cutout, queen rearing and bottled mead

I started and finished another cutout today. It was in a second story bedroom. I removed the wall and got the bees out. Never found a queen. The comb is small cell and not larger sizes. I then crawled on the roof and we cut into the soffit/box overhang and made sure there were no other bees in there. Just mouse damage.

Yesterday I also bottled the Ancient Orange mead and the Strawberry Chocolate Vanilla mead. Talk about good stuff!!!!!!!!!!

 

This is a combo of both..... I call it sunset mead. Very complex taste and VERY good.

Queen pics and ant/roach/earwig

I have had an ant, cockroach and earwig problem in this hive. I have taken 2 turkey roasting pans and filled them with canola oil to stop them from crawling up the stand.

I have created 2 new nucs, one in a nuc and one in a hive body. I will be testing 2 Instrumentaly Inseminated queens in these to see if we did a good job on them.

We will be doing II on friday or sunday and these bees will have been queenless for 24-72 hours... I will have to destroy any queen cells I find when I cage introduce the new queens.

While pulling frames, I was able to take a picture of 2 queens. Hive 3 which is a carni who is putting out mean daughters and will be pinched very soon (see if you can find her in the next pic):

And I was able to get a good one of the Kona queen from Hawaii:

nuce to hive move, and queen pics

I decided that the nuc had enough time being in a nuc now there was a queen in it.

The brood pattern in the following pic is from my Kona Hawiian queen. I gave them a booster of brood. I would say that is a good pattern, wouldn't you?

wax processing

I have gotten around to cleaning up the junk wax and processing it to clean it up. I washed it in warm water in pantyhose to catch the big chunks. I then put it under a heat lamp in my solar wax melter, as we have not had a full day without rain.

I took that wax that ran off and gave it a hot water boiler bath to get it to melt. All of the trash either floats or sinks. I can skim off the top and scrape off the bottom to get rid of the junk.

All I have left now is to scrape the bottom trash off the block and melt it one more time.

Working and a wild swarm appears!

I was inspecting my far hive at my house and I started closeing everything up. I noticed a lot of bees buzzing around near me. I went back to the porch and looked back and saw the swarm landing on the cinderblock temporary hive stand.

I initially freeked out and though that I had dropped my queen while working with her, but I remembered that I put the only frame I removed in front of the hive, not behind it.

I threw them the best I could with my bee-vac into the nuc I had been trying to get to raise a queen. What a dumb idea. They all immediatly started fighting. I sugarwater sprayed all of them and shook every frame infront of the hive. I also smoked really well....

Don't ask me why I added them to the queenless nuc... I didn't think about the cardboard nuc I had squirreled away in the garage.

4 meads bulk ageing

I have sorbated both the chocolate and joes orange meads to keep them from restarting, and I put them in the freezer and got them below 30 for the night. That should have made most of the yeast, if not all of it, go dormant. The sorbate keeps it from becoming active again.

I also didn't think the chocolate had enough chocolate taste. I added a whole bottle of Hersheys syrup and stirred it up. It was noticable, but not strong. The same with Joes and orange taste. I added 5 cups of quality OJ.

I am going to add some more honey as well. This is known as back-sweetening. I have to make sure it doesn't start fermenting again. That is why I froze it and sorbated it. A lot of people I know are alergic to sulfites, so I am going to try to not go that route.

I added 3 lbs honey to each strawberry mead along with 9 drops vanilla extract to the strawberry vanilla.


Sorbating, freezing and back sweetening is all done.