busy as a...... :)

I have been busy and I apologize for not posting in a while.

I have 5 apiaries now and 26 hives. I am currently doing 2 trapouts, and starting a 3rd today.

I have done 2 cutouts this season and am also getting ready to do a removal from a water meter tonight.

I have officially run out of empty hives. I have 1 nuc left and 1- 10 frame deep with about 8 frames. Other than that, I have no more hive components.

I have extracted all of the honey for this year and ended up with about 30 gallons! Not bad considering I started with only 8 hives!

one more to add to the list

I got a swarm call again last evening and was not able to get pictures due to the fact it was 8:30 pm by the time I could get there.

There was a ball the size of a basketball. I got it. I looked for any stragglers and right above it was the other half of the swarm.... another basketball size!!!!!! I dumped them in too and headed home.

Another swarm call!

I got another call at 5:30 about a swarm of bees in a bush. They were SUPER gentle. The swarm was about the size of a cantaloupe.

Swarm Call

I got a call at 12:30 today with a woman sawing there were honey bees all over the ground and it looked to be like several thousand. I asked her to describe it and she said honey bees in two blobs on the ground about the size of phone books across the street from the high school and on the sidewalk....

I asked her if she knew the difference between yellow jackets that live in the ground and honey bees and she responded "Yes I know the difference.... I am not an idiot. I am alregic to honey bees and not yellow jackets and these are honey bees!"

I got there and sure enough it was a swarm!

Only one problem.... I found the queen and she was lying on the ground like she was hurt..... I dont know how it happened, but I doubt she will make it. That explains why the swarm was on the ground. I placed a frame of eggs in the box from a hive that has a queen I like.... Maybe I can get them to make a new queen....

splits and swarms

I split almost all of my hives this weekend.... Most were more than ready for it as the honey flow is comming early. I was very supprised to find a hive with swarm preps. they were clingy and they had several uncapped and capped queen cells..... found it too late I guess. I still split it and used the queen cells in the splits.

pollen and drones

On the nice days, my bees are bringing in tons of pollen. I have had to do some major movement of hive bodies. Almost all of the lower brood chambers were empty and needed to be moved on top for the queen to lay in and the beed to store food.

I have tons of mature drones and drones in various stages of life. This is great. In about a week, I am going to split all of my strong hives and try to recouperate some of my losses.

I am also waiting on a call from Larry Tate for when we can start instrumental insemination. Should be fun!

cool happenings

I discovered I have lost yet another hive today. I will be spending my spring making splits and recovering my losses instead of being able to sell nucs.

I will also be officially starting artificial insemination this year. More to come on that in the future.

I have 2 bee hives in a country club and they needed to be moved. The people there love them so they built me an awesome stand/platform for them. I am amazed at how involved the people at the country club are with nature. They wanted them near the gardens, so we decided on the location and I told them about my requirements. And this is what they built for me:

A neighbor where I have some hives took a bunch of pictures and asked a bunch of questions about bees last year. She has entered an art contest with my photo.... Pretty cool! It has some iridescence in it that the camera cant pick up.

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Motivation

All of my bees that are still alive are doing really well even with the recent cold snap. The candy boards and mountain camp method really helped.

The problem is now me. I have a bunch of comb with dead bees in it from my losses and I am starting my rotation out. I will be removing 2 frames from every box, making the bees make new comb and then processing the wax. I am just really lazy about it and have quite a few supers in need of processing.

Does anyone have a good way of processing? The way I have been doing it is: boil everything in excess water. Once cooled but still hot, I take a cheese slicer and remove the underside that has all of the trash. I then use a double boiler system on the good wax. This workd well, but takes a really long time. Any suggestions?