Spring, Baby!

So, here it is!  Spring is upon us, and now that the dandelions are in full bloom (something that I'm happy about for the first time ever!), I'm ready to declare that we've successfully made it through the first winter with both hives intact.  I went out today and was able to conduct my first, thorough inspection of the year. 

I was able to get the entrance reducers off, to allow the bees to come in and out easier, as there was quite a traffic jam at the entrance.  It also will make it easier for the girls to get some of the debris off of the bottom board and out onto the ground.  You can see in the picture here, they are all set for some spring cleaning.
As you can see in the picture below, they have managed to get some things out of the hive.  That is the mass grave that is directly in front of the hive.  As the bees died over the winter, their sisters unceremoniously shoved them out the door, and onto the ground.

Moving on to somewhat happier news, the pollen is coming in like crazy!  We're going to refer back to the handy pollen chart that I used in several posts last year, and which can be found here.

The brownish yellow color of pollen they're loaded with in the first picture looks like it may be from a grey alder.  Hawthorne is also a possibility.  The light olive color that the bee on the right is bringing in the second picture is indicative of several different plants, but based on what we have around us, I'm guessing that it is from a crabapple tree.  However, it could also be from a Box Elder, an American Hazel, or an Oak tree.

I'll leave you with the good news that I have already added a honey super to one hive, and am very hopeful that we will experiences a large honey crop this year.  There are some exciting things coming up in the next few weeks when I get two more nucs and another package of bees, which will be going into a completely different type of hive.  Stay tuned, and enjoy this picture of a few bees coming in for a landing.

Like a Boss....

Well the weather is hovering right around 40 degrees today, so I was able to get out and do another "midwinter" check (even though it's the end of February, the weather hasn't decided to play along yet!)  Before I dive into how they're doing today, we're going to back up about 6 weeks to the last really warm snap we had when I was able to get out and check on them.

The girls were doing fairly well in both hives.  The weaker of the two hives going into the winter was (not surprisingly) not doing quite as well as the other, but they were still doing okay.  They had worked their way pretty high up in the second box, however, meaning that they were likely getting pretty low on stores of honey.  Knowing that we had the bulk of our winter weather yet to come, I decided to go ahead and feed them.

If you're not a beekeeper, you may be wondering what in the heck that is in the hive.  It's fondant.  If you're not a baker, you may have seen fondant on any one of the number of shows like "Cake Boss" where they make those ridiculously large cakes that look like dragons and sailboats and such.  It's a kind of icing that can be rolled out and used to cover cakes, and is made of a variety of different things depending on where you get it and what quality it is, but the primary ingredient here is powdered sugar.  The bees eat the fondant as their honey stores are depleted, helping to keep them alive through the winter months.

Fast forward back to the present, and the bees have been munching on it pretty well.  They weren't quite out of stores before, but I wanted to be proactive, knowing that it might be awhile before I could get back into the hives to check and feed them if necessary, so they haven't eaten a ton of the fondant. It's hard to see in the pictures, but on most of the pieces the edges have been rounded out and smoothed down as they work on it.  In the coming weeks, the fondant will disappear a bit more rapidly, but I'm hopeful that we are out of the worst of winter, and they'll will make it through.

These pictures only came from the hive that was the weaker of the two, though the strong hive is doing fine as well, and is a bit better off.  They still have a lot of capped honey, and likely won't need the little bit of fondant I gave them as an insurance policy.  As always, I like to leave you with a close up picture from the hive, and you'll find the ladies munching away at the fondant below, "Like a (Cake) Boss."

Sugar....Oh, Honey, Honey.

Special thanks to Bill Emenhiser (my father-in-law).  Without him there is NO way I could have made this.

While this may look like just your everyday, average trashcan, it's anything but. That's my honey extractor, and you know what that means!  HONEY!  Bill and I just finished making it last week, and none too soon, because today I got to go and try it out.

Now it's kind of difficult to see here, but on the top is (of course) the lid.  Inside, that mesh and steel bit you're looking at is a basket that holds the frames.  By attaching a drill to the shaft that comes out the top, you spin that basket around, and it flings the honey out of the combs and basket against the sidewalls of the can, and it drains down through a spigot into a 5 gallon bucket.  Or, at least that's what is supposed to happen...

Now, most of you will recognize that this drill looks a little short on the front end, and that's because after spinning the frames for a few minutes, the screw that holds the chuck on broke, and now my drill is in two pieces.  Unfortunately, my other drill doesn't have a large enough chuck to fit the shaft of the extractor, so now my extractor is out of commission.  This means there will be no more spinning honey out of the frames today.  But that doesn't mean I'm not getting that honey.  Just need to improvise, adapt and overcome.  And that's exactly what I did.

Again, it's a bit difficult to see here, but those frames have been stripped of their wax and honey.  Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of actually doing it, on account of my hands were covered in honey and there was no way I was going to touch the camera.  All I did, however, was take that yellow prybar on the left side of the box and scrape all of it off into several containers.  This made for one heck of a mess, with the wax and honey all mixed together.  Fortunately, there's a cure for that.

This five gallon bucket has a plastic strainer in the top, that filters out anything larger than 600 microns.  Into this the wax/honey mess was piled.  Since it was a bit chilly this morning, the honey was pretty thick and didn't want to run through the strainer very well, so I set it in the living room in the sun.  It warmed right up and drained through pretty well, leaving the wax and the occasional bee leg in the top.  Everything underneath that strainer is pure, beautiful and delicious honey.

This container holds 1 gallon, and you can see it's about 3/4 full.  That's all the "good" honey I got.  There's pretty close to the same amount of uncapped honey left that we probably won't be able to keep and eat.  The reason is that the bees don't cap (cover over the cells) the honey until it reaches a certain amount of moisture (usually less than 22%.), and honey with a higher moisture content is likely to ferment.  That's a long way of saying this higher moisture content honey (or "bad" honey) will probably get fed back to the bees in the next few days, so they can add it to their winter stores.

And there it is!  The first bear I've ever bottled, and hopefully, it's the first of many, many bears to come.  The honor of having the first bottle goes to Bill and Julee, because without Bill's help, I'd have had a heck of a time getting the hives built, and they wouldn't have turned out nearly as well.  He also gave me (okay, so it was actually a loan) a Beekeeping book 3 years ago, and that also helped to get me started.  And if not for Julee, I wouldn't have half the time I do to get these things done, because she watches Logan, a lot.  So a big thanks to the both of them, and I hope you guys enjoy the honey.  Unfortunately, there isn't a ton of honey to go around, so most people can't expect to get any from me this year.  Next year should hopefully go much better, and we should have a very large surplus to go around.  I'll leave you (as usual) with one final picture.  A couple of my girls wandered inside the house this afternoon to see what all the good smells were about, and here they are just hanging out on the back of my couch.

 

 

Say hello to my "little" friend.

The Back 40 is back!  I had to take a short hiatus after Logan stole our camera and hid it in his toybox for a few weeks, and then I was starting school, and I've just been busy.  I've got some Bee news coming up in the next couple of weeks, but for right now, we're going to hit the wildlife side of The Back 40.  So here we go.

My food plot is starting to come in and looks fantastic.  It's Michigan Ultimate Blend which combines turnips and clover, along with some other brassica type seeds.  My father-in-law Bill has had some great luck with it over the last few years, and I'm hoping I'll have the same, although it can take deer a while to figure out that the turnips are there under the ground if they haven't run into them before.  So, with any luck they'll hit it hard this year, and I'll be able to hammer a nice buck in a month or so.

These are what's left of the stalks of some Pokeberry bushes.  They grow about 8 feet tall, and they're incredibly tough and woody.  These ones (and all of them within 20-30 feet of here) have been stripped bare and broken by bucks using them to rub their velvet off.  These have been pretty well decimated, so while it may not be a large buck, I'm hoping there's at least a lot of deer working them over.

This is more of the same.  The deer have been working them pretty hard all along what was a pretty solid scrape line last year, so I'm hoping we'll see some more of the same this year.

 

To wrap things up, I've got a few picture off of trail cameras below.

 

 

 

To come clean, that last one isn't from my trail camera.  But I'm fairly certain I got at least a couple hearts to skip beats there.  Bazinga.

 

Newspaper in the hives, and THIEVES!

Well, an awful lot has happened since the last post, so I'm going to dive right in.

First off, as we discussed in "Ruthless Virgins!", Nucleus #1 failed to raise a queen, and Nucleus #2 was successful at doing so.  You'll be glad to learn that she was in fact successfully mated, and has been laying eggs like crazy that have begun hatching, and the population has just exploded.  About a week and a half ago, I combined the two Nucs back together into one hive, using the "newspaper method."

Using this method, I place the bees and frames from Nucleus #1 in the bottom box, and the bees and frames from Nuc #2 in the top box, seperated by a piece of newspaper.  As the bees would attempt to kill each other if they were just introduced into the same box together, they need to be kept apart for a few days.  The newspaper divider keeps them apart while they get accustomed to the smell and sound of the other bees.  When they chew their way through the newspaper after 2-3 days, they have become accustomed to each other and can live and work together in the same hive again. 

The left side is a picture taken the day I combined them, and on the right, you can see the girls have done exactly what they were supposed to do, and have opened up both "floors" of the hive.  Hopefully, they'll continue to do well, they won't supercede their queen again, and they will have time to build up and make it through the winter.  Moving on!

We had a slight issue at hive #1 (the recently combined hive,) when we went out to inspect.  We discovered these nasty buggers hanging around the entrance, along with about 6 of their buddies.  They are bald faced wasps, and they had seemingly discovered the sugar syrup being fed to hive #1, and were looking for a free meal.  They mostly crawled around the front of the hive, looking for an entrance that wasn't being guarded.  Before we left, I decided to squish them, to relieve my girls of the burden.  After the first 3 or so, the wasps got rather agitated (I wonder why?), and they began diving in towards the entrance and stinging my bees as they came back with their pollen. It took awhile, but I killed all but one, and that one eventually "bugged out."  Robbing attacks like this are not uncommon, but a strong hive has no trouble defending itself.  I put an entrance reducer back on, to minimize the space my girls will have to defend if the wasps come back. 

Enough about hive #1, let's talk about #2!

This beauty to my right is what you want to see in any honey super.  The entire frame is honey, it's beautifully capped, and that frame weighs probably 9-10 pounds, most of which is honey weight.  The bad news?  That particular frame is in the brood box, meaning it's not for me.  Everything in the brood chamber must be left for the bees so that they can make it through the winter.  The good news?  The girls are coming along rather well in the honey super, with most of the frames having at least a softball sized block of drawn comb that is full of uncapped honey.  With plenty of time left before the cold sets in, we may just get lucky and have a nice, long, late bloom that will net us at least a small honey crop this fall.  And, speaking of the honey,

Erin and I both sampled some honey direct from the hive, (although she declined to be photographed) and it is the absolute best honey I've ever had in my life.  So, I guess there were 8 small thieves, and two really big ones. :D

I've discovered that there are more things I want to cover each time I write than I really can, while still keeping it interesting.  So, I'm saving some pictures and topics each time that I'll share in a few posts over the winter, or during some slow times in the blog.  Until next time, enjoy this final picture of the girls lining up at the "watering hole," (some spilled honey on the inside of the inner cover.)

New deer blind and trail camera pictures you don't want to miss.

Here we go!  The first post, not about bees.  To the left is the skeleton of the deer blind I've been working on, and recently finished.  The nice platform underneath was there when we bought the house last year, and it's in a perfect place to sit in a funnel between two fields.  As soon as I saw the platform, I wanted to build a blind on it, but we didn't have quite enough time last year, so in true redneck fashion, I suffered through the first year by sticking a pop up blind on there and tying it down.  Dropping things down to the ground between the cracks in the floor got old, however, so this year I'm riding in style.

To the right is my completed deer blind, and I think it looks great.  The roof is steel roofing panels that the previous home owners were kind enough to leave in the garage for me (although I don't think they thought I'd use them for THIS!)  The side panels are just underlayment sheathing I painted up with cheapo green paint and camouflage spray paint, and I think it turned out pretty well.  The best view, however......

North

West

And East 

 out the windows.

We've also got some nice trail camera pictures from my last trip out to check cards.  The first (and most mundane) of the pictures is this guy here.  He's a nice 6 point right now, and it's tough to see in this picture, but he's got two little nubs up between his forks that look promising, and I think he's going to be a very respectable 8 point pretty soon.  This camera is about 35 yards out the east window of the blind up above.  Hopefully, he decides to hang around. 

Here's a beautiful Sandhill Crane that decided to walk about 5 feet in front of my trail camera, which I really appreciate.  This is just a cool picture to catch. And finally, the one we've all been waiting for, a picture of the elusive....

El Chupacabra!  The mysterious, frightening, possibly fictitious goat sucking critter believed to inhabit the southern United States, Central America, and various islands in the Carribean. 

Wait...maybe its just a coyote.  The jury is still out on this one.  Stay tuned,

Ruthless Virgins

So, let's get the bad news out of the way first.  Nuc 1 (at left) isn't doing great.  They seem to have failed to raise a queen from the limited queen cups they had remaining after the Small Hive Beetles had their way with the comb, and two frames had to be frozen as you will remember from Pests!.  At this point, the plan of action is likely to re-join Nuc 1 and Nuc 2 into a single hive.  At this juncture, it would probably be too late to get a viable nuc before winter.  While this is unfortunate, it's not entirely unforseen.  The hope now is just that we can get two good hives through the winter.

Now, on to some good news!  Nuc #2 (pictured at right) is doing just swimmingly.  They have hatched out a virgin queen, and that queen has taken her nuptial flight or flights.  These flights send queens into Drone Congregation Areas (or DCAs.)  In the DCA, drones from several colonies congregate together for the purpose of catching a virgin queen on her nuptial flights.  There is no known rhyme or reason to the choice of location for DCAs, but they typically occure anywhere from 50-130 feet in the air.  When the virgin queen flies through, she will attempt to avoid being caught and bred, allowing only the fastest, strongest, and longest enduring drones to breed with her. (A special nod to our old buddy Chuck Darwin!)  As many as 10-15 drones will mate with her, after which they will immediately plunge to their death.  The now mated queen will return to the hive, after which she can begin laying fertilized eggs that will grow to be worker bees. 

The picture at right shows two of the four queen cell husks in the nucleus.  We have talked several times about queen cells, but never about them hatching.  As you can see, these two cells appear to be ripped open from the side. Inside the queen cell, the larvae grow head down, and when they are ready to hatch, they chew a circle around the bottom of the cell, letting it drop open like a hinge.  So, how are these cells blown out the side, you ask?  After the virgin queen hatches, she moves around the hive destroying any other queen cells she can find, and engaging in a fight to the death with any other virgin queen she finds.  When destroying queen cells, the virgin will come at it from the side.  Unfortunately, the husk that contained our hatched queen had already been mostly torn apart by the bees, and the picture quality wasn't good enough to see what I've described above.  Our queen has now laid some eggs in the nuc, and only time will tell if she has been properly mated, or if she failed to do so and will only lay unfertilized eggs that will become drones, but I am hopeful that things will go well. 

Finally, I am glad to report that hive #1 is doing so well that they are ready for a honey super.  This smaller box sits on top of the two deep hive bodies and is for the sole purpose of collecting honey.  A queen excluder is placed in between the hive bodies and the honey super, and is a framework of holes that will allow workers to pass through, but keeps the larger queen out.  The workers will fill this extra area with honey that we will be able to harvest and keep, as the hive bodies hold enough honey to sustain the hive through the winter. 

I would also like to let all of my wonderful, loyal readers know that we will soon be coming into more posts about other "Back 40" topics, so it won't be ALL about bees.