Harvest

We harvested two 'frames' of capped honey from the TBH about a week ago. It was medium colored and super sweet (tooth-ache sweet) with the distinct but subtle flavor of licorice. Everyone who tries it takes a taste, stops for a moment, gets this confused look on their face and then says, 'there's something different about this honey...I can't quite place it.' They either eventually realize it tastes like licorice, or when we tell them that's the flavor, they go 'yeah, that's it!' We harvested a couple of quarts.

And now I am rendering the wax. Hard work. I bought a crock pot yesterday ($7 at Saint Vincent De Paul. It's the cool, yellow old-school one my mom had.) and pitcher to use expressly for wax rendering. I'm starting with a double boiler, which will allow me to skim the melted wax off the top of a pot full of water and other gunk. The next step will be to re-melt the wax in my way-cool retro crock pot and then pour it through some paper towels to sift off the remaining gunk. This is hard work for just a few ounces of wax from several combs.

Word on the street is that you should only try rendering wax from cappings--the thin, pure-ish wax the bees use to cover the fully cured honey for storage. I think that's probably a better idea. But hey, we never do things the easy way, and it seems a real shame to throw out all of the honey comb.

Bee Brethren: The Mud Dauber

At the beginning of the summer, I noticed a mud dauber (this guy ) building a nest under our patio cover. I was a little aprehensive about her being there because, well because look at that thing; she looks like a stinging machine! I could just imagine a nest bursting forth with hundreds of stinging machines later in the year. But it was fascinating to watch her build the nest. She would collect mud and then plaster it into the corner of the patio, building clusters of long, narrow cells. Each day she would add one new cell. Sometimes the cells were capped and sometime open.

Intrigued, I did a little research online to find out if mud daubers have any redeeming qualities; I really don't like killing things if I can help it, but I was a little worried that the wasps might bother the bees, not to mention my friends and family! My research revealed that mud daubers build these cells and then fill them with dead insects to eat later, not baby mud daubers. Another article indicated that honey bees are too big to be a major source of food for them. And since the wasp wasn't the slightest bit interested in me, I decided she could stay. 

I haven't seen her now in months. And until today, when we decided to remove the nest and dissect it, it looked exactly as it had before she disappeared. I sometimes wondered what had happened to her, but not enough to think that the food she put into the nest might not have been for her! Tim carefully cut down the nest and we gingerly cut it open, removing bits of brittle mud plaster to reveal little caches of long-dead spiders and some sort of cocoon. As I started to cut away another chunk of the nest, I heard a violent buzzing and saw something brown and amber colored wiggling around just under where I had made my cut. 

I don't think I've ever moved so fast! I was away from our dissecting table and across the patio in a fraction of a second, screaming my head off like a maniac all the way. (Odd that Tim thinks I'm too jumpy to make a good entomologist.) 

Let me now set the record straight: mud dauber nests are full of baby mud daubers! The mother builds a mud tunnel, fills it with snacks, lays an egg in it, covers the entrance for extra coziness and then makes a get away. The babies grow fat eating the dead insects, spin cocoons and then emerge as full-grown mud daubers. The one that we watched emerge this morning, chewed her way out of the mud tunnel and immediately took flight. She made one circle of the patio and then flew off without so much as a glance back.

Not to worry friends, fascinating as they are, we are not about to get into mud-dauber keeping.

There's honey, Honey!

When we didn't have any capped honey by mid-July, I started to worry that we wouldn't get any, which I found surprisingly disappointing. I'm into beekeeping because it provides me an opportunity to observe insects up-close-and-personal. Honey is a bonus. Nevertheless I was disappointed, partly because I thought it meant I was doing something wrong.

Well, if the amount of honey in a hive directly correlates to the skill of a beekeeper, Tim and I are beekeeping extraordinaires. According to Tim, who is chivalrously holding down the fort while I'm on travel this week, the TBH has several combs of capped honey!

I'm ecstatic.

Combo the Combo Hive

Today we combined the remaining bees in the combo hive with the Langstroth colony that was originally split from it earlier this summer.

Several weeks ago, I noticed that the combo hive, which was the strongest of our spring swarms, was building lots of swarm cells. In an effort to stop or decrease the swarming, I split the hive into a Langstroth. (By the way, this never works; once a colony makes swarm cells, it's gonna swarm.) The remaining combo hive 'swarmed itself silly'--a technical term I invented to describe a colony that has swarmed repeatedly until it has too few adult bees to care for the brood.

When we checked the combo hive today, there were just a couple of combs of bees. There was larva and capped brood, so we knew there was a laying queen, or at least that there had been fairly recently. The numbers of bees had dwindled to the point where I couldn't really see the hive surviving; just a few bees went in and out of the hive in a 15-second period.

So, we combined the combo and Langstroth colonies using the newspaper method. Simply put, you consolidate all of the bees from the strong colony into one deep, then you place a newspaper with slits in it over the top bars of said deep, and finally, you place a second deep containing the combs and bees from the weak hive on top. The idea is that the bees on both sides of the newspaper will eat their way through, getting used to each others scent as they go, and be best of friends by the time they come out on the other side.

We'll check on the bees again next weekend and let you know how they're doing.