Posting

I have been very busy and not had time to post. I thought I would let everyone know that, yes, I am alive and will post when I get back from Panama.

I would also like to let everyone know I gave a lecture on aerodynamics and honey bee flight to the Forsyth County Beekeepers this past weekend. There were about 113 people there! The talk and Q&A lasted about an hour. In all, I would say it was a success!

That's all for now....

For my Granny

I have been very busy with things and I have not had much time to post on here. My Granny in Florida has been keeping up with my posts and has made the comment that I have not posted in a while. So this one is for her!

I have 8 hives total. I have 6 at my house and 2 at the airport location. I will be moving two hives from my house to another location sometime closer to this fall.

I have gotten a queen castle to raise 3 queens at a time. All you do is put a frame of eggs, a frame of pollen and a frame of honey into it and 14 or so days later you get a new virgin queen. You can then sell them or use them yourself.



I have 4 newly hatched queens. I have one queen in a nuc hive. The three current ones should go on mating flights in the next few days and begin laying eggs by this weekend. I will keep one to requeen a mean hive, and I might sell the other 3. I am also considering trying to overwinter one nuc colony in the event I lose a primary hive. I can always sell it next spring if it makes it through the winter.

I have also had 2 metal hive stands built…. I have built in oil traps at the foot of them to keep ants, earwigs and anything else that crawls/walks off of and out of the hives. I have killed a good 30 bees with these traps. Not sure why those bees were on the ground and trying to crawl back up. Most likely they are already dieing or are deformed and the others kicked them out. I might try to market and sell the stands for $65.

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.