Sweet Rewards

Just like the hokey-pokey that’s what it’s all about.

There are people who would call us nuts for making roughly a quarter million stinging insects our close personal friends. At the height of the summer, a full beehive houses between 50,000 and 60,000 honeybees and weighs roughly 300 lbs. We overwintered 2 colonies in 2019 and they roared into 2020 like most of us, feeling great and not realizing what was coming down the road.

Our plan was to turn 2 hives into 4 by splitting each colony. So we planned and made new hive body parts over the winter, feeling pretty good about the whole situation. The bees had other plans. At the risk of taking liberties with biology, the honey bee as an individual is of course an organism, but the colony is also an organism. A bee on its own can not survive for any period of time outside of the colony structure. The queen bee is responsible for laying eggs, drones are responsible for mating with unmated queens in the area, and workers are responsible for everything else, including the reproduction of the colony.

A colony reproduces by swarming. Workers decide that hey, it’s getting a little tight in here, we have enough resources, let’s take half of us and our queen and peace the f out. Prior to doing that, they turn one or more larva into new potential queens so that the remaining part of the colony has a way to keep going and they pester the old queen so she can’t lay in any cells. Once the new queen larvae are going, they all up and leave in search of a new home.

The challenge for a beekeeper is to split the hive into two hives so they don’t run out of space and swarm. We did that. So far so good. And then the colonies decided that they still didn’t have enough room and swarmed anyway. Cue Patchy furiously making new hive boxes and frames so we had space to catch the swarm and put them. We ended up keeping one swarm and calling another bee keeper to offer up the second one because we just didn’t have enough hive parts to keep a 6th hive.

To complete the colony reproduction story, the colony that was left queenless with only queenly larva to sustain it, holds a battle royal (get it???) for the new queen. The first new queen bee to emerge in the hive sends out a call to the rest of the bees in the hive. It’s called piping and she’s essentially saying, “Come fight me, bitches!” Any other queens that have hatched in that hive will pipe back and then it’s on like donkey kong. She will make her way through the hive, stinging any other queen larva through the cell wall and killing them. And she’ll fight any other hatched queens to the death. Then she’ll depart on her mating flight, mate with as many drones as possible while she’s out there, return to the hive, and start laying.

Needless to say, startup costs for raising bees are not cheap, even when you build the hives yourself. Or as my instructor put it in the first beginner’s bee class I took, “If you like gizmos and gadgets, this is the hobby for you!” I almost ran out of the room. Because I do not like gizmos nor gadgets, especially if they’re single purpose and expensive. But I do like honey and think that bees are pretty cool. And once you’ve got all of the woodenware and are set up, the annual costs reduce as you head into maintenance mode and discover ways to do things cheaper. Though the instructor was right, there are about a billion doodads you can buy to help you keep bees.

Bee dock made from salvaged parts

One of the doodads that’s unique to our situation is the requirement that our bees float. Enter the bee dock. We salvaged most of the parts for this contraption from behind our house from stuff that floated downriver during hurricane Floyd in 1999. The poles were left over pieces of fence pipe from our dock anchor project.

We also salvaged this sweet rowboat and turned it into a planter. Modeled by Otto in his younger years.

Well if you manage your hives and don’t run into any major issues with your bees and you have a decent nectar flow for the year, in June or July and possibly again in September you’ve got some work ahead of you. We ended up harvesting two full and two partial honey supers, about 30ish frames of honey this year. We use a queen excluder to keep the queen down in the brood chambers and harvest what’s on top of that. Some people take all of the honey frames and then feed their bees sugar water. We leave them any frames below the queen excluder, which is at least 10-14 frames of honey, because if honey is nutritionally better for us than sugar water, then it’s obviously better for the bees as well.

Clean your equipment before use, because nobody likes botulism.

Well. . . I guess the plan was to take pictures of the whole process from start to finish. Sometimes plans go awry and this is the only picture we took. This is the honey extractor and a Home Depot bucket with soapy water. The start of the process is obviously cleaning your equipment so that no one gets food poisoning. And then we got all excited about our first honey harvest and completely forgot to take any other ones.

But the process goes like this, once you pull the frames from the hives and get the vast majority of bees off, (there are always going to be a few stubborn bees who accompany you back to your garage) you cut the face of the cells off, called the cappings, and place the uncapped frames in the extractor. The extractor has specific slots for each frame and extractors can hold anywhere between 2 and 24 frames depending on the size of the extractor you use. Then you turn a crank and spin the frames for about 10 minutes until centrifugal force pulls all of the honey out. Repeat until finished.

Once the honey is in the extractor, it flows out of the gate at the bottom into a food safe, not Home Depot, 5 gallon bucket that has a strainer at the top. The strainer catches any wax and bee parts but has holes big enough that the pollen goes through. Once all of the honey has been strained into the bucket, it’s closed with a lid because honey is hygroscopic (absorbs water from the air). And then let the honey rest until it’s time for moisture testing and bottling.

All of those empty frames head back into the garage with the stubborn bees who refused to leave the pulled frames. You might be tempted to open your garage door to let those bees out. This would be a bad idea. Because opening the garage door is a one way endeavor at this point and would be like lighting a bright shining neon sign that says Free Honey! to every bee in a 5 mile radius. Another thing that would be a bad idea (ahem Patchy) is to open the garage door so the dog can come in and hang out in the garage while you’re down there and then forget to close it when you come back into the house. There is nothing like the resounding sound of a screw up like the audible hum of 50,000 bees in your garage. Because at that point, you just have to leave the door open and wait for them all to leave.

24 hours later, bees still trying to depart the premises.

All’s well that ends well though. The bees eventually left the garage and we ended up bottling 92 lbs of honey for our first tasty harvest.

That was the literal buzz around The Hive this past July. What do you think? Is bee keeping a hobby you’d pick up? What would you do if you opened the door between your house and your garage and heard an incredibly loud buzzing noise?