New Year 2011!!

Well, so starts a new year of beekeeping. Over the winter I thought my hive had died. I didn’t see any bees for a really long time. Even on warm days I didn’t see any, then, one warm day, I went out to my beeyard and saw like a bagillion of them flying around. YES!! Can’t wait to get out there and start working them again. Anyway, this year I have a couple of goals:

1- Replace the Queen
For about the past year, my hive has grown really aggressive and I have decided that it is the queens fault, and that I will replace her.

2- Get all the wax off of the frames.
It has been three years since I got most of my equipment and so I must strip some of the wax off of some of the frames. Luckily I get to do cool things with wax like candles, soap, and sell

3- Sell my honey and my wax.
This past year I got over 200 lbs. of honey but I still don’t have bottles so I can’t sell it. As soon as I get bottles I’m going to go on a major selling spree and sell everything that I can. Then, I will still have this coming years harvests. Hopefully I can sell that too.

If you have any other suggestions or cool things I can do with my bees, please comment. I am always looking for new and exciting things to try!

Taking off the Last supers.

So we decided to take off the last three supers on my hive. They weren’t completely full yet but it is almost labor day and the bees need time to start stockpiling honey for the winter. Good luck to them!

Anyway, I was pulling the last super off and I got stung through my glove. Again. Now my finger is all swollen and puffy. Hopefully that gets better soon.

For my total amount of honey, I am hoping for just over 200 Lbs. Then with my brother’s hive, I’m hoping for at least another 50. We’ll see what happens!

Another Sting

Well, I went out and checked my bees again. I noticed that they weren’t quite as active as they normally are and decided to check them. I thought that they might have swarmed. When I got out there, they were all just in the hive. I think the rain earlier today might have forced them into their hive. However, they did need another super. The makes three supers on top of my hive. Good thing I already extracted four. These three will make like one-hundred more pounds of honey. Yes!! Well, on my way out, I was scraping some burr comb off of the inside cover when I felt a sharp pain in my right arm. Another bee had stung me…through my suit… again. What is that four times through my suit. Who-hoo! I’m still hoping for at least one more super before I have to harvest.

Yet Another Super!

It’s been a week since we pulled the last four supers off of my hive.  I decided that I should check it seeing that I now had about a bagillion bees working on one super, that could be a potentially huge swarm problem.  So, I went and checked on them.  There were four frames left that hadn’t been built out, but the others all had honey and wax.  Since I won’t be checking it for another week, I decided to put another super on just in case.  Better safe than sorry, right?  As soon as I put the super on, bees immediately started to crawl in.  Maybe it was a really good Idea to put that super on.  At least, I think it was.  Well, I guess we’ll see how many more supers I can get on there before I have to take them all back off.

Finished Product

In the end, we got around 124 lbs. of honey. I’d say that’s pretty good, seeing that we have a month or two left. After we had spent a day or two extracting it, we decided we should bottle it also. Yeah, we didn’t have nearly enough bottles and still have a five gallon bucket left. So we are going to order some more bottles ASAP and bottle the rest. I’m going to try to sell around 15 two lbs. bottles over here locally. I sell two lbs. bottles for about fifteen dollars so if I were to sell all 15, that is three-hundred dollars. That’s amazing!! Sorry, I can’t sell it on the web because I don’t have a food handler’s permit and the such, but maybe someday.

Extracting

I pulled off my first four supers. Wow!! So heavy!!! Anyway, my friends and I decided to extract it right after we pulled it off of the hive. It’s been pretty fun but it’s also been pretty hard. Luckily, we are doing it in an eighty-six degree garage! This makes the honey run about seven-bagillion times faster. Unluckily, manual labor in that kind of heat is killer. So, right now as I type, we are approximately half way done. We have spun about eighteen frames. That is almost two of the supers.

The best is when I find a live bee on the frames. All of my friends are scared of bees, so they kind of freak out, It’s pretty awesome!

So, I’ll talk to you all later! Post more when I finish.

Another PRODUCTIVE Check-up!!

So, as the title states, I went out and checked up on my hive again. Oh, They are doing great!! Right now, I am using a manipulation method with my supers. Basically, I put the new super on the bottom, right above the Brood boxes, so that the bees work on it before they go up into the other supers. So far, it has worked great. When I went out there, I took the top super off so that I could get to the ones beneath. Then, I tried taking the next two off but they were stuck together and I didn’t have anybody else that could help me. So I pulled them off just enough so that I could see into the super beneath.

It was eighty percent full of wax and honey. Doh!! I’m supposed to put another super on when it hits seventy! So I ran into my house and grabbed our last super. I would have put it on the bottom, but as I said before, I couldn’t get the last three supers off the hive, so now the new super is somewhere in the middle. With this last super, I have five supers on my hive. I am so excited to see how much honey we get. With my five supers and my brothers one or two, we should get over one-hundred pounds of honey!!! How in the world are we going to eat that?

So I was sticking everything back on, when I noticed that my inside cover was starting to come apart and that it also had a little mold on it. Seeing how I had a couple of extra inside covers, I replaced it with a new one. Hopefully that will also reduce moisture.

Then, just as I was leaving, a bee landed on my arm and stung all the way through my suit! It caught me by surprise, having a bee sting through my suit. But it didn’t hurt too bad. This is the third time that I have gotten stung by one of my bees. The first two actually stung me through my glove. Who would’ve guessed that bees had such long stingers.

Here is my hive as of 7/14/10.

My inside cover, The dark stuff along the side is Mold

The Other Side of the Cover, with Burr Comb on it.

Brother’s Hive!!

By the way, my brother just won a hive the same way I did.  He wrote an essay and submitted it to the UCBA.  Now his hive sits right next to mine in our “Beeyard”.  He also is starting a blog.  The URL is honeysuper.wordpress.com .  It is called Honey Bee Haven.  Go check it out to see his hive!!

So if you see a random hive in some of my pictures, you know what it is!

It’s Been a While!!

Wow… It’s been a really long time since I’ve written on here. I just checked my hive a few days back and it’s doing great!! As we speak (or more like type) my bees are out there working on their fourth super!! Hurray!! That’s already more than I had last year!! When I checked them, the super only had four or five frames left to build. That means I might just have to add another super sometime next week. And I thought buying a couple more supers was over doing it.

Anyway, while I was out there, we decided to put on a screened bottom board. I talked about that a while back in my Ventilation post. It is a bottom board that is mostly screen. It has two main purposes. The first, ventilation. It helps air flow through the hive and help keep it cool. This will help the honey dry faster and let the bees work on other things. It also keeps mold and crap from growing. If it gets too moist in there, the bees get stressed. When the bees get stressed, Varroa mites start to take over. Which leads us to the next reason for a screened bottom board. When mites fall off of bees, they will fall through the screen and to the ground. With a normal bottom board, the mites fall off and just crawl back onto another bee. Now they just fall through.

After I had checked the supers and put the screened bottom board on, I Powder-Sugared my hive. I got a bunch of Powdered-Sugar and sifted it into my hive. You see, powdered-sugar is actually a lot of small crystals. These crystals when dropped on mites, cause a bunch of small cuts. The mite population is injured horribly by this. Some mites die while others just let go and fall through the bottom board. (Good thing I got that screen!!) I went and did it to every box.

Not that I saw any mites in my hive. They seem to be doing great!!! I just wanted to make sure that there weren’t any mites. I mean hey!! What will a little sugar do to my hive, right?

Mapping Bees

Have you ever wanted to know how far your bees fly?  Have you ever wanted to see what other beekeepers are around.  If so, there is this way awesome website that another beekeepers showed me.  Basically, you enter in your address and some information.  Then it uses a Google based map to show you how far your bees fly.  It is so cool.  Then, if you want to see the other beekeepers in your area, you can search around and find how to contact them.  I hope you all will go and try this out.  It is so COOL!!!

The link is mapmybees.com.  Please go and try it out.  I think that it will help beekeepers to communicate better.  It is a rather new website, so there aren’t many apiaries listed yet.  Hopefully, though, you will go and put yours on.  I found out that there are like ten hives that all belong to one guy, that are posted around my area.

Please go try it out!!  Have Fun!!!