An Inspector Calls (title borrowed from the book by J.B. Priestley)

Did you know that there are people employed to inspect and monitor bee hives? I'm not sure if every state has an apiarist but NJ has one and he is terrific. Tim Schuler  is a font of bee knowledge and is also a really nice guy. This past week he was in northeastern NJ to visit beekeepers and their hives so he stopped at my house.



 
Tim and his helpers talked to my husband about our hive and any problems we might be having. Then he opened the hive and checked things out. Tim did a test for varroa mites using the alcohol wash method-

Alcohol Wash Method

This method is simple, quick and quite accurate when applied to a larger number of colonies in the apiary. It doesn't require a second visit after 24 hours. The test is carried out as follows:

• Use a wide-mouth glass jar and scoop about 300 bees (~1 cup) from the brood area. Make sure that the queen is NOT included!
• Add 50 ml (~ 2 oz) of windshield wiper fluid (or diluted methyl hydrate, or rubbing alcohol) to the jar and shake for several minutes.
• Remove lid and pour contents into a container covered with light metal wire-mesh screen (8 mesh/in) or a coarse sieve. Repeat.
• Pour alcohol solution into a second container covered with cheesecloth or fine sieve. Count number of mites.  (explaination from http://www.agf.gov.bc.ca/apiculture/factsheets/222_vardetect.htm)

Varroa mites are a bee hive's worst enemy and have been since 1986. while the test may seem extreme because some bees die, a serious hive infestation can lead to the loss of the entire hive. The test can tell you just how bad your varroa problem is. Test results showed that my have has mites but just a few. Tim says every hive has mites it is just a matter of how many and how the beekeeper handles the problem. You can learn more about varroa mites, testing and treating here- http://www2.ca.uky.edu/entomology/entfacts/ef608.asp

Anyway, back to the inspection. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to be home for this event so my husband had to be the point person and remember to ask all the questions we had talked about. Tim gave my hive a good grade, told us what to do to help it survive the winter and put a sticker on the hive marking it as a NJ State inspected bee hive. The girls really liked the sticker!



Recently on some beekeeping Face Book page, that I follow there was a long thread about whether to register hives with the state. Some people choose not to register citing government intervention and big brother monitoring. Others argue that registering gives them piece of mind because registering provides the state with good statistics and other data that can result in positive honeybee legislation and early notification of trouble. Being registered cal also help when there is a complaint about your bees or when your local municipality changes the rules about having bee hives.

So, the same way that I registered my dog with the town and I have my kids vaccinated when they were babies, my bees are registered with the state. I know that I can contact Tim's office to get help any time I have a need. I know that my club (Northeast New Jersey Beekeepers Association) will invite Tim to speak and to visit hives every year. this is a good thing for my hive and for my fellow beeks' hives.

Bee-vangelism or spreading the word and enlisting converts

One of the dictionary definitions of "evangelism" is "a militant or crusading zeal". While I have always been a proponent of bees and beekeeping, I guess now I have become an evangelist or a Bee-vangelist! (I can hear the groans from my pun loving friends John and Roger)  My husband has also become a bee-vangelist telling everyone he knows that his wife is a beekeeper and he is right there with me, in the hive, visiting the bee supply stores and browsing the catalogs. He joined in the extracting fun at my workplace and he even thinks he can find a place for a hive or two at some of his work sites.

Our crusade worked on a colleague at my workplace as well. A professor with a strong interest in the environment and sustainability came by to learn about the extracting process. He was so excited about it, he called his wife and asked her to come by, with their teenager daughters. After some teenage reluctance, all three arrived and within a few minutes, they were all working. They uncapped frames, cranked the extractor, and stuck labels on jars. At one point, one of the girls had a drone bee walking around on her hand. Before the afternoon was over, the professor was hooked and talking about getting his own bee hive and his daughter was thinking of designs for the jar label.

My nephew in Vermont has been converted as well. His conversion came from my dad, his grandfather. My nephew and his wife are caring for their first hive this summer and we share updates. Their enthusiasm is not dampened by the shorter summer in northern Vermont or the shorter growing season. In this picture, Steve is adding a honey super and is well protected.

photo courtesy of Brianne Ragno
 

Oh, and my son-in-law is a convert too! He says he's willing to put a hive in his backyard (although he might just be trying to stay on my good side!) but his wife, my daughter, is not yet ready for that. Dogs and babies come first. 

Yup, and 2 of my high school classmates, who are also Facebook friends, have contacted me about bees and beekeeping. One of them lives in Hawaii so I'm volunteering to go visit and help Michael with his hives! I had honey from a lavender farm in Hawaii and it was exquisite!

http://www.aliikulalavender.com/p-21-lavender-honey.aspx

One more...a neighbor with a young son who has a tortoise, a lizard, a dog and is in to all sorts of outdoor sports came over recently and got very excited about the bees. Now he's borrowed my books, wants to come watch when we go into the hive again and getting educated so he can have a hive next spring.

With all the news about the importance of honeybees for our food and the collapse of bee hive colonies all over the world, I can only hope that more people catch bee-vangelism fever and become crusaders.



"Evangelism." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 18 July 2014. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evangelism>.

Honey, Honey, Honey, Honey......Honey

This week, I had my first hands on experience with harvesting honey. With all the years that my dad had honeybees, you'd think I've had tons of hands on experience. But no. I'm pretty sure my dad used the bees as his special place to escape all that comes with a family of 8 kids so we never actually were involved with bee work.

At my workplace, there are 2 beehives in a meadow right at the front of the campus. The meadow with all its wild flowers looks like a tiny slice of paradise as you drive into campus. The beehives just add something extra special. The groundskeeper is a novice beekeeper. He's been at it for 3 years. Last year, with 1 hive, he got 60 pounds of honey.


The Meadow

The day before the harvest, Hugh went to the hives and inserted an escape screen under the medium honey supers. The screen allows the bees to leave the supers, but not get back in. The bees do not get hurt by this, they just get confused for awhile. This is helpful because a beekeeper does not want to remove a super full of honey and bees. The bees should stay with the hive as much as possible. Also, a super full of honey weights about 60 pounds. Add a few pounds of bees and this becomes too heavy to lift.



Escape Screen
 

The day of the harvest, we met up and began to set up. A couple of tables are needed. One is used for the uncapping process and one is used for the jarring process. Uncapping is the term for opening up the honeycomb so the honey can be removed. If you are a fan of comb honey, you have eaten both the wax, in small chunks, and the honey. Not everyone enjoys chewing wax which is why honey gets removed from the comb. For each frame of honey, the caps are either sliced off with a hot knife or poked open with a spiky tool that looks like a paint roller.

Between the two tables is the extractor. The extractor is  a big aluminium or plastic tub on feet with a drum inside where the open frames sit. On the lid is a handle which turns a crank which spins the drum inside. Think of a salad spinner. It works the same way. The centrifugal force moves the liquid honey out of the frame and leaves the solid wax in place. The honey falls to the bottom of the tub. The frames come out and get put back into the supers for the bees to refill. The extractor also has a capped spout at the bottom so the honey can be poured out.

The extracted honey gets poured into a 5-gallon container with a strainer on the top to remove any wax or bees or other stuff which may have gotten into it. My dad used to call this strained stuff "slum gum". The container also has a capped spout at the bottom and that is how the jars are filled. Simple process from hive to jar in just a few hours. We extracted for about 3 hours and got about 100 pounds of honey. Community College bees sure work hard!

Hypochondriac Panic Attack- Bee Hive Style

Ever get a pain and decide to search the internet to see what it might be only to discover that the pain could be the beginnings of a rare and terrible disease and then remind yourself that you have other symptoms? Thanks to Web-MD and other sites, it is really easy to self-misdiagnosis or become one of the world's leading hypochondriacs. The internet is really helpful for providing misinformation.

So that's what I did this week with the bees. I misdiagnosed and scared myself and I should know better. I am a librarian by profession and teach information literacy classes to college students. 

 On Tuesday July 1 I went into the hive to see what was going on. The girls had been in that hive for about 10 days. From the outside, I could see plenty of activity but I really wanted to know what was going on inside. So I donned the veil and entered.

I saw some positive stuff inside. I could see 2 full frames of honey and 2 full frames of brood and honey. There were still 3 new frames that hadn't been touched yet. There was another frame that sort of looked ok but caused me some concern.

I take pictures whenever I go into the hive. This helps me to later remind myself of what I saw and lets me enlarge the pictures to take a closer look at stuff. So I took pictures of the frames, closed up the hive and said good night to the girls.

Looking at the pictures on the computer monitor, that one frame just didn't look right. First, the foundation and the cappings are really dark in color. I know that this frame came in the nuc box and was probably used when the guy put the nuc together which would account for some of the coloring, but still it seemed dark. Second, there was capped brood but it was all over the frame, not nicely nestled together in a sort of oval shape with honey on the outside edges. Third, I could see into some of the cells and I saw pupae and larvae in various stages, liquid of some sort, some solid looking bits that were gold in color and some empty cells. 

Grabbing my trusty books, I began to look at pictures and descriptions of bee hive diseases and illnesses. Oh no, looks like foul brood of some type. Nope, wait, looks more like     I "googled" for more information and pictures and came away more depressed. My bees had a disease and I didn't know what one or what to do.

Wednesday morning I decided to ask the experts and posted the picture of my frame to the Northeast New Jersey Beekeepers Association FaceBook page and said I was concerned about this frame. I did not say what my concern was or what my several diagnosises (?) were. Then I waited for the cry from other more experienced beekeepers telling me I had to destroy my hive or quickly medicate the bees or some other action to save them.

Guess what happened? The responses were quick and positive. Nothing wrong with my bees. the experienced beeks said I was being over anxious and what they say in the frame was hatched brood, new eggs and larvae and happy bees.
Big sigh of relief from me.  thanks fellow beeks for keeping this new beek from having a bee panic attack!

Look Ma, No Gloves!

June 21, 1014- Day 3-
I did it! I successfully moved 5 frames from the nuc box into the brood box and did not get stung. Of course I was dressed in a jacket, long pants and a veil, but no gloves. All the experienced beekeepers, Dad included, say not to use gloves because they make you clumsy.

First step- Assemble all the necessary stuff:



• brood box
• lid
• sugar syrup
• top feeder
• hive tool
• bee brush
• smoker
• hat
• veil

Next- Drink some more coffee and wait for the sun to warm up the hive. This is a good move since many of the foraging bees will be out working so there won't be so many bees to disturb.

Light the smoker and let it get a good burn going. I am using Dad's smoker which has a lot of years on it but still works great. Opened it up to find some of his burlap still inside. Thanks Dad!

 Don the gear and get going-

 

Hello Bees

Opening the nuc box

5 frames inside the nuc box

Looking for the queen

3 frames moved out

Brood, honey and workers

There she is. a beautiful italian queen bee
 

Here they are in their new home behind the vegetable garden

 Very proud of myself! No gloves, no stings and they seem to have taken to their new home.

Hint: Take digital pictures of your work. If you don't see the queen or eggs or whatever you are looking for, you may see it when you put your photos on your computer screen and enlarge them. I did not see eggs when I made the transfer, but when I looked at the pictures later, and enlarged them, ta da!...eggs!

What's in a name

My entire life has been spent around honey bees. My Dad was a hobbyist beekeeper who, in his later years, ran a small bee supply shop from his garage. Sometimes when he was working with his hives, he would bring me a drone bee to play with. Drone bees are the males. They don't sting and are usually put out of the hive by the other bees. He would bring one to me and I would let it walk around on my hands until it flew away.

 Sometimes I went with him when we was called to pick up a swarm. Swarms land in the oddest places, a mail box, a bench in front of the library, and they always attracted a crowd. One thing that really bothered him was people saying "Don't you get bitten?" "I don't want them to bite me" "I got a bee bite"

Have you ever seen a honeybee's face? They don't have teeth. They sting from their backside and they only do that when they have no other option because when they sting, they die. OK, so now Dad's pet peeve is mine. That's what the name of this blog is about. Honeybees do not bite!

June 19, 2014- Day 1- While I have many, many years of knowledge, I have practically no hands on experience with beekeeping but that is about to change! This morning, in the pouring rain, I picked up a nuc from a local beekeeper and deposited it in my backyard on the hive stand where it will live. Nuc, short for nucleus hive, is a small function beehive with workers, a laying queen, drones and various phases of eggs and larvae.  Later today or maybe tomorrow, I'll move the girls and their brothers and mother into a new bigger house where they will, hopefully, work hard and live happily and get themselves through the winter. That's my hope for them. Next year, I will hope for extra honey for me, this year, survival is all I want.

Adjacent to my yard there are 2 mature American Chestnut trees which is rare. American Chestnuts were nearly wiped out in the 1950s because of a blight. These trees flower in early June with long strings of blossoms called catkins which are very stinky, not fragrant, just stinky. When the blossoms wither and fall off the tree, they really smell bad and they make a collective mess which has to be raked up. Anyway, the trees are in bloom and the new bees are loving them! At first, we wondered where they bees were going since they were coming back with full pollen baskets but we didn't see them on any ofour flowers. Then we looked up. The chestnut trees were full of bees...my bees! Our family nickname for those trees is "stinky tree" so I may have "stinky tree" honey!

June 20, 2014- Day 2- Decided not to transfer the bees into the real hive until tomorrow. I'm thinking they just need some time to adjust to having moved from their original home. The dog is curious about them. We walked near the hive and watched as they flew around. He was having a hard time keeping track of all of them so he gave up and came back to sit on my lap.