Kitchen bottling operation

After getting the honey from the hive into a bucket, I needed to bottle the honey for distribution. Honey can be stored in food-grade plastic or stainless-steel air-tight containers for a very long time (centuries in some extreme cases). It shouldn't be stored in containers of other metals because the honey's acidity will oxidize the metal.

We purchased a few 5-gallon buckets and a "honey-gate" - a valve that is screwed onto a hole cut into the bottom of the bucket. The honey gate is designed so that it is easy to quickly change the flow from the bucket which allows bottle fillers (me) to avoid overflowing the bottles.

First, I put a cardboard box under the honey gate to catch all the drips. As well as the honey gate is designed, it isn't perfectly drip-free, and when dealing with honey you have to assume that everything you touch will be sticky at the end. My wife hates a sticky kitchen, and she seemed a bit relieved when she noticed that the honey was dripping into the box and not onto the floor!

I rinsed and dried the food-grade PET bottles, and then just filled them with honey up to the neck. Then I tightly screwed on the plastic cap along with a paper seal. The seal seems to have a bit of adhesive around the rim and helps to keep the jar air-tight. Finally, I wiped off each bottle to remove the honey that inevitably gets on the outside of the jar, and the honey was ready to meet a consumer!

Out of curiosity, I weighed a few of the bottles and found that I was adding more than 1/2 lb. in the 1/2 lb. bottles after subtracting out the weight of the empty bottles. I did measure my honey at only 17% water content which would make my honey slightly heavier than the 18.6% water limit for honey, but I doubt that accounts for all of the difference. Of course, honey from different locations has different proportions of different kinds of sugar as well as differing water content, so it doesn't particularly surprise me that they're a bit heavy filled up to the neck. It's also possible that I was overfilling them. While I think they look best when filled to the neck (not the brim), large operations probably use bottling machines that fill by weight -- but then they probably have bottles that are designed for their average honey density and don't have to accommodate the variation in hobby apiarists world-wide.

How do you get honey out of the honeycomb?

Commercial beekeepers use a specially-designed centerfuge to drive honey out of the comb without damaging the comb so it can be reused. While we have tentative plans to purchase an extractor, the cheapest high quality models (i.e. not the plastic thing from China that WILL break after two years) cost around $300, and the motorized 9-frame radial extractor I have my eye on is more like $1500.

We'll need to sell a lot of honey to fund this kind of capital investment -- at the least, we'll need to have a lot of capped frames of honey to process so the time we save becomes significant. For the 18 frames I had capped, it is very difficult to justify such an expense.

My dad and I had read in various books and websites that it is possible to simply allow the honey to drip out of the comb once the thin wax caps are removed if it's kept at a high enough temperature for a few hours. We figured that if this method didn't work we could always fall back on the old "crush and strain method."

This method failed. Even at around 100 degrees F over night in a "honey room" in my parents' garage, the honey simply would not drip out of the honeycomb. I suspect there's some equation involving viscosity and surface tension that could have predicted such a result.

We then implemented our crush and strain backup plan. My mother and I ripped all the wax and honey out of the frames and dumped it into our uncapping tank. The uncapping tank is set up like a double boiler with a wire grid keeping most of the wax off the bottom of the lower tank so that the honey can drip off the wax into the lower container which is set up with a honey gate so we can empty the tank as it fills up.

This second picture shows the honey gate (propped open with a cork) dripping the honey into a two-stage strainer on a 5-gallon bucket. The strainer removes any small bits of wax and clumps of pollen that are floating in the honey while leaving the honey unheated and unfiltered so it remains "unprocessed." It's not uncommon for beekeepers to use a 200 micron filter which results in clearer honey that is less likely to crystallize, but pushing honey through such small holes often requires heating (which destroys many of the aromatic compounds that give unprocessed honey its amazing taste) and it's an extra step I don't consider necessary at the moment.

In the background, you can see the dehumidifier we ran during the processing operation. Honey is essentially dehydrated sugar water (nectar and some enzymes from bees) so it easily absorbs water from humid air. With the honey open to the air over night, it was important to pull water out of the air so the honey didn't get too watery. Honey is generally defined as having less than 18.6% water -- more than that and it's prone to fermenting. Below 18.6% water content, any yeast and bacteria in the honey can't grow. I used our refractometer to measure the water content of our honey at 17.0% -- a perfect level for honey!

Finally, here is a picture of the smashed honey comb at the bottom of the uncapping tank. You can't see the lower tank under the wax, but it's offset by about 2-3 inches. I left our "honey room" with a five gallon bucket full of honey that weighed around 50 lbs. I left the wax to drip and around 10 lbs. of honey in the bottom of the tank for my parents to finish processing. I have a hard time driving out to their house on week days (30 minutes one way is tough when you have a job and a baby) and they were happy to help.

Hopefully, we can melt down the wax in a double-boiler and make candles out of it later. I don't think we'll have quite enough to be worth the effort this year, but wax stores well and we'll save it up until we have enough for some winter activities.

Up next: my kitchen houses a brief honey bottling operation!

First Honey Harvest

On Friday, August 6, my wife and I opened up Meg (our booming hive) to steal some of the excess honey the girls had collected. We chose 18 of the heaviest, fully capped frames in the hive and Rachel carefully brushed off all the bees with the bee brush. I think she was a little nervous about flinging so many stinging insects onto the ground in front of the hive, but we gave them a little smoke to calm them down, and only had to reinforce the message once or twice when they got too excited. For the most part, the bees just slowly crawled their way back into the hive to join their sisters after their crazy experience with the bee brush!

Rachel must have been particularly rough with one because she got stung through her jeans! Luckily she was wearing the heavy canvas bee suit so she probably wouldn't have noticed stings to the suit, and she didn't even swell up with the sting through the jeans. It's her first sting so her next reactions may be include a little more swelling, but I've found that stings through heavy cloth aren't much worse than mosquito bites. It's the stings to the face and hands that are really rather inconvenient (and easily avoided by wearing your veil and gloves!

After brushing and blowing off all the bees, we put the capped frames into an empty super we kept under a sheet to keep the bees from finding the honey (in the bottom right corner of the right picture). We ended up with 18 frames of capped honey which we stored in a box in our basement over night until I could bring the frames to my parents' house to extract the honey.

In the picture, you can see that a third of the top frame on the right isn't fully capped. Only three frames had any uncapped honey like this, and it is a small enough amount to make little difference in the moisture content of the final honey once it's mixed up. You can also see a gouge in the bottom of the lower frame where Rachel got a bit too enthusiastic about brushing off the bees. This "mistake" required some very tasty cleanup!

Stay tuned for my adventures with actually extracting the honey!

Still one good hive

Both my hives are doing well, and while Meg (the taller one) seems to be stalled at 2.5 full supers, Jo has drawn 70-80% of the fourth box and should have plenty of room for honey going into the winter. Jo is around 80% done capping two boxes of honey in the supers, so I'm looking forward to around 50 lbs of harvested honey from the one hive!

In other news, my dad reports that three of his hives are now queenless. He thinks all three of his hives swarmed, and while he caught one (now doing very well and building up for the winter) the three original hives have neither eggs nor larvae suggesting that they are queenless. The hives are still reasonably strong, so he's planning to purchase three new queens and cross his fingers that they'll build up a good bunch of bees for wintering.

Other than that, not much to report. I suspect we'll be harvesting in two weeks as I want to have most of the honey fully capped to make my life easier when we're harvesting. If too much of what we take is unripe, we could have to run a dehumidifier in the room with the honey to get it back under 18.5% water content (so the honey doesn't ferment).

Moving from collection to processing in the hives

The bees have still been very busy with such consistent beautiful, sunny weather and some great nectar sources. In the bright sun against a backdrop of shaded trees the hundreds of bees zipping in and out of the hives every minute are really fun to watch!

Last weekend, I went through hive Meg and did some reorganizing to convince the queen to stop laying eggs in my honey supers! I simply moved all the frames with eggs and brood down into the bottom four boxes, and replaced them with frames of pure honey in the fifth and sixth boxes. With no cells open for laying eggs at the top of the hive, the queen should stay down in the first four boxes where the bees will be spending the winter.

I noticed that the bees have made a great start at filling up the lower frames, and they've started capping all the frames in the first two honey supers (boxes five and six). I'm still looking forward to around 50 lbs of honey if they cap it properly and continue to backfill into the bottom boxes in preparation for winter. Hopefully all the honey will be capped by mid-august so I can harvest it and get out of the bees' way for the rest of the year.

Jo is still making slow progress on her fourth box, and is about a third done drawing out that fourth box's foundation. I may have to add some extra frames from Meg to top off Jo for the winter, but I'm hoping that with some fall feeding, I can get Jo to fill most of four boxes with honey and syrup without any transfers.

Babies in my honey!

The first picture is a wonderful frame full of honey and about half cured and capped. The bees take nectar from flowers, stick it in the cells, and then process it and evaporate moisture until it's under about 18% water. When the honey is finished curing, the bees add a protective layer of wax to preserve the honey until it's needed.

The second picture is from middle of the same box -- apparently the queen has moved up into my honey supers and is using them for her bee-making activities! I suspected this might happen when the bees filled so much of the bottom two boxes full of frames of pollen, but I was hoping there was still enough room down below to keep the queen happy.

On one hand, this is awfully inconvenient as I won't be able to just steal supers of honey off the top of the hive, I'll have to go through and carefully mix and match frames of honey when I take it off for the winter. On the other hand, I was a bit worried about crowding at the bottom of the hive, and that the bees are using middle frames all the way up for brood rearing suggests that I won't have to worry as much about swarming (although that should be largely finished by now). Practically, I'd have to go through the hive frame by frame anyway, and ensure that I leave enough honey and space for honey so the bees don't starve in the winter.

This development does somewhat dampen my optimism about the honey crop this year. It looks like there will be a lot of honey, and I'm sure the hive has at least 50 pounds stored away already, but I'm hoping to leave 80-90 pounds for the winter and without a more accurate count of individual frames I just don't know what to expect.

In the future, I could use a queen excluder to keep the queen out of the honey supers, but I'm leaning toward letting her roam -- if the brood boxes get stopped up with pollen and honey, I'd rather have her move up than force the hive to swarm, and I'm not working enough hives that it's a HUGE inconvenience to swap back frames of brood when the time comes to harvest the honey.

There will be honey!

Quick update from a week ago -- I went through both hives frame by frame (skipping a few as I found everything I was looking for). Both hives were moving along slowly, both queens were still laying and Jo was still not moving much out of the second box.

I added another box of foundation to both hives bringing Meg up to six and Jo up to four.

Yesterday I look again, this time at a couple frames per box and was very happy with the bees' progress! Meg has 3 boxes 90+% full of curing nectar and capped honey and is working hard on a forth! Jo has almost finished drawing out three full boxes and while there's not nearly as much honey in Jo, there's a decent amount building up on the edges of the brood area.

Later this weekend, I plan to add a seventh (!) medium super to Meg so there's no chance she runs out of room, and I'll swap around a few frames in Jo to try to encourage her to start working on the so-far-untouched fourth box.

At this rate, I'm looking forward to 50-100 pounds of harvested honey depending on the honey flow and how much I can get the bees to backfill the brood boxes in August. I'll probably store some capped honey to give me some more feeding options if they don't collect enough in the early winter and to give me feeding options next spring.

I'm still not allergic!

In hindsight, opening the hives between thunderstorms may have been a poor idea, but I really wanted to add a third box to Jo before she totally ran out of room in the second. On Saturday morning, I sprayed the foundation with syrup, then opened Jo to give the girls more space. Immediately, there was an angry buzz with half a dozen guards head-butting me and stinging me three times! Good news: I'm still not horribly allergic to apitoxin. I did have a quick peak at one of the frames and found eggs, so they're not queenless, they're just not as calm as Meg.

Today I had another look under the covers and while Jo was much more docile, there still seemed to be more angry guards than in Meg when I had a look. I suspect it has something to do with the much slower buildup Jo has experienced, or maybe Jo's queen is just a little hotter than average.

I've got another box of embedded frames ready for each hive, and I've wired another 20 or so. My dad's hives aren't quite as far along as Meg as they're only half done with their fourth box, but they've been collecting nectar like crazy. It's almost surreal (and slightly hazardous) to stand in the middle of their flight paths and watch/hear them zipping past -- a bit like going into hyperspace in Star Wars where each star sounds like a Formula 1 racecar!

Nectar Flow!

Meg and Jo both exploded this week -- Meg's hard at work on her fifth box (4th is 100% drawn out, fifth went on a bit late last Sunday), and Jo is just about done with her second and will receive a third tomorrow morning! I guess that means the nectar is finally flowing -- I just wish I could throw GPS trackers on all the girls to see where they're finding the best flowers!

I noticed that both hives are a bit more touchy than usual -- especially Meg. It could have something to do with the weather, but I suspect that they're moving into "protect the honey" mode and my days of playing with the girls sans veil may be limited for the year.

As for the picture, in my last inspection I noted that I'd put a quarter bucket of scrap comb in the top of Meg so they could clean up all the sticky honey -- they didn't just clean it up, they reworked it into a single mass and attached it to the side of the bucket!

Low Nectar Flow

As my first year with bees, I'm not entirely sure what to expect, so Jim's blog has been invaluable. He's been expecting a strong nectar flow from pollen and basswood, but his latest blog post suggests that he's not seeing it yet either.

That would explain why my bees are making so little progress right now -- they're significantly slowed down as they have to draw out honeycomb before they can put nectar in it, but I've been expecting at least SOME faster progress when the local flowers start producing good quantities of nectar.

http://naturesnectar.blogspot.com/2010/06/my-local-nectar-flow.html

Moving Ahead Slowly

On June 10th, I added a fourth box to Meg since she was about 70% done with the third box. I noticed a lot of burr comb, but didn't have time to take care of it as it started sprinkling in the middle of my inspection.

Jo is still lagging about half done with her second box. I'm just hoping we can build up enough to last through the winter, but worst case, I've got some good drawn comb to start with next year.

On June 20th, I went through all the frames in Meg scraping off burr comb. Overall it wasn't horrible, just a bit of drone comb between boxes except for one frame where the bees had started a second layer parallel to the foundation on one side. After eating a bit myself, I put the honey and brood-filled wax on the top cover for the bees to clean up -- within a couple minutes there were hundreds of girls happily lapping up honey with their cute red tongues!

I stopped feeding Meg as I think the hive has just about stopped taking syrup, but I'll keep feeding Jo since that hive has a long way to go, a much lower population, and seems to still take syrup even if at a lower rate than before. Jo is still only around half done with her second box, so I'll wait a bit longer before adding a third.

Inspection With My Wife

My wife joined me today in an inspection of Meg and Jo! I thought she was just less interested in beekeeping, and I didn't want to push it (it could be argued that I spend too much time with my girls as it is). However, she made it quite clear to me last week that she's only been holding back because she feels like she needs to take care of our baby Brennan while I'm looking at bee-covered frames. We got her sister to watch Brennan while we were inspecting and we had a great time!

We didn't have a ton of time, so we never got around to finding the queens, and we didn't get any good pictures from Jo, but we had a great time watching the girls work.



Meg is doing great and is about half done drawing out the third medium frame. This hive has about a dozen frames of capped brood with a great pattern, and a whole lot of honey/syrup being cured and capped around the brood. We may yet get some significant amount of honey from this hive, although it might ultimately depend on whether I decide to leave them 3 or 4 mediums of honey for the winter (roughly equal to 2 or 2.5 deeps).

One interesting thing I noticed was a frame of 80% pollen with occasional larvae or capped brood where the queen found an open cell. I love all the different colors! This abundance of pollen probably explains why they've largely ignored the single pollen patty I gave them early in the year -- our location must be great for pollen, I just hope it's as great for nectar collection!

Jo is still lagging significantly. The hive is still largely confined to the first box, and I'm still worried about them building up by winter. They're not taking much (if any) syrup, and while brood patterns now look good and I can't find anything else wrong with the hive, there could always be something I'm missing that is preventing their successful expansion.

Given Meg's great progress, I took a frame of capped brood from Meg and added it to Jo's brood chamber. The capped brood take very little maintenance, and when they emerge, they'll add hundreds of new bees ready to draw out comb for future generations. To do this, I had to knock all the bees off the frame first so they didn't get in cross-hive fights inside the hive. I bumped the frame sharply on the ground, then wiped off all the remaining bees with some long grass. It was fun to watch all the bees fanning their Nasonov glands at the entrance to guide the poor nurse bees home. The nurse bees were initially clumped up together, but I prodded them a bit, and they all started marching straight home!

Tomorrow, I'll return with some new syrup for both Meg and Jo (Meg is almost out and Jo's is a bit old as they aren't taking it).

A peek under the lid

My mum says I need an electric fence to keep me out of my beehives...

I had a quick peek under the top covers today, and since Meg's second box is over 80% drawn out, I added a third. Meg has brood in both of the first two boxes, and some great heavy uncapped frames of honey/sugar water.

Jo is worrying me a bit. After adding a second box, I think the population has contracted (or more bees than usual were out foraging) and there are only 6 frames of bees at this point. They've actually stopped clustering around a couple frames of drawn comb! There's a significant amount of capped brood though, so the population should be growing in the next couple weeks, and I am convinced that if I just leave it alone, they'll slowly build up to strength. I might have to feed them much more than Meg to go into winter with enough food to last until April, but unless there's some bad disease I'm missing, Jo should be fine.

One more interesting note, both hives suddenly became sticky with propolis this week. This is expected, but I find it interesting that after a month with no noticeable propolis, they both got sticky at the same time within a week or so. There must be some source of sap that suddenly became appealing.

Queen Trouble

After a couple weeks had passed, my inspection showed that Meg had immediately drawn out and started laying in a number of frames, but while Jo was drawing comb almost as fast, there were only a couple cells with eggs, eggs on the sides of cells and multiple eggs in some cells. There were also a number of queen cups on some of the frames suggesting that the bees were trying to raise a new queen.

With no improvement the next week, I purchased another Minnesota Hygenic queen and added her to the hive. She's been laying wherever she can, although without a good brood pattern to start with, she's been rather limited in the amount of drawn comb available to her. It's starting to open up a bit as new comb is drawn out, but it will be a few weeks before her brood really starts emerging and the hive population takes off.

In the meantime, many of the frames are deformed from the queen cells, and some of the cells have been enlarged to accommodate the larger drones. It looks to me like there is enough consistent capped worker brood that the hive has only been set back a few weeks and it should take off mid-June, but I'm not expecting any excess honey from this one. I've been considering adding a frame or two of capped brood from Meg, but I'll probably learn more by watching how this turns out than by making any more manipulations. I did move a frame of undrawn foundation to the middle of the drawn frames to try to alleviate the honeybound state. They're almost done drawing out this comb, and in two weeks, I should be able to use this frame to judge the queen's laying pattern.

Meg is 60% finished drawing out a second medium box, and there are eggs and curing honey in both boxes. I'll probably be adding another box next weekend as long as the bees continue drawing out comb in the next week's warm and wet weather.

One other thing I noticed is that Meg is taking almost a gallon of syrup a week, where Jo wasn't touching their syrup. Jo also stopped drawing out comb as fast, and I suspect the lack of thousands of new bees every day as well as a few weeks without a queen has slowed them down more than I'd hoped. I removed the second hive body I'd added to Jo to put the feeder directly above the main cluster. I hope this helps them to take as much syrup as possible to stimulate more wax production so we can open up some more space for brood and further stores.

Installing Bees

Apivia -- [ey-pi-vahy-uh, ey-pi-vee-uh] n. "Bee road" -- my journey with beekeeping.

Thus begins the record of my beekeeping adventure.

No, I'm not going to write like that all the time, but it seemed like an appropriate cliche to throw in the start of a new beekeeping blog (as if there aren't enough of them out there already).

I installed 2x 3-lb packages with Minnesota Hygienic queens. My wife immediately named them Meg and Jo, inadvertently giving me permission for at least 4 hives (I wonder how many characters are mentioned in Little Women...).

Meg's queen started laying right away, but I suspect Jo's queen flew away during the installation, and I had to introduce a new Hygienic queen a couple weeks later. All is well as last Sunday (May 9) when I inspected the hives, Meg had 7 frames with capped brood, and Jo had at least one frame with dozens of new eggs. Meg is significantly ahead of Jo, but they're both starting to draw out foundation in their second brood box so they're well on their way to making me some honey by Fall!