slid in snugly into the entrances and the bees still were able to exit even from the small nuc entrances.

2012-10-27 17.45.382012-10-27 17.51.27

Boardman feeders were added to each nuc and a tub feeder (which has a lid with a mesh covered hole about 1.5 inches in diameter through which the bees can drink syrup when the tub is inverted over the hole in the inner cover) was added to Red.  As a side note, it looks like the grease patties are being dispersed into the hives.

   2012-10-27 16.42.55 2012-10-27 16.45.48

2012-10-13: Greasing Up for Winter

2012-10-13 12.53.49 Bee Check

Two more weeks have passed and the last dose of Apigard needs to be removed from Green and Blue.  My mother had been feeding the bees some sugar syrup and some of the honey washed from the I also wanted to try a different mite treatment on all of the hives.  I made grease patties out of vegetable shortening, sugar, salt, a little honey and wintergreen oil.  The theory is that the grease will impair the ability of the mites to stick onto the bees and the wintergreen oil will further antagonize them.  The salt and honey are there to attract the bees.  I placed the grease patties (or just smeared the mixture) onto the top bars of the frames.  In theory the bees will be crawl over the patties and be greased up all through the winter.  The mites are unable to breed or hide in brood cells since there are no brood during the winter and thus are very vulnerable to anything that will knock them off of the bees.

Orange:  Maybe a little light in honey stores.  I added an entrance reduce to reduce the risk of robbing and to try to keep mice from going into the hive looking for a warm place to spend the winter.  I added an inner cover that had a notch in it to increase ventilation of moist air in the winter and to act as a second means of egress from the hive.  The later is useful if the snow gets high enough to block the bottom.  I also greased the top bars.

Purple:  Already had an notch in the inner cover.  Greased the top bars and shifted the brood boxes back so they no longer have a gap between them and the bottom board.

Green:  There were a few bees in the top bur comb that I brushed away before removing the inner cover and replacing it.  I also removed the dregs of the Apiguard and then greased the top bars.  Below is the burr comb filled inner cover and some of the grease on newspapers.

2012-10-13 13.20.26 Comb2012-10-13 13.24.21 Bee Check

DarkGreen:  Top deep looks full of honey!  So either the last blooms of the season and/or the extra feedings came through.  This is very good news as I was worried that this hive would not have enough reserves to get through the winter otherwise.  It already had a notched inner cover so I just greased the top bars.

2012-10-13 13.30.44 Bee Check

Nucs:  Both look light in honey.  I greased them.

2012-10-13 13.36.57 Bee Check

Blue:  Seemed more aggressive than normal.  I greased them.  I will need to get a notched inner cover on it after I have notched a few more.

Red and Yellow:  Top box looks to have an ok amount of honey.  Greased the top bars.  Both need notched inner covers.     

I removed the empty supers that I had on some of the hives and stacked them in the bee yard.  I didn’t place them directly into the barn for winter storage since I wanted them to get cold at night to discourage wax moths and there maybe less chance of one of the barn nice crawling in to make a nest.

2012-10-13 13.59.31 Bee Check

I placed the bur comb next to a feeder to have the bees rob it out.

2012-10-13 14.04.11 Bee Check

2012-09-23: Mid Meds

 

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15 days have passed since the last visit to the hives.  This means that the first round of Apistan is done and the second needs to be added.  You can see in these photos from Green and Blue that the Apistan gel is almost all gone at this point.

 2012-09-23 16.16.42 2012-09-23 16.21.02  

There is a queen excluder on top of the frames in Green.  It was left there to try to make sure that the queen does not get up into the burr comb that has been build into the inner cover since I want to remove it at some point so I can show it to my daughter’s daycare and then clean it up.  As you can see, the drones also can’t get past the excluder as they try to get back into the hive and are trapped on top of it.

2012-09-23 16.17.42

I am still worried that DarkGreen and the nucs might be light as frames pulled from them are not fully drawn out and filled with honey.

2012-09-23 16.24.41

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

2012-09-08: Second Bottling Day

My mentor had put aside a half bucket of honey from cleaning out the cappings tank.  It had not run through a double filter so it had more debris than the rest of the honey.  I had thought to keep it for feeding back to the bees, but I had realized that after some barters for maple syrup and yarn and brisk sales at work I might run out of honey sooner than I had thought.  So I decided to bottle up this honey.

It had been stored in the freezer so it had a toffee like consistency before I warmed it up.  I tried to pour some out onto a filter I had set up, but the whole bucket’s worth decided to come out along with a big lump of cold toffee like honey.  Oops.

 2012-09-08 11.20.57 2nd Bottling Day

2012-09-08 11.54.30 2nd Bottling Day    

I added removed some undrawn frames from the double nucs and added drawn comb with honey from the top box of blue to them  The rest of the frames from the top box of blue filled in the empty space in Red.  You can also see that the Green Nuc was bringing in a lot of pollen which suggests that they were still raising brood.

00000000000000000                    2012-09-08 12.29.52 2nd Bottling Day

I then added anti-mite treatment to Blue and Green which were the hives that were the oldest and most likely to have a mite problem, I have seen mites in Blue more often that I would had liked.  I then stopped up the top entrance in blue to keep in the fumes.

2012-09-08 12.44.23 2nd Bottling Day                  2012-09-08 13.06.15 2nd Bottling Day

2012-09-02: Bottling

The honey was left to settle in buckets over night.  The idea being that bubbles will rise to the top and debris to the bottom.  The former can be problematic since too many small bubbles in the bottles will cause unsightly foam at the top of the bottle.  I used a bucket with a ‘gate’, a spout of sorts at the bottom of the bucket than can be opened and closed, to dispense the honey into bottles.

 2012-09-02 14.40.22 Honey Bottling 2012-09-02 14.46.50 Honey Bottling 2012-09-02 14.47.05 Honey Bottling

As you can see, I was helped by my assistant.

I went for a walk with my mother in order to try to get my assistant to take a nap in her stroller.  We noticed a large patch of a bamboo like plant with white spikes of flowers that were covered in bees.  We were intrigued as to what this nectar source was.

 2012-09-02 15.57.21 Bottling Day 2012-09-02 15.57.37 Bottling Day

A google search for “bamboo like plant with white flower stalks” revealed to me what some of you might already have realized, it was a patch of Japanese Knotweed, one of the most invasive species in the world that has been causing problems throughout Vermont’s water ways.  But, for beekeepers it is supposed to make a very nice honey, so ‘yeah’?

And at the end of the day we had the fruits of a year’s work:

2012-09-02 18.31.21 Bottling Day