The first several days after a queen is caged, worker bees will try to create a new queen by manufacturing royal jelly and placing a bed of it in multiple queen cups. Then they drag an egg out of a cell to plant it into the jellified queen cup. The last thing you want is a new, unmarked queen to start laying eggs again. Remove all queen cells until all eggs have metamorphized into larva. After this, you shouldn't see anymore viable queen cells.
Along with the Angels, the Longs, and the O'Learys, we robbed two hives at Plant Kingdom last week. We ended up with eight gallons from this initial harvest. It has been several years since we have had such light honey. It is nearly transparent.
The Farmer's Market was bustling this Wednesday!
Friday, July 29, 2016
Friday, July 22, 2016
Queen Caging Demonstration this Saturday!
Hi Folks, Tomorrow (7/23/16) at 3pm I will be caging two queens up at plant kingdom.
Please come for a free demo if you wish. Call me on my cell if you have questions about directions.
(907)460-6050
Please come for a free demo if you wish. Call me on my cell if you have questions about directions.
(907)460-6050
Saturday, July 16, 2016
Honeyflow at Its Peak!
Have you noticed how heavy your frames and boxes are getting? We are at the peak of the honeyflow now. I will start robbing honey from the supers that don't have any brood in them today to get it extracted and to the market. Honey must be capped (sealed with wax) to be the right moisture content. If the honey is harvested before it is sealed by the bees the honey will tend to sugar (become granular) much faster. I plan on caging my queens in the next week or so. If you want to join me for this free demonstration for those who took my class, please email me at sciencebasedart@yahoo.com and let me know. I will email a confirmation to you with a date, time. I have seen many hives this summer and the best one was the O'Leary family's in Aurora Subdivision. For starting out with bare foundation, I was very impressed with the amount of drawn-out honeycomb, brood production and honey production. Having a Rubbermaid tote to store frames in during the harvest is vital. I put my tote anywhere from 10 to 20 feet from the hive, leaving the lid on. I rob one completely drawn-out and capped honey frame at a time using my bee brush to remove any lingering bees before placing the frame into the tote.
Rubbermaid Tote Image
If you need to rent my extractor please email me. It costs $25 per day and includes 3 decapping forks, 1 hotknife, 1 coldknife, 1 stainless steel double sieve (strainer), 1 - 5 gallon bottling bucket, and a long spatula. If you want to order bottles, now is the time to do so. I order mine from Dadant or Mann Lake Ltd.
Please don't hesitate to email me if you have any questions:
sciencebasedart@yahoo.com
Harvesting Your Honey - An Important Message from Steve Victors
The summer seems to be going well and we are now at the time to start planing our harvest if you have not already done so. As many of you know, many beekeepers harvest in early August and I thought that I would send out this message explaining why that is:
The sweet spot for harvest is timing the fluctuations of two changing factors. The first to consider is the hive population as it relates to the metabolic demand of the hive. To do this we have to look at the hive as a single organism and examine the factors involved. Factor one is the population of the adult bees in the hive and factor two is the amount of brood being raised at the moment. Metabolic demand of the adult bees is dependent upon the temperature of the bees themselves and the warmer they are the more food they will consume. In addition the more bees that there are the more food that they will consume also. At the end of July, both the temperature and the population have reached their peak. The metabolic demand of the adult bees in the hive is highest at the end of July. This situation lasts until high populations begin to diminish through winter attrition. Remember that this is TEMPERATURE dependent and as winter sets in, the bees become colder and the metabolic rate slows down. This can be described graphically as a flattened or truncated bell curve. (A bell curve with a flattened top.) The flattened top stretches through the month of June, July and August.
In looking at the other factor (brood,) it is generally an accepted rule that it takes a frame of honey to raise a frame of brood. Brood raising increases during a nectar flow, and since our flow runs from late June through August, brood raising is heaviest at this time. With these two factors combined, metabolic demand of the hive is highest during the month of July and into August.
Let's turn our attention to the nectar flow. Nectar flow can be described as a bell curve starting in late April and ending in late September. As many of you know, the bell curve starts at zero and ends in zero. The peak of this bell curve is in mid-July. If one simply overlays the bell curve of nectar flow on top of the bell curve of metabolic demand, one can easily see that the portion of the nectar flow curve that stands above the metabolic curve represents our honey crop.
It is interesting to note that the metabolic demand curve does not move much from year to year. The nectar flow curve shifts right or left depending on the season and environmental conditions. It can widen out or it can shrink back down.
The absolute PERFECT time to harvest is where these two graphs cross each other. Since the nectar curve shifts right or left, widens or contracts, traditionally this curve crosses between the first and the tenth of August. You will note in looking at your imagined curve that there is still a nectar flow going on. After the crossing of these two lines, the metabolic demand is exceeding what the bees are bringing in. The wise beekeeper in picking their harvest date will focus on the factors that shift the graph right or left. We are now approaching the three week from August mark.
Now is the time to decide how to manage your queens if you haven't already done so. There are many styles of queen management. I prefer to have no brood in my extracting room. My queen management style is to put the queen in the bottom box of the hive with an excluder over the top of this box so that in three weekstime there is no brood above the excluder. I do this because I want young brood hatching out in preparation for winter. For those that are not planning on wintering, placing the queen in a cage can eliminate ALL brood in the hive in three weeks time.
I do not advocate removing or killing the queen. Loss of pheromones results in lower productivity of the hive and emergency queen cells that make end of season management more difficult. This will also reduce your honey crop.
For those beekeepers in the Anchorage and Valley areas, you should know that our extracting services will be operational, and we will be accepting your boxes from the end of July to the first of September. After the first of September, we generally break down our equipment for the end of the season. We have commercial grade uncapping machines, several large extractors and a fairly efficient filtering system. We run the honey in individual batches, and the honey return to the customer is the same honey that arrives in their boxes. If you choose to use our services, it will be necessary for you to manage your queens so that there is no brood present. Our uncapping machine does not differentiate between a frame of brood and a frame of honey. The frames are loaded into our uncapper one at a time by hand, and we are able to pull frames aside that have brood on them. These frames must be uncapped by hand, and extra charges will be incurred. If you wish to provide your own buckets, that is something we can accommodate. A full schedule of charges and requirements are listed on our website on the Services page.
We hope that this letter finds you well and that your harvests are abundant,
Steve and Donna
https://www.
The sweet spot for harvest is timing the fluctuations of two changing factors. The first to consider is the hive population as it relates to the metabolic demand of the hive. To do this we have to look at the hive as a single organism and examine the factors involved. Factor one is the population of the adult bees in the hive and factor two is the amount of brood being raised at the moment. Metabolic demand of the adult bees is dependent upon the temperature of the bees themselves and the warmer they are the more food they will consume. In addition the more bees that there are the more food that they will consume also. At the end of July, both the temperature and the population have reached their peak. The metabolic demand of the adult bees in the hive is highest at the end of July. This situation lasts until high populations begin to diminish through winter attrition. Remember that this is TEMPERATURE dependent and as winter sets in, the bees become colder and the metabolic rate slows down. This can be described graphically as a flattened or truncated bell curve. (A bell curve with a flattened top.) The flattened top stretches through the month of June, July and August.
In looking at the other factor (brood,) it is generally an accepted rule that it takes a frame of honey to raise a frame of brood. Brood raising increases during a nectar flow, and since our flow runs from late June through August, brood raising is heaviest at this time. With these two factors combined, metabolic demand of the hive is highest during the month of July and into August.
Let's turn our attention to the nectar flow. Nectar flow can be described as a bell curve starting in late April and ending in late September. As many of you know, the bell curve starts at zero and ends in zero. The peak of this bell curve is in mid-July. If one simply overlays the bell curve of nectar flow on top of the bell curve of metabolic demand, one can easily see that the portion of the nectar flow curve that stands above the metabolic curve represents our honey crop.
It is interesting to note that the metabolic demand curve does not move much from year to year. The nectar flow curve shifts right or left depending on the season and environmental conditions. It can widen out or it can shrink back down.
The absolute PERFECT time to harvest is where these two graphs cross each other. Since the nectar curve shifts right or left, widens or contracts, traditionally this curve crosses between the first and the tenth of August. You will note in looking at your imagined curve that there is still a nectar flow going on. After the crossing of these two lines, the metabolic demand is exceeding what the bees are bringing in. The wise beekeeper in picking their harvest date will focus on the factors that shift the graph right or left. We are now approaching the three week from August mark.
Now is the time to decide how to manage your queens if you haven't already done so. There are many styles of queen management. I prefer to have no brood in my extracting room. My queen management style is to put the queen in the bottom box of the hive with an excluder over the top of this box so that in three weekstime there is no brood above the excluder. I do this because I want young brood hatching out in preparation for winter. For those that are not planning on wintering, placing the queen in a cage can eliminate ALL brood in the hive in three weeks time.
I do not advocate removing or killing the queen. Loss of pheromones results in lower productivity of the hive and emergency queen cells that make end of season management more difficult. This will also reduce your honey crop.
For those beekeepers in the Anchorage and Valley areas, you should know that our extracting services will be operational, and we will be accepting your boxes from the end of July to the first of September. After the first of September, we generally break down our equipment for the end of the season. We have commercial grade uncapping machines, several large extractors and a fairly efficient filtering system. We run the honey in individual batches, and the honey return to the customer is the same honey that arrives in their boxes. If you choose to use our services, it will be necessary for you to manage your queens so that there is no brood present. Our uncapping machine does not differentiate between a frame of brood and a frame of honey. The frames are loaded into our uncapper one at a time by hand, and we are able to pull frames aside that have brood on them. These frames must be uncapped by hand, and extra charges will be incurred. If you wish to provide your own buckets, that is something we can accommodate. A full schedule of charges and requirements are listed on our website on the Services page.
We hope that this letter finds you well and that your harvests are abundant,
Steve and Donna
https://www.
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