Getting ready to harvest

We get our honey via two methods. One is through commercial pollination services, which may pull as many as 15 or 20 different crops in a season. The second method is from our own bees!

In this area, we harvest only once a year. The goal is to leave 60-80 pounds of honey on the hive for the bees to winter-over on, and we take the rest. It can be a bit tricky to guestimate 60-80 pounds, simply because there is a fall honeyflow that the bees are able to collect from. Just like a standard farmer, we have to be able to judge the honey potential of the fall crop, before ever knowing what the weather will be like!

However, judging from the weight of the hives, it looks like we will be able to bring in 200-300# of honey, all from the 3 hives that survived the winter. Yippee!

The honey in this area is a wildflower honey, consisting of Black Locust, Linden, Skunkweed, Maple, Dandelion, Berry, Clover, Crabapple, Alfalfa, and whatever else is blooming within a 2-mile radius that the bees decide is tasty. So far, it has always been a light-colored honey. (Some parts of Maryland also have Tulip Poplar, which is a dark honey.)

The weather is looking good, and I hope to bring the honey harvest in before the rain that appears to be scheduled on Wednesday. Between now and then - mostly sunny skies, 80 degrees (not too hot, yet the bees will be flying).

The trick is to pull the honey off quickly, with minimal fuss to the bees. If I have to chase bees off the honey, they clue in to the fact that loose honey is moving around, and ALL the hives will try to get a piece! If the bees are in the field, I can usually get in and out quickly. Hence, a sunny day is perfect for honey collection.

To extract the honey, I scrape the "cappings wax" off the honey (the top layer of wax holding the honey in the comb.) I have a huge centrifuge that beekeepers call an "extractor" (nobody said we were creative in naming objects). The centrifuge spins the honey out against the wall of the extractor, leaving the comb in one piece. Then I return the comb to the bees, and they lick it clean.

It is said that in the time it takes bees to produce 1 pound of wax, they could have produced 7 pounds of honey. It is in both my interest and theirs to salvage the comb and give it back to them to fill again!

Anyhow, back to work for me. If you are interested in "first dibs" on our local honey, please subscribe to our email list. The signup form on our homepage is for the general list, but it will send you a link for a "local" email list. We will be notifying members of the local list first when honey from our own hive is available, before making it available to the general public. (And don't worry about spam - we do not sell, lease, or otherwise distribute our list, and we typically send out one news update and one recipe each month.)

Increasing the number of hives

Many of you probably already know, we went into the winter with 15 hives, and came out with 3. We weren't hit by the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Instead, we had a warm December and January, then two solid months of near-freezing temperatures. The queen had started laying eggs during the warm spell, and when the cold hit, the bees hunkered down on top of the brood nest in an effort to keep them warm. When they hunker down, they don't move around the hive to eat the winter honey stores. So, the bees starved to death trying to keep the brood nest warm, even though they had a hive full of honey!

We usually increase the number of hives by purchasing packages of bees from other beekeepers. A "package" is a wooden box with two mesh sides filled with approximately 3# of bees, and a queen is introduced to them in a little wooden box. The beekeepers who create "packages" shake bees into these mesh-sided boxes from several hives. It confuses the bees a bit, and gets them to accept the new queen a bit better. The packages can then either be picked up on-site, or they can be shipped. Let me tell you - when several packages of bees arrive at the local post office, they will give you a call as soon as they come in and ask you to pick them up right then - even at 3AM!

However, packages are pretty much unavailable due to CCD. The large pollination services who were hit hard (up to 100% mortality in some cases!) bought up all the packages early in the spring, leaving nothing for us small guys. So, this year I am making "splits" off my own hives.

A "split" is a couple frames of brood and a frame of honey from an existing hive. These frames are placed into an empty hive, and a new queen is introduced. It forms a weak hive, that hopefully will turn into a strong hive by the end of the summer. I cannot get any honey off a split this year, but assuming it survives the winter, I can get honey off it next year.

I have been able to purchase queens, even though I cannot find packages. Some beekeepers specialize in raising queens, and really get into the genetics of it all. They ship queens in little wooden boxes with one mesh side, about the size of two fingers placed side-by-side. The queen has a few attendent bees placed with her, and a sugar fondant plugs a hole in the side. The queen is then shipped overnight to her destination. The attendents make certain she eats and is kept warm.

I have one hive that came through the winter strong, had a quick buildup of bees in the spring before the main honeyflow, is bringing in lots of honey! This hive is not quite as gentle as I would like, but otherwise has all the characteristics of a good hive that is resistant to mites. (I am trying to build a mite-resistant apiary so that chemical treatments are unnecessary!) Because of the problems finding bees this year, I decided to try to make new queens from this single hive!

The method I choose involves placing a frame of fresh eggs from good hive into a hive that does not have a queen, and letting the bees raise multiple queens from the single frame. Before the queen cells hatch, they are redistributed to queenless splits. The new queens have the genetic stock of the good hive, even though they were raised by other bees. Since one of my splits rejected the queen I originally gave them, I expect them to raise multiple queens from the frame of eggs I just gave them!

Finally, after going through my hives yesterday, I found a pleasant surprise! Somewhere, a hive had a swarm, and it decided to settle into one of my empty hives! I know my strong hive swarmed on me a few years back and settled into a hollow tree across the street from me. I am hoping this swarm came from that tree, and thus is survivor stock - much desired in the beekeeping world today! (Survivor stock is a hive that is able to survive a mite infestation without resort to chemical treatments.) The best part is that this is a free hive - I did not have to pull frames of brood or honey from any of my other hives, or purchase a queen, or purchase a package.... The queen is going to be a nice young queen, who should be good for a few years!

Anyhow, after going through my hives yesterday, I realize that honey from my own hives will be limited in availability. With luck, I'll be able to pull 2-300 pounds, mostly off one hive. If you are interested in purchasing honey that is local to Mount Airy, MD, I highly recommend you signup for our local email list. The local email list will be getting first option on honey from my hives.

For everyone else - I have already contacted other Maryland beekeepers, and I believe I will be able to get more local honey this year than in the past. If so, it will be available around mid- to end-July. I will put the word out on the general mailing list once it is ready to ship!

Upgrades to the website are almost complete!

We are upgrading our software to the newest version, which will hopefully make things run a bit more smoothly for our customers, and the admin should be easier. As part of the upgrade, we are moving to a new webhost, and have vowed to update the blog on a more regular basis!

Over the next several weeks, I would like to use this blog in part to answer common questions from our customers. Eventually, they will be incorporated in our FAQ, but a blog may be a more convenient method to comment on current topics, such as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), or when we will be collecting honey from our bees.

If there is a future topic you would like us to include, please let us know either through this blog or via email!