We did not have enough honey to extract ourselves this year but we like to help Poppop extract his so we headed down to Hampstead. This post explains our extraction process.
First we collect all of the frames off of the hive. We have to minimize the bees left on the frames so that when we move inside we are not working around lots of bees. This is actually a difficult task. We use a spray that the bees don't care for to try to move them away and then we brush as many bees off as we can and place them in a wheel barrow with a towel on top. Then we move those boxes of frames of honey to the room where we extract. The room is my grandparent's workshop where they work on their various hobbies and it is has a cement floor with a drain. We cover the floor with newspaper so we can easily clean up from any honey spills.
Boxes of frames ready for extracting!
After we have gathered the frames we will extract from, we go frame by frame to cut off the wax cappings sealing off each honey comb. We use a hot metal knife and sometimes a metal toothed pick to do this.
A frame of capped honey comb
An electric metal knife and a metal pick help us get to the good stuff
Melting and cutting away the wax capping. See the cells that are still capped at the top? That's where the metal pick would be handy.
Then, we place each frame into a centrifuge and spin away! The honey comes flying out of the comb and onto the walls and bottom of a large plastic barrel. Then we strain that honey through cheesecloth and two metal strainers.
An above view of the centrifuge and straining bucket over a floor covered with newspaper for easy cleaning.
The last step is bottling the honey which we normally save for another day as sanitizing the bottles is a bit of a job all in itself. Poppop likes to add a fancy label to his jars if they're gifts for non-family members or if he intends to sell it.
Last year we gathered over 600 pounds but this year poor Poppop only got about 50. It's sadly been a tough year for bees. Hopefully we both have better luck next summer!
Anson and I went to the Science Cafe at the Museum of Natural Sciences last week to hear an NC State Professor of Entomology talk about bees. He gave a brief intro and then opened it up for Q&A. The session was fun and people asked a lot of great questions. I was surprised at the quality of the questions, actually, especially considering how diverse the crowd was.
After the session, I approached Dr. Tarpy to ask about the affect of sun or lack thereof on my hives. He said that it would be preferable to have morning sun but it is not imperative. Then he mentioned that a grad student of his is conducting a study about diseases of urbanized bees and requested I contact the student because of the location of my hives being downtown. The following day I did and the student was excited to have hives in Five Points to study. He asked if he could come by 3 times in 3 week intervals to take a sample of 60 bees each time from my hives. I declined to include the nuc in the study and offered the stronger hive. He came by this morning with a net and about 10 tubes for bee collection. He is only capturing foragers as the study includes some feral hives and he would not be able to collect anything but foragers from those hives.
After standing at the entrance with a net for 30 seconds, Holden would then swoop the net around attempting to contain as many additional bees as possible. Then he had to insert a tube into the net and try to get them all to go inside the tube. He did this until he had collected 60 bees which took almost an hour.
Attempting to capture all the bees in the net into a tube.
Tube of bees.
Hopefully by the fall he will have some analysis for me. He did keep a watchful eye for any disease-like activity and noticed a bee that carried out a dead larva from the hive. He was interested but not concerned about that being related to disease.
Dead larva we examined after noticing a bee carried it out of the hive and dropped it outside. There were a few others on the ground near it.
I'll keep ya posted about the results of the study once I get them back. It will be a long time though.
I lost both of the hives Poppop gave me last September. About a month ago we picked up two more: another one Poppop gave me and one was a nuc that I bought from Mr. Knox.
About to start another bee driving adventure! This one went much more smoothly!
A nuc is a 5 frame mini-hive that should include a mix of frames including brood of varying stages of maturity, honey stores, and pollen. All of the frames should have drawn comb and the queen should be less than a year old. Mr. Knox is is an 80 year old master beekeeper that I met at the Wake County Beekeepers Association and he has been keeping bees since he was like 13. Unfortunately, the nuc he sold me was weak as it had only 4 frames of drawn comb, and not enough bees. I knew that it should have 5 but I figured it wouldn't make much of a difference. Well, a month later and it's clear that it does make a difference. The hive is very weak, has hardly grown, has yet to finish drawing that 5th frame of comb, and has so few bees I'm worried I'll lose them again this winter.
The hive Poppop gave me is much stronger and already has 2 supers on it! Supers are the boxes on top of the larger boxes that are meant for brood and some honey stores for the bees. The supers are slightly smaller boxes and frames that the bees fill only with honey and no brood. We ensure that there is no brood in these boxes by excluding the queen from getting to them using what's called a queen excluder. This way, when we go to extract honey we are sure that we are not disturbing the queen or her brood.
This is a frame from the honey super. The cells are filled with delicious smelling honey. The white area are cells that have a sufficiently reduced moisture content and have been capped with wax by the bees to best preserve the honey.
The nuc is on the left and the hive from Poppop on the right. You can certainly tell which one is healthier!
That wire rack beneath this set of frames is the excluder as it is too narrow for the queen's larger body but is just right for worker bees to be able to slip through.
Both hives are weak really, but the one Poppop gave me is much happier than the other and hopefully will survive this winter for me! I have identified two major problems and only one is really solvable. The first problem is that the hives really need to be in a sunnier spot. I suspect that the reason these hives are under-active is because they are not getting enough direct sunlight. My book tells me that bees become "listless" in the shade which I do believe describes my poor bees but there's not much I can do about that living in the City of Oaks in an old neighborhood. The second problem I see is that I really need a mentor to come check my hives with me about once a month. I have asked the association for a mentor and also asked around at the club but so far have not had a lot of luck other than people willing to offer verbal advice. I will continue to pursue finding a mentor though! Also, I can lean on the support of a forum in the meantime.
Over the past month I also had the opportunity to learn a valuable lesson. Poppop told us when we started our adventure of becoming beekeepers that we need to keep all of our unused boxes enclosed with moth crystals.
We were mostly diligent about that until the week we picked up the new hives. See, you're supposed to air out the moth crystals for 24 hours before putting a new box on the hive. We figured the nuc would need a new box in a few days and set one out in the basement. Within the week we had wax moths. A little infestation is, according to Poppop, not the end of the world as the bees can clean and repair any damage. The wax moths eat through the comb and also make a disgusting webbing all over it. I noticed the problem but wasn't really sure what to do about it at the time because I wasn't sure when we'd need the box for the nuc. Well, I should have figured something out because now it's been down there for a month, is covered in webbing and moth larva and is dripping and crumbling wax to the point that it was too gross for me to get near. The frames were no longer salvageable and we had to throw them away. While the frames themselves are not expensive, the drawn comb is a big advantage to the bees so that they do not have to waste energy pulling new comb and can focus on making honey! So that you can also be repulsed, I took a picture of the frame covered in larva. I almost vomited just taking the picture. But I'm looking at it as a good thing because now I won't ever let our shed of unused boxes be without those crystals!
You can see where the moths have eaten through the comb
I'm really not sure why it is dripping wet like it's melting but it has left a puddle of wax on the basement floor. The larva is there in the middle but perhaps not close enough for you to get the willies. Take my word for it, it was nasty.
My next blog post will be a lot more fun as we help Poppop extract his honey. I may even get a jar or two of my own from my good hive! Now that would be awesome! I can't wait to taste it. And as one of my 12 valued readers perhaps you could join me!
In a single collecting trip, a worker will visit between 50 and 100 flowers. She will return to the hive carrying over half her weight in pollen and nectar. Sometimes when I watch the front of my hive the bees will be visibly weighed down from all of the pollen. Here is a photo (that I did not take) of a bee with a lot of pollen on her legs in what is called her "pollen basket"
A strong hive will have up to 100,000 bees in the summer. An average hive has more like 40,000-60,000 depending on the season, where 30,000 of those are working on tasks inside the hive and the other 30,000 are working outside the hive. I suspect my hive currently has about 20,000 bees but who's counting!?
Bees travel up to 5 miles to gather pollen and nectar and can fly up to 15 miles per hour! We charted out the possible foraging radius (hivetracks.com) and saw that our bees could really be all over downtown Raleigh including all the way to the NC State Rose Garden.
Foraging bees teach other foragers where to find honey by using the waggle dance:
Honey bees work around the clock. They do take naps or sleep for a few hours at a time but even at night they can be found working building or repairing combs.
The queen lays about 1,000 eggs a day but can lay up to 2,000 in the spring and summer when an increased population is demanded.
Bees are not born into an assigned task for life, rather they progress through different jobs as they age. The roles are as follows:
The honey bee only dies when she stings an enemy with soft skin, such as a human, but they do not die when the sting other predators like insects.
When bees buzz they produce a negative charge. Supposedly pollen has a positive charge and therefore the pollen clings to the bee through an electromagnetism.
Theoretically, when bees smell smoke they fill up on their honey stores. This expands their abdomen which makes it more difficult for them to bend, and thus it should make their stings less deep and severe.
Bees are able to solve the traveling salesman problem by determining the fastest and most efficient route to multiple destinations and they're able to solve the problem faster than a supercomputer. They are also able to count to 4, but only 4. This is based on a study where pollen was placed in the fourth tube and the bees were able to repeatedly select the fourth out of a series of tubes.
The queen does not necessarily mate with a drone from her own hive. She mates with about 20 drones that happen to be around when she does her mating flight. This means that the hive is not all inbred but is a mix of at least half different genes. During that mating flight the drones will deposit upwards of 90 million sperm in the queen's oviducts. The queen, however, will not use all the sperm. She stores about seven million sperm to use throughout her life.
And finally, my favorite fact yet: The drone dies in the mating process: the wind pressure developed during his attempt to catch and mount the queen actually causes him to explode with an audible pop as he ejaculates inside of her. He then falls off the queen, usually leaving a portion of his phallus inside her.
For more amazing information I encourage you to watch this documentary from PBS NOVA called Tales from the Hive. It is really fascinating and the footage will have you awed. There's a corresponding article about how NOVA was able to capture the footage which is pretty incredible.
Anson and I got the opportunity to check the bees today as it is beautiful and warm. You can only work the bees in the winter on warm days, and those often fall on days where I have work or other activities so I was pleased to be able to finally get out there. And we had great news! We spotted our queen! She's not laying but that may be because I have not provided her adequate space to lay as all the frames are full of honey. I'll add some space for her soon but for now I'm just happy to still have a hive and a queen!
She has a yellow marking to allow the beekeeper to more easily find her, even though her longer body makes her distinguishable anyway. The breeder uses different colored dots based on the year:
White - years ending in 1 or 6
Yellow - years ending in 2 or 7
Red - years ending in 3 or 8
Green - years ending in 4 or 9
Blue - years ending in 5 or 0
So if I am able to get another hive going this year and purchase a queen she will have a red dot. I am on a waiting list for a nuc which is a box with a queen, 10,000 bees and 5 frames of wax that has already been drawn out into the comb, of which two or so frames will be full of brood and the other two or so will be full of honey and pollen. This is advantageous because the bees will need to eat 8 pounds of honey to produce one pound of wax and they cannot spend their energy making wax when there is nectar to forage in the spring! So, here's to hoping I am off the nuc waitlist soon!
This Thanksgiving we were sitting on the porch at my in-laws and a bee flew in that did not look like a honeybee but didn't look like any other bees I'm familiar with either. I decided I'd like to do some research on the different types of bees (I found that there are over 20,000 species!) and I figured I might as well share the information with you too! So, this post is not really related to my becoming beekeepers, but hopefully you will find it interesting anyway.
None of the photographs used in this post are mine. I found them all via Google Images; however, I tried to credit their rightful owner where possible in the captions. Also, the information is not my own research, so sources are cited below where I have paraphrased someone else's work.
Currently, there are only 7 recognized species of honeybee with a total of 44 subspecies [1]. They are eusocial, which means that they live in a cooperative group with a caste system. Honeybees have been domesticated for over 3000 years. I have a blog post coming about cool honeybee facts so I'll leave this section light.
Photograph by Stephen Buchman via nationalgeographic.com
These bees are also known as Killer Bees as they are the most defensive and will peruse their attack the longest of any other variety of bee. Although a hybrid of the honeybee we know and love, this bee is not desirable for the average beekeeper as they swarm more frequently and further, as well as the issue of defensiveness.
The best way to tell the difference between Africanized bees and European bees is in a lab through testing [2]. Although there is a slight difference in size it is very difficult to tell the difference by just looking. In the picture below, the Africanized bee is on the left, European on the right, however, I don't think the coloring differences are of note, only the slight size differences.
Credit to Scott Bauer, USDA-ARS
The Bumblebee
Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Arthropoda, Class: Insecta, Order: Hymenoptera, Suborder: Apocrita, Superfamily: Apoidea, Family: Apidae, Genus: Bombus, Species: various
So cute! Bumblebees are sweet and soft. I actually pet them because they don't normally sting. There are over 250 species of bumblebees.
Cute bumblebee from Photos.com? Sorry, not sure on this one...
Bumblebees are often found foraging for nectar and pollen similar to the honeybee, however, they do not produce enough honey to attempt to farm them the way we do the honeybee. Also, their nests are different in that they have much smaller colonies (50 bees instead of 50,000), sometimes built in the ground. The queens hibernate over winter and then form a new colony in the spring. She does this on her own, building wax posts and laying eggs to begin a new colony. [3]
Carpenter bees are usually found flying around the eaves of houses or near other wooden areas of structures, like a deck. There are 500 varieties of carpenter bees. Some live in small nests together, but most species are solitary, living in nests tunneled in wood.
www.buffaloexterminating.com
They bore holes into the wood and use the tunnels to raise brood and store nectar. It is possible that these holes will be used over years at a time and in those cases, the tunnels can run several feet long. They do not eat the wood, but reform it to make side walls that are similar in consistency to particle board to raise brood. In the image below you can see the tunnels and the smaller brood cells.
www.fs.fed.us
The Wasp (Hornets & Yellow Jackets too)
Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Arthropoda, Class: Insecta, Order: Hymenoptera Taxon: Aculeata, Superfamily: Vespoidea, Family: Vespidae, Subfamily: Vespinae, Genus: Dolichovespula, Species: various
This one actually looks kind of creepy to me. Anson once stepped in a yellow jacket nest and had about 30 stings all over his body. They kept stinging him until he swatted them dead. I watched and worried from afar. He was fine though, and didn't even have much of a reaction.
Yellow jacket: Special thanks to Laura Meyers of laurameyers.photoshelter.com
The term wasp as a species covers over 100,000 insects, including hornets and yellow jackets. They are actually not even a bee, but I'm including them in this post because, well, I didn't know that and I'm assuming you didn't either! Another cool thing I learned is that almost every insect has a corresponding wasp that preys upon it or parasites it. They are sometimes used as a natural form of pest control as they prey mostly on what is considered pest insects, like caterpillars, crickets and flies [5]. Wasps have annual colonies like the bumblebee that is rebuilt each spring. Wasp queens also go dormant through winter, hiding in wood crevices until they reemerge. They do not reuse old nests to start a colony. Unlike honeybees, the wasp can sting multiple times because they do not lose their stinger in your skin.
www.allcountypestcontrol.com
Because there are so many varieties of wasps there are also lots of forms of nests. I bet the bees that killed Thomas Jay in My Girl were wasps and not bees if my memory of the nest is correct. The nest Anson stepped in was a ground nest, which you can hardly tell is a nest at all. You've probably seen a small grouping of cells under a house at some point. There are even wasps that make nests out of mud:
Uploaded to wikipedia by a user named Pollinator
Paper wasp nest from www.advancedwildlifecontrolllc.com
A hornet nest from Wikipedia. I think this nest is really pretty!
Cat Bee
And then there is the little known cat bee. This bee is also soft but surprisingly unpredictable.
This is just a joke. It's from this video:
Citations:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeybee
2. M. K. O'Malley, extension assistant, J. D. Ellis, assistant professor, Entomology & Nematology Department, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 and A. S. Neal, extension agent, St. Lucie County, Ft. Pierce, FL.
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee
4. Stephen B. Bambara and Michael Waldvogel, Entomology Extension NCSU 5. Jeff Hahn, Phil Pellitteri, & Donald LewisUniversity of Minnesota Extension
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