MPR At The Honey Harvest

It was time to do some honey harvesting at our three hives. We had a rather large posse going out: Me, Mr. Neil, Non Birding Bill, Lorraine, Kitty, and Euan Kerr from Minnesota Public Radio.

We had so many people coming, that we were short on bee suits. NBB wore long pants, with a red shirt (the color red doesn't bother bees), just a helmet with a net and gloves--go NBB. Euan was there to interview Mr. Neil about his latest book, The Graveyard Book. What a brave man, you're scheduled to do an interview and told, "Hey, why don't don't you come out with us to our hives!" And he comes along in full bee suit to record part of the interview. What a good sport.

And then we put him to work! The honey supers (boxes where bees store excess honey and no brood) are incredibly heavy and you sometimes need two people to take them out. Now, last year, I used something called Bee Quick to get the bees out of the hive. It didn't work as well this year. I suspect that the bottle I purchased last year lost some of its potency because the bees did not vacate the supers quite like they should have. I think we'll just have to get a fresh bottle every year. Here's a video of Mr. Neil and Lorraine trying to shake out the last few bees from the honey super...and notice the irritated bee buzz:

Don't you just love the maniacal Lorraine giggle?

We checked the MimiKo hive first--no honey production--but the bees are so incredibly friendly, did some hand feeding. Next we checked the county-fair-blue-ribbon-winning Kelli hive next--three supers with honey in all (she made both comb honey and regular honey), but not willing to give up the supers, she got a little angry. We were talking about the differences between the two hives. How Mimi doesn't make much excess but she is so, so friendly and how Kelli works hard and made a terrific amount of honey her first year. Mr. Neil told me that the two women who painted the hives have been following their progress on the blog and discussed this as well. Kelli said, "When I painted my hive, I put in the message, 'Be productive.'" To which Mimi replied, "That's funny, I told my hive to 'Be friendly.'"

And that's what the hives are.

Then we checked the combined Kitty/Olga hive (and we actually had the Kitty namesake with us). We warned Kitty and Euan that we needed to be ready for this hive. Someone asked if she's a mean hive. This hive isn't a mean or angry hive, it's just that she's older and doesn't tolerate any shit. There really is no other way to explain it. We had the smoker at the ready, we took off the top lid--bam! Mr. Neil got stung through his sock near the ankle! It's one of those rare areas where a bee could breach the bee suit. Some beekeepers wear boots (Mr. Neil often does) others duct tape the bee suit pants over the shoes to prevent the breach, but we didn't and he got stung very quickly. Kitty/Olga was living up to her hype. We went back to work--bam! Euan got stung--right through the bee suit, a complete breach of the beesuit.

It was at this point we decided to put the fume board on top of the hive and leave it for 20 minutes to a half hour to really let the essential oils do their work--bees do not like the aroma of the Bee Quick and it pushes them deeper into the hive, leaving all the honey supers bee-less and allows es to harvest the honey relatively pain free. Also, leaving the hive for awhile meant Euan could continue his interview, the boys could also treat their stings and the rest of us could get a much needed break and have a snack.

I took a moment to take the Ross Rounds out of their frames--the easiest way to harvest honey if you can talk your bees into making comb honey (instructions for how to extract from Ross Rounds can be found here). It was weird having Euan along. He's a terrifically nice guy, and again, I must say that he was a very good sport to come out to our hives and still keep a genial nature after being stung. But the weird thing is that you hear him all the time on MPR (he's the dude with a hint of a Scottish brogue) and so it kind of felt like we were taking the radio out with us. I made sure that when he went home, that he got some fresh comb honey. We take a lot of people out to the hives and sometimes we just give them the smoker. It keeps them busy and if they get nervous at the hives, they have something to hold on to and most of the time we can work with minimal smoke. Euan went right in there, lifting the heavy supers, taking one for the team and getting stung, all while he was just trying to get an interview. When the interview is up, I'll post a link.

Here's Lorraine's account of the day...oh dear, and a photo of Kitty and I wrestling in the bee suits.

Kitty also has her own perspective here.

And here is a video of the Kelli hive entrance--note the drone hanging out in the front:

Hustle And Bustle Of The Hive

Mental note: avoid scheduling Birds and Beers during the MN State Fair, Barak Obama's historic acceptance speech, and when a swallow-tailed kite is reported in Minnesota. It was an intimate group, so small that even Non Birding Bill came over and joined us. I think a total of six showed up. It was still fun and we all ribbed Dingley that he was the one who released the kite.

Here is some video of our bees coming and going from the hive entrance. You'll hear an eastern peewee singing in the background:

My Bees Are Makin' Some Honey


The summer has been quite busy and I haven't had too much quality time with my girls. I love this time of year and could literally spend hours watching the girls coming and going from the hive entrance, noting all the colors on their pollen baskets.

I was out this week with Lorraine just to check on honey production. I've noticed that there is a definite difference with boy beekeeping and girl beekeeping. When the girls are out checking the hives it's, "May I have the hive tool please? Thank you?" or "Could you puff a little smoke on my hand? Awesome, thank you."

With boys involved at the hive...it's different. It's more of "We need smoke here, now!" or "You're standing in the worst possible place." Not that we don't appreciate the boys at the hive, we love the boys, they are an important part of our beekeeping operating, but it's fun to note the dynamics.

The bees are in serious honey gathering mode. The Bickman hive (the award winning hive) has an almost full honey super and is about halfway through filling a comb honey super.

As we were checking the supers, Bickman had made some cells between the two supers and they were ripped apart when we moved them. All the girls came in right away to clean the mess.

Word soon spread to the hive that more tongues were needed and many workers came up to eat the spilled honey--those pheromone work great for mass communication--gotta love it. One super was almost full, the other was halfway and I wasn't sure when we'd be back, but we thought we would add a third just for the heck of it. We walked back to the house to grab a super and when we came back (which couldn't have been more than 15 minutes)...

They had licked the spilled honey dry! I think this is one of the many parts of beekeeping that is so enjoyable. You read about what bees are capable of, but as a beekeeper, you get the chance to actually witness this miraculous insect. I love beekeeping.

Here is a little video of the bees licking the honey. As usual, if you go to the actual YouTube page, you can click on "watch in high quality" button so the bees in full beauty:

Lorraine and I had to put the hives back together and with all the massive honey gathering and our short statures, it's a tad tricky (did miss the boys' help with that today. Lorraine and I struggled to put the hive back and when finished, I had a slight problem:

My beesuit got caught in the hive and mashed with some sticky propolis for good measure. It took some pulling and wedging, but I finally managed to get free.

Ants In My Hive & Propolis Trap

So, we thought we would try a propolis trap for our beehives. Propolis is a sticky, resinous substance that bees collect from trees, I think sap. They use it as a sealant for holes in the hive, or they cover anything they don't like from stray leaves to dead mice. Humans like propolis because there claims of medicinal properties. I don't know about that, but I like the texture of a little propolis in the hive. We have a couple of propolis traps, so we thought we'd give them a try on a couple of hives. True to beekeeping equipment, the trap came with no instructions at first the bees ignored it until a blog reader told me that I need to keep the roof ajar. The bees see light coming in seal off the trap to block the light.

ajar

So, we gave it a try on the MimiKo and Bickman hives. We left the roof ajar and set the propolis trap on top of the inner cover.

propolis
There's a little hole in the inner cover that the bees can use to access the roof. Bless the bees hearts, they only filled the propolis right where the hole was on the inner cover--doing the least amount of work necessary and keeping the hive efficiently dark.

ants

There was one tiny disturbing thing around the trap in the MimiKo Hive--ants. Large ants. They were between the inner cover and the roof and not into the rest of the hive. There are some dead bees on the ceiling and the ants were taking those apart, but I hope they don't decided to make themselves too welcome. I did some checking on google and found this from Go Beekeeping:

"Ants are a nuisance in the bee hive. They often build nest under the top cover and above the inner cover where the bees don't bother them. They seem to cause very little damage to the bees except be a curse to the beekeeper who wants to control them.

Treatment: Any chemical used to destroy ants will also kill bees. One could set the bee hive on a stand supported by four legs. Each leg would fit into a can filled with oil preventing ants from climbing up the side of the hive. Don't spend too much time worrying about them."

buzzes

We looked down inside and the MimiKo bees were pretty chill. One ant came down and even ran into a couple of bees but there were no severe altercations. As long as the ants don't mess with the insides I won't stress too much, but I don't like that riff raff hanging out with my girls.

Sometimes I Know Too Much

Non Birding Bill and I stopped at Midtown Global Market today. As we were locking up our bikes, I looked down and saw a honey bee flying between us and then land on some plantings. It's weird, I can pick out a honey bee even in fight from the thousands of other hymenoptera species in the US. But, what was odd was that we were seeing this bee right in the heart of Minneapolis. Thanks to Colony Collapse and varroa mites, foul brood and all the other nasties that afflict the honey bee, there really aren't wild hives any more. Now, if you take into account that the average bee flies two and a half miles away from her hive while foraging (that's average, it's possible for a forager to go as far as five miles) and that it's illegal to keep bees in Minneapolis and St. Paul...is someone keeping a secret hive near the market?

Interesting.

Skywatch Friday

It's another Skywatch Friday and I'm going to contribute some North Dakota storm clouds. I love the prairie--I love birding on the prairie, when the sun is out and it's spring, nothing quite beats bird song on the prairie. However, when it's rainy and windy, nothing can be quite as brutal as birding on the prairie. There are no trees to slow the wind and the rain, but the expanse is vast and you can get a clear view of the storm about to hit you. I love the look of clouds right before a rain. I love the view of a minimum maintenance road disappearing into an approaching storm, the unknowable is ahead.

I think this is one of my favorite views in North Dakota--painted beehives under storm clouds on a prairie.

A Tiny Bit Of Bee Blogging

I was talking with Mr. Neil the other day about bee blogging. Periodically, I get emails from people asking "Hey, it's been awhile since you blogged bees, can we get another post please?" Or something to that effect. But since I've started working on the bee book in earnest, I've lost the desire to blog the bees. He could relate. The book is not a reprinting of the blog, some of the same stories will be there, but with more and different details and you just can't write a book the same way you write a blog--hyperlinking just does not translate.

I did have a minor bit of panic in the MimiKo hive recently. When we opened the roof, we found webbing in the corner. I worried that it may be wax moths. Wax moths lay eggs in gaps in your hive and when the larvae hatches, they crawl into your comb and eat the wax, making webs all over the place. Incidentally, if you have been purchasing the wax worms this summer for birds during the mealworm shortage--that's the same thing. Those buggers can really mess up a hive. However, if you have a strong, healthy colony, they can stop the moth larvae before they get too bad. I looked closely at the webbing and then suddenly realized that the small dots I thought was frass left from the larvae--were moving...with eight legs. These were baby spiders. Something else I don't care to have in the hive. I grabbed my handy dandy hive tool and evicted the spiders. I hated to do it, I respect what spiders do in the food chain, but I'd rather they didn't do it in the beehives.

Award Winning Honey Bees

So, we interrupt the shorebirding I was about to blog about to do a beekeeping update. I think when I last wrote about our humble beekeeping operation, we had combined the queenless Olga hive with the strong Kitty hive using the newspaper method. We took the remaining brood box with bees from Olga and placed it in Kitty, separating the box with a thin layer of newspaper. The bees would chew through the newspaper, giving the Olga bees a chance to absorb the pheromones of Queen Kitty and not start any fights.

When we check on them a week later, the newspaper on the bottom was completely eaten away.

They were still working their way through the top, but all seems to be going well and we are now a three hive operation. Not bad for our second year, not bad at all.

Meanwhile, the Bickman Bees have really set the tone for this summer--their honey won the blue ribbon at the county fair! It started as a wacky idea, I told Mr. Neil, Lorraine, and Non Birding Bill that we should enter our honey in the local fair. Having scoped out the rules and figuring we could afford the fifty cent entry fee, we gave it a go. I must say, Lorraine did the bulk of the work (apart from the bees): she extracted the honey and dealt with the slumgum, read up on what makes for an award winning entry, and walked it to the fair.

I was going to try and go out, but I was too swamped after my tv segment today--I still have not unpacked from last week! I got a phone call this afternoon Mr. Neil and Lorraine reported that the honey from our bees got the blue ribbon. Above is Lorraine posing with the entries.

It's beautiful too--a very pale color. I've had a couple of bites of feral comb from the hive, but have not tasted the official entry. Apparently, it tastes much different than Olga's honey last year.

I can't believe the overwhelming sense of pride I have in my hard workin' girls right now. This has been a pretty good year--I've got steady work that I enjoy, my second book came out, I've traveled to some fabulous places, but...I think seeing our bees take the blue ribbon has to top it. Not only because beekeeping is one of the most awesome things a person can do in life (aside from birding and living with a pet rabbit) but it's been a team effort with my husband and two really good friends.

...and now I have the A-Team Theme running through my head. Great.

Kitty and Olga and The Newspaper Method

Well, there have been some changes in the beekeeping operation. But first, let's start with the fun.

Can I say how grateful I am for the sweet natured temperament of the MimiKo bees? They are just a joy to visit and are still so friendly and easy going...which as you will read later, is much needed this summer. I love it when I open the lid of a hive and all is calm and a few bees that are at the top of the frames just kind of poke their heads up to see what is going on. They just hang there as if to ask, "Hey, how's it going? Did you see the dance about that aster patch on the south side of the fallow field--that's some good nectar." They're so fuzzy up close, you almost want to pet them.

My buddy Jody the Librarian came out with me for some of the hive inspections and I had her do some hand feeding. That is the cool thing to do this summer: come out to the hives and feed bees bare handed. Once you've had bee tongue on your finger, you never go back to life as it was before.

Above is a Bickman hive frame with some out of control comb construction. In a beehive, you have deep brood boxes with longer frames that bees put their brood and food stores. Then there are smaller boxes called honey supers that bees building excess honey in and you get to eat. We've been having a tough time convincing some of the bees to get out of their brood boxes and go build up inside the honey supers. So, I put a smaller honey super frame inside a deep brood box of the Bickman hive. The plan was to have her start to draw out comb on the frame and then I would put it back up in the honey super and encourage the girls to build up there. I left the frame in just a little to long and the bottom of the frame was covered in soon to be drone cells. I scraped those off and put the frame back in the honey super...honey should be packed in there by the end of this month. Whoot.

I will say this, the Bickman hive has low tolerance for shenanigans. While scraping off the drones cells, a worker tried to sting my glove. I didn't feel it, but I saw her stuck on the finger tip. I had Jody smoke my glove. When a worker bee stings you, she releases a pheromone that tells her sisters, "Hey! Something bad, right here, come sting too!" And soon more bees arrive. Sometimes it's instantaneous. You'll see the one sting you and three seconds later, five bees fly to the spot. If you use your smoker and puff it over the sting, that will mask the pheromone and prevent more bees from coming to join in the stinging fun. Jody smoked my glove, but this one bee pictured above was furiously trying to find the spot to sting. She kept angrily buzzing the glove, but couldn't find the exact spot to sting. Her stinger kept popping in and out of her body, but my camera was not fast enough to catch it.

Jody and I also checked the Kitty and Olga hives. Kitty is still going strong. Above is a frame with some early drawn out comb. Kitty is strong. We looked in on Olga, neither of the new queens had hatched yet. Damn. They should have hatched by now and it was clear that they just weren't going to. Olga was dying. The workers were in a slow death. What could I do? Well, there's the dump method where you take a brood box and dump in front of other hives and hope for the best that some of the workers will make it past the guard bees of other hives and start a new life there. We opted for the news paper method. I went back to consult an under the weather Mr. Neil. He agreed, it was time to combine the weak hive with a strong hive. I waited until later in the afternoon when more foragers would be back and could take Non Birding Bill with me.

NBB opened up Olga. She was quiet, not the robust busting of activity that she had been in the past. Even though we had two brood boxes on Olga, half the frames in each box were empty, so we took frames full of bees and combined them into one brood box.

We then went over to the Kitty hive, opened the roof and ceiling, placed down a layer of newspaper and set the Olga box on that. Since some Kitty bees were still coming back from foraging and using the top of the hive, we put another piece of newspaper on top of the Olga box, and then put Kitty's honey supers on top. The bees will chew through the newspaper in the next 24 hours and hopefully by that time, the workers will have absorbed the new queen's pheromone and acclimate to the hive. Mr. Neil wisely pointed out that pointed Kitty was simply Olga's daughter hive anyway (we divided Olga this spring to create the Kitty hive), so Olga was transforming back to herself..

I went back to where Olga had been. We missed some bees. Foragers were still coming back and landing on the bottom board of where their hive had been. I looked at the frame with the two queen cells that didn't hatch. Did I do this too soon? Was there any chance that the queens might hatch really late. I needed to open them to know...but what would I find. I couldn't open them. NBB took the frame and offered to open the queen cells and tell me. I was a coward and agreed. He said that the larvae in both cells was shriveled and dried up. Something had gone wrong.

I watched former Olga foragers landing on the board and furiously running around. Guilt knotted up in my stomach. A lump formed in my throat. The sound was awful and full of panic:

It was early evening, it was cool, and it would be dark soon. Where would these bees go?

I took all the frames out of a brood box but set it up with an entrance and roof so they would have someplace to hang out in at night, some sort of shelter. Maybe some of them would fly over to the Kitty hive and the guards would let them through. Otherwise, what else would they do? NBB had to drive the vehicle with the remains of the Olga hive back to the house, I opted to walk. I felt terrible. As took the path, I saw a honey bee foraging on some clover. I wondered to myself if it was an Olga bee, and tears filled my eyes, she's gathering pollen and nectar only to head back to hive that no long exists. I thought back to all the lessons in beekeeping the Olga hive had taught me: how I freaked out big time because she was my first time putting new bees in; she gave my only sting thus far, we got comb honey from her last year, we listened to her in winter.

And now she is gone. She's very much a part of the Kitty hive and perhaps it's appropriate that the two hives we started with last year are combined into one hive this year. I didn't think I would feel this bad. I tearily met up with NBB and he patted my back and agreed that he too felt bad, but really at the end of the day, they are just insects. I tried to listen, but found that my typical anti anthropomorphic resolve was failing. These are just bees, they only live for like 21 days anyway.

So, days when you make the decision to end a hive, it's good to have a friendly hand feeding hive as a back up.

No, I'm not too attached to my bees. I can quit beekeeping at any time. Really, I can. It's not a habit. So what if I broke down in my hair stylist's chair yesterday as I related the story? I'm not in too deep, really. I can totally handle this.

Actually, I've had a few days to chew on this since it happened, so I am over the loss of the Olga hive and can chuckle at myself for being so wrapped up in my bees (and looking at the calendar, I'm sure hormones had something to do with it too). Meanwhile, there have been other happy and cool things related to beekeeping on:

MimiKo (hive namesake) sent me a kickin' shirt for my birthday--it's an Eddie Izzard shirt and much like his routine, I'm a beekeeper who is happy to be covered in bees. And, unlike a majority of bird shirts out there, this is actually designed for a woman's body and looks cute--bird manufacturers, please take note--you don't have to sell only men's sizes or the unisex sizes.

And another artist has been inspired by our bees (some may remember the Lisa Snellings art). Well, this really cool photographer named Kimberly Butler made a series of photos based on our beekeeping adventures--that's one above them. She gave us a signed copy. I was speechless when she showed it to us, it was so weird and reminded me of calm, happy bees poking their heads over frames to see what you are doing. So, in many ways, old hives do live on in really weird and wonderful ways.