Dry Hives and Shrew-Proofing Mesh

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The excitement continues as I finally got all my hives protected with 6mm / quarter-inch mesh yesterday. I’m also pleased with one hive where the bees are clustering well beneath their honey and the hive is dry as a bone. I’m not going to mess with it.

It’s a 3-medium hive painted black, no wrap, the bottom entrance with mesh but wide open for ventilation, an open top entrance, a piece of silver bubble wrap insulation over the inner cover, the inner cover hole covered with screen but open, a ventilation rim over that, and a small hive pillow inside the ventilation rim.
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Hive Pillows to Replace Moisture Quilts

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While ventilated quilt boxes and moisture quilts can do a great job at keeping beehives dry in the winter, they can be a pain to maintain… in the rain on the plains with stains on my cranes. You know what I mean. I’m looking to simplify what I do. So instead of dumping wood chips into a quilt box or moisture quilt, I’ve been dropping what I call a hive pillow over a slightly insulated inner cover, hoping for the same drying effect of a moisture quilt but without the loss of heat.

I know it looks like I’m working without a plan these days, but there is a method to my madness.
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Eating Crystallised Honey

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I don’t know why people don’t like crystallised raw honey. Hard as rock honey, okay, I can see not going for that. But spreadable crystallised honey is excellent.

When I notice my honey beginning to crystallise, I tip the jar upside-down so the spreadable crystallising honey is easier to get at.

Feeding Bees Crystallised Honey Again

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I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again. Feeding honey bees a jar of crystallised honey because humans don’t want to eat it for some silly reason.

It’s a 75-second video that I shot as a 4K-test. About 100% of streaming video that’s labelled as 4K isn’t really 4K, but for anyone with a 4K monitor or TV, a “4K” video will look sharper than regular videos. And if you don’t know what 4K is, don’t worry about it.

Strawberry Jam Wasp Trap

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This video demonstrates how I catch wasps at this time of the year so they don’t get into my beehives.

It’s just a standard wasp trap with a few glops of strawberry jam and a splash of water. No vinegar. No meat or cat food. Just strawberry jam and water. I’ll post a photo later today or tomorrow to show how many wasps got caught in the trap (and how many bees didn’t).

I’ve posted about this before (I’ve covered a lot of ground since 2010), but it’s always good to come back to say, “I told you it works.”
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DIY Honey Bucket with Honey Gate

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I made a honey bucket with a honey gate, or a spigot. The honey gate makes it easier to fill my jars of extracted honey. I used a 28-litre brewing bucket that I never use for brewing (from the one time I made mead). Food-grade buckets that look like 18-litre paint buckets are also available at some hardware stores. It doesn’t hurt to use a bucket with an air-tight cover.
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Follow Me as I Pull Honey Frames

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Here’s another quiet walkalong video that has me pulling off the last of my honey frames for the season. I suppose it’s a sequel to my Another Day in the Life of a Beekeeper video. It’s 21 minutes long and as usual goes into all kind of things as I basically explain everything I do while I’m doing it — the experience people get when they do a “workshop” with me. I’ll add more details at a later date as soon as I have the time.

This is likely to be the last we’ll see of my Giant Hive of 2021 in my secret location. The colony living in that hive produced almost 100 pounds of honey for me before the end of July, which came to about half of my total honey harvest for 2021. Judging from that hive, I expected great things from the rest of my colonies in other locations, but there was nothing special about this summer for the rest of my colonies. I plan to put as many hives as I can in the secret location for next year.

Background music created through the B Flat Project.

A Walkaway Split, 84 Days Later

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I created a walkaway split on June 20th and it worked out well. The last time I checked on it a couple of weeks ago, the queen was laying well and she looked healthy. I’m at the point now, pulling the last of the honey from my hives, where I don’t want to do anything else with my colonies other than check to see if they’ve got enough honey, and if they don’t, I’ll top them up with some syrup. Here’s a short video where I examine the honey frames of the 84-day-old walkaway split and make a few tweaks that should give it a better chance of getting through the winter.

Like I say in the video, the colony is looking good and is well on its way to having enough honey to get through winter (about two mediums worth of honey). I may need to top it up a little syrup, but right now it’s in pretty good shape. It’s not absolutely packed with bees, but it doesn’t need to be. My bees, possibly with Russian genetics, seem to go into winter will small clusters, consuming little honey. Which is great because it means I probably don’t need to feed them sugar over the winter or early spring.

The video was taken from my longer video, Another Day in the Life of a Beekeeper.

Fireweed Seeds Adrift is Honey Harvesting Time

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Around this time last year I wrote a little post called, When is It Time to Harvest Honey? In my local climate, any or all of the following signal that it’s time to harvest honey:

— cottony fireweed seeds start to fill the air
— temperatures significantly shift to cold, especially overnight temperatures
— drone pupae (or drones) are tossed from the hive
— goldenrod begins to dry up

All of those have turned out to be the most accurate signals for me to harvest honey in my particular beeyard, but the one I like the most are the fireweed seeds floating in the breeze. This series of slow motion clips is an excuse to show off the best slow motion shot of fireweed sides adrift that I’ve been able to manage so far.

It’s also a nice way to take a breather from Hurricane Larry that shook my house for a few hours last night.