2022 Alaska Beekeeping Workshops

2022 Interior Beekeeping Workshop Schedule:

Fairbanks - March 19th & 20th (Both days for a total of 8 hours) - Monroe Catholic School

615 Monroe St, Fairbanks, AK 99701

1:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Syllabus:

What is beekeeping? How much honey will I harvest?

How much will this cost me?

• Equipment necessary to keep bees in Alaska
• Biology and races of honeybees
• Members of the hive and their duties
• Where to obtain bee equipment. New, used or building your own equipment.
• Preparing equipment for the arrival of bees

Insulation, feeding bees properly
• What to do when the bees arrive
• Is my queen marked? (queen marking tool)

Hands-on Projects:

1) Management of honeybee colonies in Alaska, The Beekeeper's Calendar

2) Constructing a hive in class

• Running 2-Queen Hives
• Swarming and how to prevent it
• Honeybee diseases
• Extracting your Alaska honey
• Wintering Honeybees 
• Storing your equipment
• Beeswax candle making, lip balm, and lotion bar manufacturing

Cost per family $160.00 for Fairbanks and $180.00 per family for Delta

Includes your own copy of our Beekeeping Handout Book

Door prizes: 1 free package of live honeybees, miscellaneous beekeeping tools, a free consultation with Dawn Cogan, a free extraction tools rental

REGISTRATION:

To register, email Dawn Cogan at dcogan1@alaska.edu and let me know how many people are in your party, which workshop you are registering for, and your phone number so I can call you to answer any workshop questions as well as discuss payment options.  

End of the 2021 beekeeping season - overwintering your honeybees!

This is a very strange year and definitely one of the very best honey years I've seen in 17 years of keeping honeybees! What's up with all this August rain, though?

Hopefully, you checked this blog and removed all the capped honey before this monsoon started!

Wrapping up the season can be facilitated two very different ways:

1) Wintering over your bees: Please check out the website of my friends, James and Lisa Harlow. Last year they wintered over five out of five colonies successfully. 

https://rosehipsandhoney.com/bringing-overwintered-honeybees-out-in-the-spring/

You will find that mite treatment, elevation, humidity, proper ventilation, and nutrients, as well as an insulated structure, are key to wintering success. Lisa has some great photos on her blog.

2) Colonies that aren't Russian or Carniolan have a lower wintering survival rate because they do not create as tight of a cluster. Colonies that have not been treated for mites or had all the honey removed and replaced with sugar water and a sugar cake will have less wintering success as well. These colonies should be shop vacuumed into water and recycled by being added to compost or garden soil. The soft organs become part of the soil while the exoskeletons become the most lightweight, organic vermiculite available.

I plan to winter some of my colonies and will report on progress from time to time throughout the winter months.

I clean up any equipment not in use and store it outdoors so it doesn't mold, placing a bottom board on bricks so none of the hive pieces sit in standing water. Then I set a queen excluder on top of the bottom board, stacking multiple boxes filled with drawn-out honeycomb on top of the queen excluder. A telescoping lid is placed on top of the top box. Under a house or shed eave is a great place to store stacks of hive bodies this way because it makes for easy access in the spring before the snow melts completely.

Seriously, read Lisa's blog! You'll learn lots of tricks for wintering over honeybees!

Happy harvesting!!!

Humongous Honey Flow & Finishing up the Season

Out of 17 years of keeping bees in Alaska's interior, 2021 has been one of three BEST seasons! Our honey flow has peaked and will continue throughout August or until temperatures drop below the middle 40s outside the hive. 

We pulled one deep and three medium honey frames this past weekend. After extracting the honey, we have 3.5 gallons from these five frames. When robbing honey, we bring our spray bottle to mist the bees with 1:1 or less sugar water to distract them from our harvesting activities.

Using a tote with a lid placed 20-50 feet away from the hive(s), we take one frame at a time out of the hive, make sure both sides are capped/sealed, tap and brush the bees off of both sides of the frame and place the frame into the tote, replacing the lid as quickly as possible.

We are careful to rob only frames with capped honey cells to ensure the honey is 17% or less moisture content. This affects how soon the honey becomes sugared. The less moisture content, the longer honey remains in a liquid state. Heating honey much over 100* kills valuable enzymes needed for digestion. We never heat our honey, only using gravity to extract the raw liquid gold.

After the honey is extracted, the sticky frames are given back to the hive from which they came so the bees can clean up the frames. Frames that are not sticky are much easier to handle and store through the winter months.

Our honey extractor and accompanying tools can be rented for $25 per day. Just shoot us an email at alaskabees&brew@gmail.com

Any colonies not being wintered over will require caging the queen. Our next blog entry will have tips on wintering honeybees and a possible wintering workshop date. 

We will demonstrate queen caging on Friday, July 30, 2021. Please email us if you want to sign up to attend this demonstration. We will email the location address to the first 15 people who sign up. All participants must wear a bee suit. alaskabees&brew@gmail.com

When selling honey, we properly label any containers with our name and contact information.

 

June 2021 - Swarm Season

What a beautiful season we have underway! 

Here are some tips on what we are doing right now with our colonies.

We have moved all hives to their permanent locations.

Hive checks are being completed every 10-12 days during the warmest time of the day.

June is traditionally the SWARMING SEASON!

We have found a couple colonies queenless in the past couple of weeks. This is determined when no eggs are found in open honeycomb cells. Queenless colonies should have multiple queen cells at various stages.

We choose a single queen cell that is the largest/longest and leave that one while removing all other queen cells and cups.

Our hope is a new queen will emerge and spend the first 3-5 days mating with drones from a neighboring colony. Hopefully, during our next hive check, we will find new eggs and some larva.

If we do not find any evidence of a new queen, our chances of having a healthy colony are greatly diminished. We can do one of the following:

1) Call Dale Lupton for a new queen 907-378-1455 and if he is out of queens, we have a queen shipped here via Fed Ex. Here's where we like to order queens: https://www.koehnen.com/

2) Another Good Option: We can take a frame from another colony that has a queen cell (either capped in the pupa stage or at least that contains a bed of royal jelly) and tap all the bees off the frame. Then we place this frame with various stages of brood (eggs, larva, and pupa, with one queen cell) into the queenless hive. 

 3) Last Resort Option: We can combine colonies to make sure the queenless colony does not completely fail. This is done by draping a couple sheets of newsprint over the top of the healthy colony and cutting 1-2 inch slits in the paper. Then we place the queenless colony hive bodies on top of the newsprint. This allows the bees to develop a mixed family gradually as the bees eat through the paper.

This gives both colonies an increased population of foragers for the remainder of the season.

Entrances are completely removed now!

During Hive Checks:

We continue to move slowly through each of the frames, starting on one side (away from the brood nest) checking each frame for evidence of a queen. 

If we see eggs, larva and pupa, we know we are 99% sure we still have a healthy queen.

If we don't find the queen, we are not concerned as queens usually do a pretty good job hiding from us.

We keep the area in front of our hives free of weeds and grass so the entrance is wide open. Bees will be rushing in and out of both entrances with the majority utilizing the bottom entrance.

When temperatures reach 80* or higher we lift the outer lid (only in the front of the hive) and place a stick or 10-penny nail diagonally across the front corners of the top hive box to help the bees with air circulation.

We continue to ensure our colonies have a good water source nearby. If you are providing a container, be sure to have twigs or rocks in the water so the bees don't drown. 

ANT PROBLEMS:

Ants like sweet things and bee hives can attract ants. We have used the following methods to remove ants:

1) We sprinkle cinnamon around the ground base of the hive.

2) We use a kiddie pool to set the hive in and fill it a quarter of the way with water, again, making sure to put twigs, wood, rocks, moss in the water so the bees don't drown.

ADDING HONEY SUPERS:

We will start adding additional boxes (medium honey supers) in the next couple of weeks. For our colonies, the dates for adding these boxes will range from June 23rd to June 30th.

We expect to have full frames of honey by the end of June or the first week of August.

Adding Bee Space, Insulation Removal, Entrance Reducer, Pollen & Sugar Water Stores, Moving Bees

 Two ways to give your bees more space include:

1) Add a second brood box below the original box. We want to keep the eggs, larva, and pupa warm so the first box full of brood is taken off the bottom board and set aside. A second box is added on top of the bottom board. The box full of brood is placed on top of the new box.

2) Remove inside insulation and replace it with frames for the bees to build comb on and for the queen to lay eggs.

INSULATION:

Outer brood box insulation is still needed however the inner insulation boards have now been removed.

POLLEN & SUGAR WATER STORES:

We are seeing lots of tree pollen being carried into the hive by our bees at this time. They no longer need pollen patties until a three or more day period of cold/rainy weather. Our bees have stored a couple heavy frames of sugar water. We don't want our honey made of sugar water. Rather, we want our bees to start foraging for natural nectar. As soon as we see lots of dandelions, we know it is time to stop feeding sugar water. We gave all of our colonies their last sugar water this week. 

Folks with top bar hives should feed sugar water to bees until mid-June to ensure they can build out plenty of honeycombs.

REDUCING THE ENTRANCE:

Our entrance reducers are now set at the middle setting. If it drops below freezing, we will reduce entrances to the smallest setting.

MOVING HONEYBEES: 

It's important to realize we can only move bees three feet to keep them from getting lost when trying to locate their hive. If you move hives from one place on your property to another place, they will go back to the original place and never find their way back to their colony. If you must move your colony, a minimum of three miles as a crow flies is the minimum distance you can move them to keep them from returning to a previous hive location to find no shelter/home.

We have moved ten colonies this year. We wait until later at night or very early in the morning to make sure all the bees are in the hive. We screen off both the bottom and top entrance of the hive and ratchet strap the entire box including both lids and the bottom board. The hive is lifted by the bottom board, not the ratchet straps to ensure the hive components don't slide apart, allowing the bees to escape. The hive is placed in the back of a truck and driven at least three miles away.

Recently, we had to move five colonies from Cold Climate Research Center because a neighboring housing manager said last year's bees chased a couple people. Even though I explained the nature of bees with regards to their behavior at the beginning, middle, and end of the season, he still got multiple friends to call and complain about the bees. Honeybees are not very aggressive in the spring and middle summer because they are predominantly focused on finding resources to feed brood and store for the winter. The time they generally get aggressive is in the fall after the honey has been robbed. This young man said it was later in the fall that the bees had become aggressive last year. This makes sense. Regardless, we were asked to move our bees after many years of keeping honeybees at Cold Climate Research Station. 

We are meticulous at completing thorough hive checks every ten to twelve days to prevent disease and/or swarming.

Brood and Honeycomb Build-up & Swarm Prevention

Thank you for your patience with me. I spent the last three weeks in TN visiting my daughter and her family. Grandchildren are an absolute BLESSING!!! 

While there, I experienced a southern spring and had the opportunity to work with another beekeeper.

Our Apiary Update:

All of our colonies have laying queens with great brood patterns. 

Here are examples of how queens should be laying excellent patterns of brood:

    

Examples of a "spotty queen":

Spotty queens can be replaced however, replacing a queen can be a risk because the colony might not accept a new queen once established.

Main tasks at this time:

1) Keep bees nourished with 1:1 sugar water and pollen patties;

2) Keep bees warm;

3) Regular hive checks every 10 -12 days;

4) Remove queen cups and cells after confirming you have evidence of a queen (eggs, larva, and pupa);

Queen Cup Examples:

Queen cell examples:

    

        

5) Remove any burr comb and save it for melting down for wax products (see examples below):

    

    

• Burr comb is always drone comb.

• When a queen lays an egg in drone comb, the egg will become an unfertilized bee - a drone!

• The more drones a hive has, the more the female workers have to labor to keep the colony nourished well.

• Keeping a small population of drones is important, however, in case you lose your queen. The colony will have drones available to mate with a newly hatched queen.

No Eggs or Larva? 

You probably have a queenless colony if you can't find eggs and larva. This needs to be addressed immediately!

Call Dale Lupton 907-978-1455 to order a new queen.

• If your colony is queenless for more than a couple weeks, some of the workers will develop ovaries and fill cells with multiple unfertilized eggs which become drones. 

• A colony in this condition will eventually have a full population of drones and will die out. 

• Also, this alters the comb in a very undesirable way - worker cells become drone cells - All drone comb must be removed to prevent future queens from laying high populations of unfertilized, drone eggs.

Examples of laying workers:

    

                  

        

Laying Worker Drone Comb:                   

What to do about laying workers:

• Have a replacement queen on hand in a queen cage.
• Lay a white flat bed sheet or blanket on the ground at least 50 feet and preferably with a  building between the hive and the sheet;
• Carry each frame over the sheet and shake off all the bees;
• Place the frame into a tote or a cooler with a lid making sure no bees are on the frames;
• Hang the new queen in the middle of the top brood box, leaving the cap on the queen cage so the bees will have time to get used to the new queen pheromones (If you quick release the queen, the colony may kill her);
• Put all the frames back into the hive boxes.

Any workers who have not developed ovaries will reenter the hive and laying workers will not be allowed back into the hive.

You must re-queen the colony since they will not be able to create their own queen at this late date.

Spring 2021 Beekeeping in Alaska

 Hello Fellow Beekeepers! Well, finally Jack Frost is headed out of Alaska! 

In seventeen seasons, I've only experienced one spring worse than this for low temperatures surrounding the first arrival of honeybee packages. 

Two dire needs of  honeybees in these early weeks are:

1) Warmth - All hives are insulated internally and externally. Telescoping lids are insulated and at least 1" of rigid foam insulation is placed underneath each bottom board. Each hive body is wrapped with insulation as well.

• We reduce our entrance to the smallest setting to keep as much heat inside the brood box.

• Do not cover your bee hive with a tarp or blanket. They need oxygen!

2) Nourishment - Keep inner sugar feeders full in the spring! If you don't have pollen stores in comb from previous years, feed pollen patties with essential oils until dandelions are prolific! Pollen is what the bees feed the eggs and larva and without it, queens may wait to lay eggs or decrease egg laying.

Current forgeable pollen is willow trees.

Our first shipment of ten colonies arrived April 8, 2021. We kept them in packages in Jen's garage for three days since evening temperatures dipped to -30* in Fairbanks. 

• I prepped our equipment by warming it up in my garage for a couple days prior to the bees arriving. 

• We are starting out with one brood box per colony to ensure the bees don't have to heat up too much space. Frames 1 and 10 are inner insulation frames. 

• The inner feeder replaced space three or four to ensure the food source is right next to the cluster. 

• At least three frames with empty comb cells were placed in the middle of the brood box to give the queen plenty of cells to start laying eggs in. 

• Pollen patties were taken out of the freezer the day before and cut into 1/4 lb. for each colony. 

• 1:1 sugar water with 1-2 tsp. Honey Bee Healthy was mixed up and brought to room temperature - 1 gallon per colony.

• With all the snow this spring, we used wood ash, old carpets, and tarps to lay on top of the snow. This helps the bees during orientation flights. They can become disoriented and fly straight into snow, thinking it's the sky especially on cloudy days because the snow and the sky look very similar. This is a fatal mistake! 

• We are filling up sugar water every 3-5 days with full hive checks every 10 days to prevent swarming. 

Regular hive checks every 10-12 days is our key responsibility to:

1) Make sure our queens are alive and laying well;

2) Prevent swarming by removing queen cells;

3) Make sure the bees don't run out of food. They are not able to find much pollen in Alaska yet and colonies are at risk of starvation and decreased body temperatures if not well nourished. Besides, sugar water is great for stimulating wax secretion. The sooner they build comb, the sooner the queen can start laying and the population begins to multiply.

4) Add bee space by adding another brood box when 7-8 frames are full of brood or resources.