Showing posts with label capped honey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label capped honey. Show all posts
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Two Colors of Honey
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Serious Burr Comb
One of the first laws of beekeeping is this: Bees will do what they will do.
You just have to go along with it.
The bees in the Tardis filled up their lower hive body and then built honey comb between the tops of the frames and the lids. That can be a problem. If they get too full up, then the hive makes a new queen and they get ready to split the colony. The old queen takes a bunch of bees and they go elsewhere to start a new colony.
Beekeepers don't want that, so we watch carefully to make sure that the bees don't get honeybound and crowded. When they're almost full up, we add more supers [hive boxes] so that the bees have more room.
We have a lot of goldenrod around here and as long as we get rain, we can have a very nice autumn nectar flow, which means extra honey for the bees and for us. We added two supers of empty frames above the main hive body, crossed our fingers that the bees would prefer that to building between the layers and waited.
When we opened the hive a couple of weeks later, we found this.
And this.
Bees will do what they will do.
Even though the bees had no problem building their own comb on the foundationless frames in the lower chamber, they acted like they were totally confused with the supers.
We cut the burr comb out, explained to the bees what we wanted them to do, and then cut some old comb from a lower frame and put it in one of the upper frames. That worked. Next time we checked, they were building in the frames the way we wanted them, too.
So, my advice to new beeks is to make sure you have some sample comb in your supers so the bees get the hint. If your super frames are smaller than your brood frames, then you have a couple of options. We used the first option for the Tardis and it worked. We tried the second one in our other hive with good success.
1. You can do a simple cut out of a section of comb that's the size of your smaller frame from a bigger frame and rubber band it in place. Put it in your new super.
2. You can put a small frame at one end of the brood chamber below along side your bigger frames [second frame in from the very end] and let them fill that up. Then you put that frame into the new super. Note: They'll likely build burr comb on the bottom of the short frame, but that's easy to cut off and you can harvest it or rubber band it in another frame for them to keep using.
You just have to go along with it.
The bees in the Tardis filled up their lower hive body and then built honey comb between the tops of the frames and the lids. That can be a problem. If they get too full up, then the hive makes a new queen and they get ready to split the colony. The old queen takes a bunch of bees and they go elsewhere to start a new colony.
Beekeepers don't want that, so we watch carefully to make sure that the bees don't get honeybound and crowded. When they're almost full up, we add more supers [hive boxes] so that the bees have more room.
We have a lot of goldenrod around here and as long as we get rain, we can have a very nice autumn nectar flow, which means extra honey for the bees and for us. We added two supers of empty frames above the main hive body, crossed our fingers that the bees would prefer that to building between the layers and waited.
When we opened the hive a couple of weeks later, we found this.
And this.
Bees will do what they will do.
Even though the bees had no problem building their own comb on the foundationless frames in the lower chamber, they acted like they were totally confused with the supers.
We cut the burr comb out, explained to the bees what we wanted them to do, and then cut some old comb from a lower frame and put it in one of the upper frames. That worked. Next time we checked, they were building in the frames the way we wanted them, too.
So, my advice to new beeks is to make sure you have some sample comb in your supers so the bees get the hint. If your super frames are smaller than your brood frames, then you have a couple of options. We used the first option for the Tardis and it worked. We tried the second one in our other hive with good success.
1. You can do a simple cut out of a section of comb that's the size of your smaller frame from a bigger frame and rubber band it in place. Put it in your new super.
2. You can put a small frame at one end of the brood chamber below along side your bigger frames [second frame in from the very end] and let them fill that up. Then you put that frame into the new super. Note: They'll likely build burr comb on the bottom of the short frame, but that's easy to cut off and you can harvest it or rubber band it in another frame for them to keep using.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Honey
One of the pleasant consequences of keeping bees is the harvest of honey. Since this is our first year, we may not get much, but over the summer, as we've had to cut out burr comb and crooked comb, I've saved it. At one of the inspections early in July, we had to cut out a big piece of crooked honey comb and there was enough honey in that one section to fill this pint jar. 
This honey came from this comb. You can just see on the right where we cut out that section the week before. The white in the center section is the capped honey. The darker area around that is honey that is being collected and fanned down to the right consistency. The white edges around that is new comb that is just starting to be filled.
Honey facts:
- A pint jar holds 24 oz of honey, but only 16 oz of water. Honey is heavier.
- Honey is also sweeter than sugar because it's more condensed. Use only 2/3 - 3/4 as much honey as sugar when you substitute in a recipe.
- The bees cap the honey because it has less water in it than the air. The wax cappings keep the honey from absorbing humidity from the air.
- Abandoned comb will eventually fail and the honey will reabsorb humidity from the air, then ferment and leak all over everything. This is just one of the reasons that you should pay to have someone remove a hive from your home, and not just kill the bees. If there is any honey comb left in your walls, it will eventually leak and you'll have a real mess on your hands - and head.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Flower Lang Update
You might remember that we had a bit of trouble with the queen in our Flower Lang hive and we had to replace her.
We checked on things again on July 1st and were very pleased to see this frame of capped brood.
The brood is the stuff under the tan caps. This is larvae that has been sealed up to metamorphose from a grub into an adult. You can also see capped honey around the top edge of the frame. The laying pattern of the capped brood shows a great laying pattern. This queen is a good queen. [We never did see her during the inspection. Perhaps she hides as well as she lays.]
We also found this frame of honey.
The whitish stuff in the middle is capped honey. Honey has a lower water content than the air, so the bees cap it off to prevent it from pulling moisture out of the air. Honey's low water content is one of the things that makes it antibiotic and keeps it from spoiling. Cool, huh!
The two rubber bands on the frame on the right side were used to keep some broken comb in the frame. The bees built the broken stuff back into the frame and added on. When they're tired of the rubber bands, they'll chew them off.
This honey probably has a lot of our sugar water in it. This hive doesn't take nearly as much sugar water as the other one does, only a quart every 6-7 days, but it's still pretty likely that a lot of this honey came from the feeder and not the local flora. It's a small hive.
We checked on things again on July 1st and were very pleased to see this frame of capped brood.
We also found this frame of honey.
The whitish stuff in the middle is capped honey. Honey has a lower water content than the air, so the bees cap it off to prevent it from pulling moisture out of the air. Honey's low water content is one of the things that makes it antibiotic and keeps it from spoiling. Cool, huh!
The two rubber bands on the frame on the right side were used to keep some broken comb in the frame. The bees built the broken stuff back into the frame and added on. When they're tired of the rubber bands, they'll chew them off.
This honey probably has a lot of our sugar water in it. This hive doesn't take nearly as much sugar water as the other one does, only a quart every 6-7 days, but it's still pretty likely that a lot of this honey came from the feeder and not the local flora. It's a small hive.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Queen Bee
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| Queen getting ready to lay |
This is the queen in our Tardis hive. We call her Liz 10.
[Whovians get it.]
 |
| Queen moving across capped honey comb |
The Tardis is a horizontal hive body - as wide as two regular hive bodies side by side. You take the lid off and can see the entire brood chamber without lifting one box off the other. We LOVE horizontal hives and from now on, this is the way we're going to go.
We're feeding this hive 1 quart of sugar syrup every other day. They're sucking it dry. I hope that if it ever starts raining here again, that when the goldenrod blooms, this hive will actually make us a few frames of honey. We'll see.
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| Queen laying [in center of pic] , surrounded by attendants |
We have had no problems with the Tardis hive. The queen laid gangbusters from the beginning that that hive is constantly crowded at the entrance. They much prefer the lower entrance, even though they can get out under the telescoping top lid. I also opened a second lower entrance at the other end of the hive body but at the last inspection discovered a bumble bee in there robbing the honey, so I closed it off. The bees obviously weren't guarding it.
Thanks to Lily for the pics. She does the camera thing while Eric and I are working the hives. I point and tell her what to shoot and she shoots. It makes things much easier for us.
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