BlueRidgeBee

  As you can see from my posts, being a Beekeeper has lots of trouble and heartache. There are times of great joy as well. These times come in the form of harvesting honey. I have gotten fairly adept at harvesting honey from my hives. It can be very messy and lots of work but the end result is liquid gold 😊 I recently harvested honey from my one remaining hive. See the previous post about how I got 20lbs of honey from the hive that swarmed. I don't sell honey, right now anyway, so this is just for my wife and I and our family and friends. I will try to detail the process I go through to extract honey on this post. Many people take their supers in to a local bee supply store and pay to have them extract the honey, but I prefer to do it on my own. First we get suited up and get all our equipment ready for extracting honey. As you see we load the wheelbarrow with a container, smoker, brush and blower. Sometimes I get the bees off a frame at a time and put them in a container, or some...

It has been a roller coaster ride with my one hive that has been so aggressive and large. I worried that they were too large to make it over the winter, but they made it. I worried they they were too aggressive to handle, and at times they have been. I worried that they were going to swarm, and at first I was able tot thwart a swarming but now they have gone. Good news is my other hive is thriving. When a hive swarms they take the queen and half the worker bees with them and look for a new place with larger accommodations. I believe that the bees that were left in my strong hive joined the other hive making it much stronger, because my strong hive is dead. I checked on it this week and there were very few bees left and no brood. Good news they left me a bunch of capped honey. So I quickly harvested that honey before it gets robbed or hive beetles destroy it. I could see some beetle larvae already. Without the workers to take care of the hive it will be destroyed. I also took some of th...

 It's early Spring and the flow is starting with all the blooms around our part of the world. My hives have made it through the winter and are large and strong. Especially one hive, the one that has always been so active. The one that my wife and I both got stung by several  times. A strong aggressive hive makes for lots of honey production so I don't mind. But the other day I came home to find this! This means they are crowded and thinking about swarming. OH NO!  I quickly got another medium super and put it on to give them room. Also, I called the local owner of the bee store where I shop and he told me that a queen excluder can cause this as well because the queen is running out of space to lay eggs. So I also remove the excluder and then I took the top board and scooped them up and dumped them back in the top. They looked better with in the hour.   The next day they looked very good, back to normal for this hive anyway.         ...

 We made it through the cold days of winter and are having some days in the 60s and 70s here in the Upstate of SC. I just finished a treating my bees with Formic Pro a formic acid type treatment. Both hives are looking very strong going into the Spring and honey flow season. I am excited to see if we get a lot of honey this year.  I was worried about one of my haves because it was not very active compared to my other hive which is very aggressive. But yesterday I opened both hives to remove the Formic Pro treatments and good news it is doing very well. As you can see from the pictures below it has good brood, honey and pollen. This is a sign for a very healthy hive. I do not look for the queen in my hives, I just look for evidence of the queen and good brood is evidence. If there were no brood or drone brood only I would be concerned and know that there is a problem. Yesterday it got up in the low 70s in the afternoon and they were quite active. Looks like it will be a great y...

 Winter Lock-down Well it is cold and drizzly today and the bees aren't doing much. In the winter they spend a lot of time in lock-down mode just staying warm in the hive. When the sun comes out and the temp gets above 50 degrees you will see some of the ladies adventure out to see if there is any pollen or nectar to be found. This is the time you have to watch them closely as they can starve to death. I had a hive starve to death last year so I am very cautious. The best thing to feed them during this time is fondant. Fondant is not liquid so does not freeze and is pure carbohydrate. They don't need pollen during the winter as you do not want to promote building the brood at this time. In early spring you can give them some pollen. There are many makers of fondant or recipes to make your own. You must follow the directions for making it precisely as some forms can hurt the bees. A fondant patty ready to feed the bees. I just break it up and put it under the top cover and they...

 Harvest Time I have to be honest, keeping bees is a lot of work and trouble. If you don't believe me just read my previous posts. So why do I keep on doing it. Because I love honey. There is no better honey than that which is collected around your own home. We decided to harvest some honey a couple weeks back and we got some excellent honey. We only harvested 6 frames and got about 15 pounds of the liquid gold. We are not in it for profit but for personal consumption. I enjoy this being a hobby and if I add more hives it will become a JOB!  So the first this we do is go and collect  the honey super that we want to harvest from. A cordless blower comes in handy to get the ladies out of the super, it makes them a bit mad though.     Next we have to take the caps off, I use an uncapping fork. It is inexpensive and once you get used to it can become easy. It works well for me only doing 6 to 10 frames.   Next we have to spin out the honey. We bought a two fra...

 My hives are really doing great this summer and producing lots of honey. They are also growing very strong. Especially one hive that has become very aggressive. So aggressive that I have thought that maybe they are Africanized. Most hives send out a few guards to warn you off when you are working with the hive but this one sends out 20 to 30. I have one deep and 3 supers on this hive and it continues to grow. This is a good problem to have but I got a little careless recently and got a bit stung. Getting stung is a common event when bee keeping. Sometimes I will swell a little sometimes not at all. Not sure the reason. On Sunday a week ago though I was working this hive and they were attacking me and one girl found a little hole I had in my netting around my face and stung my forehead. At first it didn't seem too bad and actually my hand looked worse because it received several stings. I took Benadryl and my hand was going down but suddenly I noticed what felt like swelling around...