The girls were in a good mood when we opened the box in spite of the continued ant infestation and the presence of a few small hive beetles.  We pulled out some frames from the top super and found them about split – half capped honey, half uncapped.

We picked three frames that were fully capped and put them aside for harvesting.  We replaced the three frames with empty frame of foundation.

We moved down a bit into the second super and it looked very similar to the one above with one exception – one frame appeared to contain brood on one side and honey on the other.  The capped cells may be drones as they were slightly raised.

I have no clue as to why the queen would wander up this far, but it was slightly concerning, so we moved that super over and checked the brood chamber.  The top box in the brood chamber was as to be expected.  The brood patterns were fantastic – her royal majesty is filling up almost every cell on each frame.  We didn’t see anything out of the ordinary at all.

For kicks, we moved that box and pulled out a few frames in the bottom chamber.  Well, to my surprise, there are frames that haven’t even been drawn out yet!

I’m a bit confused by this and not quite sure how to handle it.  Maybe we added extra boxes to soon?  I suggested to Wayne that she may be working in the second box and feeling full, so she moved up?  Just in case, we grabbed three empty frames from the bottom box and switched them out with full frames from the second brood box.  I’m hoping the switch will encourage them to fill out the empty frames and give our fertile queen plenty of laying room.

We closed up quickly. The girls were patient, but not that patient and they were beginning to ping off our hoods.  We brushed the bees off the honey frames the best we could and carried them onto the deck.  We double checked each frame and found a few wayward bees before carrying the frames inside.

Wayne took a nap while I ventured into honey harvesting again.  It was the same process we described in this post; however, I was distressed to find out that hooked wire foundation is much more difficult to get off a frame.  Following Wayne’s suggestion, I ended up cutting the comb off the frame and leaving the wires intact.

I paid more attention this time and noticed that we again had two very different looking combs.  One was a deep dark color while the other was a light amber color.  I was still unsure as to whether that was two different types of honey, or just darker comb, so I endeavored to harvest them separately.

Here’s the end result:

You can see that one honey looks slightly lighter than the other, but definitely not the color difference it appeared to be when we harvested it.  The comb, on the other hand, is remarkably different.  I plan to put the wax in two batches out in the solar wax melter next week when the rain here is supposed to stop and the sun returns.  I’ll try to take pictures after it has been cleaned and melted down to show how wildly different the colors are.

In the process of moving the frames inside, we had spilled a small amount of honey on the deck railing  (lesson learned: use a tupperware container or something with a bottom when carrying frames of honey).  The sugary sweetness was drawing quite a crowd of bees.

Since the bees had already invaded our deck, I added a bucket with the empty frames (post harvest) for the bees to clean up as well.  At some point in the process Sparky decided that he was rather fond of honey and didn’t let the large quantity of bees stop him from getting his share.  He literally stood and licked the frames clean around the bees.

He was out there for a good while before I heard a yelp and he came flying through the dog door.  Apparently one (or many) of the bees decided they had shared enough.

The harvest result this time?  16 8.5-ounce hex jars or 8.5 pounds of loveliness.  I imagine this will be the last time we harvest this year, so we plan to enjoy it.

Happy Sunday and enjoy your week!

Here are the hives when we arrived.  All appears well from the exterior.

The blue hive (on the right) had quite a few bees hanging around on the entrance.

On the other hand, the brown hive (on the left) didn’t appear as populated.

We started by opening the blue hive.  We removed the top super being more interested in the state of the brood box on the bottom.

After pulling out a couple frames, it became clear that the hive is doing well.  The brood frames had good, consistent patterns.

This frame clearly shows the pattern you normally expect.  It’s a football-shaped brood pattern surrounded on the exterior by pollen and honey.   The frame does appear a bit spotty (see the empty ring around the middle brood?), but the queen could have been working on it as we pulled it out.

Once satisfied with the state of the brood box we moved on to the super Wayne added when he dropped the hive off.  We immediately found a problem:

This is what the frame should have looked like:

So, we’ve once again proved that unwired foundation is not an option for North Carolina.  Even in Morganton it is just too hot for the foundation to remain upright long enough for the bees to work on it.   We pulled out any foundation that was laying down and left the bees empty frames.  In the meantime, I’ve ordered more wired foundation and when it arrives we’ll switch out the frames that they haven’t touched.  I’m hoping this doesn’t mean they’ll miss the bulk of the honey flow.  They need to store as much as possible in order to survive the winter.

We closed up the blue hive and moved onto the brown hive.  As soon as Wayne lifted the top we we both recoiled.  Ugh.  Ants galore.  It was worse than the infestation we found at the house hive.  We had to take a brief interlude while Wayne pulled off his bee suit and removed the hundreds of ants who felt like his veil was an appropriate place for them to choose as their new home.

You can see how the bees have started to close off the screen opening to keep the ants from entering the hive.

For lack of a better option, we doused the top cover with water and then rubbed it on the grass to relocate the ants.

Like before, we pulled off the top super and opened the brood box.  Because of the slight delay due to the ants, I pulled frames and Wayne took pictures.   I was surprised to see that they are storing honey in the brood chamber.  This frame was toward the end, so I wasn’t too terribly disturbed by it.

I then pulled out a frame toward the middle hoping to see brood only and I wasn’t disappointed.  To my surprise, I also caught a glimpse of her majesty!  She is bright and beautiful.  You can see her below just below and to the left of my hive tool (click on the picture for larger view).

Here’s a slightly closer shot as she scooted around the frame trying to get out of the light.

After we got a few photos of her, I carefully put back that frame, anxious to get it in place without hurting her.  I did pull out another frame or two just to take a look.

Slightly strange – it appears that the queen is laying brood faster than the bees are able to draw out the frames.  As you can see here, the right side of the frame is just foundation and the remainder is filled.

The super in this hive appeared quite similar to the other with quite a bit of melting wax.  Neither have stored much honey or pollen probably due to lack of room.  We’ll have to remedy that as soon as the wired foundation arrives.

We added an extra super to each box all the same.  If they decide to get ahead of themselves and start hanging foundation from the empty frames they will have lots of room in which to do it.
Before we left Wayne took a minute and used his scythe to try to mow a bit around the hives.  This will hopefully prevent additional ant problems.

Over the next week or so we plan to lay down a weed barrier and either mulch or gravel to keep the grass from taking over the hives.   We were very glad to see the girls are doing well.

I’m finding it a bit hard to talk about and keep track of the hives since they have never been officially named.  I was considering choosing constellations and assigning one to each hive.  Any thoughts/comments are appreciated.

So, I knew we wouldn’t have the opportunity to harvest unless the bees were doing really, really well and the timing was just right.  As it turns out, the stars aligned this weekend and not only is the hive at the house doing tremendously well (in spite of the recent queen debacle), but we also had just enough time on Saturday to harvest!  It’s early enough in the summer that the girls should have plenty of time to rebuild their stocks and we may even have the opportunity to take another frame or two later in June….we’ll see.  As this was a new process for us, we took a ton of pictures that I wanted to share.

Here’s the hive before we started.  The box that we planned to harvest from is the second one from the top (slightly different color than the others).

Our first discovery upon opening the top was that we have a horrific ant problem.  We screen all our top covers, so the bees have been unable to come up and scare off the ants, and they’ve taken over.  We cleaned up the top cover, and Wayne trimmed down the Carolina Jasmine that’s beside the hive and appears to be giving the ants a clear path from the fence to the top of the hive.  We’ll likely need to trim it back again soon to prevent this from happening again.  The good news is that we so no evidence of them inside the hive.

Once we got into the second box, we pulled out the frame closest to the edge.  As you can see below, it has been drawn out and they are filling it with honey, but nothing has been capped and it was fairly light still.

On the other hand, the next frame over was filled and beautifully capped!

We also grabbed the frame right beside the one pictured above.  It was incredibly heavy!  Two frames seemed like a good enough start for our first go at this.

We played a game with the bee brush for a while.  I would knock off the bees, they would fly away, we’d go to put the frame in the bucket we brought along, and the bees would wander back….slightly frustrating.  We finally decided to take the bucket with a few bees in it a bit away from the hive to see if we could convince the girls to move on.  So, here’s what we had once we got up to the deck:

And here’s a picture of the second (really heavy) frame:

It should be noted that we don’t actually use full size frames or supers.  My back isn’t great to begin with, so we decided from the beginning to use 8 frame mediums instead of 10 frame deeps.  Much, much easier on me.

After battling the few remaining bees for the frames, we carried our bucket of loveliness inside where I had set up in advance for the honey harvest.  I had collected the tools a while ago based on the crush and strain video that Beekeeper Linda has on her site.   Everything I got was cheap – the container is a catering style pan from a flea market, the silicon mat, knife, potato masher, and spatula all came from HomeGoods.  We put a towel down on the counter to avoid stickiness everywhere.   I also had a bucket set up on the floor from Brushy Mountain that included three mesh strainers at the top and a honey gate at the bottom.  My guess is that I spent $50-60 in total on the equipment.  Not too bad when you compare is to the cost of a honey extractor!

Belle Terre’s version of the Crush and Strain Honey process:

Step one: Remove the honey from the frames.  (Ignore Wayne’s incredibly dirty shirt….he had just planted 200+ beans at the land).

Step Two: Hold the frames at the right angle so the cut honey falls into the pan.  Keep doing this until all the honey is in the pan.

As a side note: I was fascinated by the color difference between the two frames of honey.   The larger frame was incredibly dark and the smaller frame was much, much lighter.   I was trying to think what I’ve seen the bees visiting recently and all I can come up with on our property is the salvia and our lamb’s ear.  I’m not sure if one of those could have produced the dark honey?   That said, our bees spend quite a bit of time elsewhere, so there’s no telling what else they are favoring right now.

Step Three: Crush the comb in the pan

When this part of the process is done, you have something that resembles a thick honey soup.

Step Four: Pour the honey soup into the top of the bucket that contains the filters.  The spatula from earlier and a second person comes in handy at this point.  The pan is still rather heavy and someone needs to direct the honey into the bucket (we didn’t want to loose a drop of it!).  Toward the end we used the spatula to scrape all the excess honey off the pan and into the bucket.

Step Five: Let gravity push the honey through the filers and into the bottom of the pail for filtering.  The sun is a great help in this portion of the process.   We put a heavy metal dog on top of the bucket to keep our dogs from investigating.  We left the bucket out for an hour or so before bringing it back in to see what we could bottle.

Step Six: Bottle!  The honey gate was amazingly easy to use and allowed us to increase/decrease the flow of honey.   I had purchased these cute honey jars ages ago and we finally put them to good use.   Notice the small bowl I put under the gate.  I would highly suggest it.  I found that it helped to catch the extra drips of honey and at once point caught a good bit when I had stepped away without properly tightening the gate (oops).

We also had some small sample jars and poured quite a few of those as we have a long list of people with whom we would like to share our harvest.  Here was our first go.  We needed just enough honey to take to a party and to my parents, so we finished up these jars and put the bucket back outside to filter a bit more.

You can definitely see some air bubbles in the product.  My understanding is that those will rise to the top as the honey sits.

Here’s a picture of the comb when we were done.  It looks quite dry, but when you press on it, it seems to still contain a good bit of honey.  I’ve left it outside (covered of course) to see if we can get anything else from it.  When we’re done I plan to melt in in double boiler and then pour it through cheese cloth.  The beautiful filtered wax will be used to make lip balm and (hopefully) a salve.

Here’s a shot of some of our bounty bottled, labeled, and ready for giving.  Aren’t they cute?   As a side note, you can see our top bar hive in the background.  Still bee-less, but one day we plan to get that one up and running.

All told, we got 12 8-ounce jars and 12 1.5-ounce jars from two medium frames.  That’s over 7 pounds of honey!  Definitely a successful first harvest.

The place where we pick up the bees is pretty fascinating.  Our guess is that they probably have 30 hives or so and this is only one of two properties.  It turns out we couldn’t pick them up the girls earlier because they had swarmed and the colony had to be built back up before we relocated them.

Someone had closed up our hives for us last night so when Wayne arrived they were all ready to go.  We had been warned they were heavy and Wayne reports they were very right!  Into the car they went….

I suggested to Wayne that he might want to drive in his bee suit but he felt pretty comfortable without it.  I was on the phone with him and inquired about loose bees and he said it wasn’t a problem….paused…and said “let me call you back.”  Turns out one of two must have wandered out of the hive (or followed the hive into the car) and were waltzing around while Wayne was driving.  They apparently felt that there was no need to be alarmed though and took the drive in stride.

Wayne pulled onto our property, unloaded, set up the cinderblocks and posts (a bit rough right now since he had locked himself out of the shed and didn’t have any tools), and set up the hives.   I sent him with supers as it was recommended we add them immediately so they have room to grow.

So here they are all set up:

Wayne left the entrance reducers on so that we didn’t have large quantities of bees flying out and getting lost.  Before leaving Wayne reported that many bees were conducting orientation flights….adjusting I hope.

I plan to visit soon to change out the super on the right so that it matches (yep….can’t handle it like it is).  We’ll give them a week or so to get settled first and then we’ll plan a quick inspection.

Join me in welcoming the new girls to the Belle Terre family!

I started with a quick external inspection just to make sure everything appeared to be okay at first glance.  You can see tons of activity at the front of the hive.  We then removed all the supers and inspected a few frames from each starting from the bottom and working our way up.   We are quiet at the beginning (not much to say), but do start yapping part of the way through.  We like to talk to one another while we’re inspecting.  It makes for a better learning experience (for me at least).

A few notes:

1 – We didn’t mention it in the video, but you can see another queen cell on one of the brood frames.  I took a picture:

Since they just re-queened, I don’t understand the queen cells unless they were already feeling crowded again?  Maybe it’s left over from earlier when they re-queened?

2 – We did not see the queen.  That doesn’t worry me at all since they are many, many signs of her activity within the hive.

3 – Although I tried to zoom in, I’m not sure I showed the larvae well during the video.  Here’s a picture that’s quite a bit clearer.  If you click on it, you’ll be able to see various stages of uncapped brood.  As I mentioned, I’m still not complety sure I can pick out eggs, but I may try it the next (sunny) day we inspect.

4 – After adding the super, we opened the nuc.  If I had thought through it in advance, I would have borrowed a frame or two of brood and moved it into the nuc.  We would have needed to search diligently for the queen to make sure we didn’t move her and then allowed the bees to grow their own queen.  Since I didn’t have the forethought to plan, we instead took the frames of honey and very small number of bees from the nuc and moved it into the larger hive.   Basically, the split failed and we added it back into the main hive.  I left the empty nuc by the hive entrance to allow the left over bees to wander over at their leisure.  At some point we may attempt a split again.

So, here’s how we ended the day:

So, we’re back down to one hive again – at least temporarily.  We have two hives that should be ready for pickup any day now.

Wayne was home early from work and kindly opened the hive today.  It was my drop dead day.  My call another beekeeper in a panic looking for a queen day.  Low and behold, Wayne found larva galore.  The bees were much kinder  now that their queen has returned and is laying again.

Whew.  Big sigh of relief from me.  I swear, they are trying to teach me patience.  Unfortunately for them, it’s not working.  This weekend we’re planning a full hive inspection and I promise some photos/video.

Unfortunately, the large hive was the same.  The bees who are normally so gentle and friendly were actually flying up at us without significant provocation and inside we found this:

Honey and pollen, but no brood.

Since I couldn’t steal a brood frame to move into the nuc, we closed both boxes up and unsuited.  I started trying to figure out the dates in my head and played a lovely game of bee math.  Assuming my numbers are correct, here’s what I decided:

Queen piping – April 20th (I’m assuming that the queen had not yet emerged)

Emergence – 1 – 2 days later – April 2oth – 21st

Egg laying – 12-17 days – May 2nd – May 7th

That allows time for the maiden flight and for her to return and have a day or two to begin laying.  From what I read, we basically checked the large box too early.  Most beekeepers will wait at least 15 days after emergence to look for activity.   So, I’m not panicking.  Yet.

The nuc, on the other hand, is obviously queenless.  If a queen were to have returned, she should have started laying already.   We’ll likely add those bees back into the big hive the next time we open it up.

I’m regretting our lack of diligence in early spring.  Lesson learned.  Again.

The big hive, on the other hand, was quite exciting.  He heard piping!  So, we do have a queen….or at least two I guess.  If the weather is decent, we’ll be inspecting on Sunday and I’ll post some pictures.