Halfway through the Winter

We are about halfway through the winter right now.  I haven't looked into any of the hives lately to make sure they are still alive.  The next warm day we will and probably put a pollen patty in their to start them raising brood again.  Here in Utah where we are located there wont be much pollen before the middle of March.  Once we look in we can see if they still have food stored up or if we need to feed them.  If they have made it this far, we don't want to lose them.

It is also time to start preparing for spring.  Right now you can find many people advertising on KSL to sell their package bees.  Prices are ranging from $69 per package to $90 per package.  I am not sure why the discrepancy in price, they all get their packages from California and most of them come from two main breeders Olivarez and CF Koehnen.  I have also seen some advertised to have Wooten or Pendall queens, but I am not sure if they sell packages or just queens. I have purchased from CF Koehnen and was really impressed.  I don't think I would purchase anything smaller than a 3 pound package because it took all they had to get the hive started. I also don't think I wouldn't spend the extra money on a 4 pound package because the 3 worked out so well.

The other way we are going to try to increase is with our own splits.  I have made about 8 nuc boxes.  These are small versions of a hive that will hold 5 frames instead of 10.  This is where their is quite a bit of uncertainty as I don't know how the hives are looking and how many splits I will be able to make.  I also don't know when to have to queens arrive because I will need a nice day to make the splits and another decent day to put the queens in.  I am going to try and order the queens from Strachan Apiaries.  http://strachanbees.com/about_us.html   I have been wanting to try their queens for a while.  I have been really impressed with the carniolan queens.  They seem to manage the hive well and have less problems with verroa mites. I think I will try to have them delivered close to the first or second week in April.  Hopefully that is early enough to get the nucs going well enough to get a good honey crop, but late enough to have good enough weather to work with the bees.   

The next project is making all the boxes for the hives.  I will post some pictures of the process later.

A couple pictures from our Harvest

Year In Review

This was a fun year for us in beekeeping.  It started off pretty exciting getting the new hives and then getting lucky and catching a swarm.  We were up to 6 hives at that point.  I had a crazy experience and was stung on my neck and went into shock.  I pretty much passed out and so the paramedics came and gave the neighborhood some excitement on a Saturday night.  That freaked us out a little bit and the thought of giving it up about broke my heart.  I decided to take a lot more precautions.  Things were going well until harvest time and I was stung through my gloves.  The great thing is I didn't have any reaction to it, so I don't think I am allergic to them.  I did learned you always need to be careful though. Honey bees are for the most part very gentle but if you don't take precautions they will get you.

We also learned this year that you can have very weak hives.  We had to take from the strong hives and give to the weaker ones in order to help them out.  It was amazing how a couple of frames of bees and brood could help the weak hive start booming.  We didn't get nearly as much honey as we had hoped, but enough to get us excited for next year.

After we had harvested we checked the hives and found that we didn't have a queen in my Dad's hive.  The hive was so large we tried to split it and get two new queens, but Fall is a very difficult time to get hives to accept new queens and they killed both of them.  We combined them back and introduced another one and they killed her as well.  What we didn't realize is that they had raised their own queen but as late in the year as it was I don't think she was mated very well.  Our numbers were decreasing rapidly so we tried to put them into a nuc box (mini hive) and the Queen left and we lost the hive.

Now we are down to 5 hives going into winter.  Some are stronger than others, but we are optimistic they will all make it through.  We will try to make splits and buy a few more hives.  My goal is to get us up to 15 hives next year and do it without braking the bank.  Should be a lot of fun.

For now there isn't much we can do.  I try to read up on stuff and learn new tricks.  I must say this is my least favorite time of year when it comes to beekeeping.  There isn't much you can do for them now, but just hope they are making it through the winter okay.      

Harvest Time

We are getting really excited to harvest the honey this year.  Last year was fun, but with only one hive we really only had enough for our own use and still ran out.  This year we didn't know what to expect since we had purchased 4 new hives and then captured a swarm.  First year hives don't always produce enough extra honey to harvest but we had some that did.  I checked the hive at my place last night and they have a full super capped and ready for harvest.  The two brood boxes are looking really full too, so they should have plenty of food storage for the winter.  The other hives are doing well too.  My guess is by next Saturday we will be harvesting 5 honey suppers, which isn't too bad for new hives.  Each supper will probably produce 2-3 gallons of honey.  We should have some honey to sell if anyone is interested.  We are scheduled to rent the extractor next weekend, so we should have it available after Labor day. We will have 1 pound containers selling for $5 and gallon containers (about 11 pounds) for $45.  It will be about as pure and organic as it comes. We do not use chemicals on our bees. We wont heat the honey so it will be raw and it wont loose the amazing taste of raw honey.  We will put it through a filter just to strain any large wax particles, but it isn't fine enough to strain the beneficial pollen.  I will post some pictures of the process after we get done.  This is one of my favorite times of year, football is starting and its time to harvest the honey.

Nature's Hive     

Video of the Swarm

Here is our video of us catching our first swarm.  I learned a lot and would do a few things differently, but had a lot of fun doing it.  We checked the hive a week after and saw eggs, so we got the queen.  I think we were pretty lucky with how many fell on the ground. 

Capturing a Swarm

We had a pretty cool experience on May 13.  I put my name on the swarm removal list and the next day I received my first call. It came that morning and I had meetings at work until 3:00 p.m.  I was worried I would be too late and sure enough I was.  I was pretty disappointed.  We have a week hive from the nuc we purchased and I figured a good healthy swarm could help strengthen it.  I received another call about 7:00 p.m. and we were off.  Natalie and the girls came with me and we went and put the swarm in a box.  The swarm was a lot bigger than I thought and it packed the nuc box to the brim.  I couldn't get them all in, so I left the box over night and then picked them up in the morning.

The next morning I went early before they started to fly and they were all tucked nicely in the box.  I put them in my SUV (a pickup would have been a little more ideal) and brought them home.  We got them home without incident. I weighed the bees and I figured the swarm was about nine pounds of bees.  This was three times the size of the package we had purchased a few weeks before. I put them in their place and removed the screen from the entrance, the bees came flooding out.  They pretty much covered more than 75% of the exterior of the box.  I realized I needed to get them in a bigger box and it needed to be right away.   It was a lot of fun capturing that swarm.     

I will post the video shortly.  You can see just how graceful I am on my first swarm capture. 

If you ever see a swarm of honey bees, please call me or a local beekeeper.  Honey bees are so valuable to our food supply.  Please do not call an exterminator.  

Installing my first package of bees

Here is a video of us trying to install our first package of bees.  I think it went pretty well.  I guess we will see how the hive turns out. So far it seems to be doing really good (knock on wood).