A record of all the relevant beekeeping that I do (or have done) during the month of September. For the record, I began with two nucleus colonies in Langstroth hives in 2010 that I kept in my small backyard near downtown St. John’s (Newfoundland). I bought two more nucs the next year. By 2012, using swarm cells and naturally mated queens, I had six colonies on a farm in Portugal Cove. By 2013, mostly by creating splits with swarm cells, I had eight colonies on the edge of a big field in Logy Bay. I lost most of my colonies in the winter of 2015 to shrews. That was the only year I wasn’t able to take honey from my hives. I moved what was left of my colonies to Flatrock in 2015 and slowly built my beeyard up to nine colonies by the summer of 2016. My goal is to maintain a relatively self-sustaining beeyard with no more than ten colonies.
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.” Continue reading →
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. Continue reading →
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.
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.
I’m not an expert on dealing with a robbing frenzy because I hardly ever see it. I think I’ve only had it happen once, a few years ago when I spilled some sugar syrup spiked with anise extract in my beeyard. And… I did it again.
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.
This is what it’s like to follow me while I’m beekeeping. My “workshops” (i.e., standing next to me while I do my thing in the beeyard) is exactly like this. I do what I have to do and explain in as much detail as I can off the top of my head everything I’m doing or planning to do.
I extracted some honey in my garage over the past couple of days. I’d like to say there’s a precise method to my extraction process, but like everything in beekeeping, there isn’t — and don’t let nobody tell ya no different (just like Sling Blade would say). Now let’s take a gander at how it all went down:
00:00 — Intro to the extractor. Everything is sanitized, from the extractor to the stainless steel honey filter to the honey bucket. The garage might look rough, but it’s well ventilated and there are no chemicals or gasoline or any toxic fumes floating around.
The Wailing Wailers recorded a cover version of “I Made a Mistake,” by The Impressions, sometime in the ’60s, and if it wasn’t for copyright laws, it would be the soundtrack to the following video:
Something I’ve learned from beekeeping over the years is that’s okay to make mistakes, even big ones. It might be better than living in a fantasy world. If we’re not open to making mistakes, we never really learn or get good at anything.
According to my previous post, When is It Time to Harvest Honey?, it’s about time to harvest some honey now. Which means it’s about time to add some escape boards so my bees can “escape” from their honey boxes, which then makes it easier for me to steal their honey. You know, I think I might have a video of me from earlier today that shows how this works:
Here’s a short video that demonstrates a newspaper combine:
A newspaper combine is when two honey bee colonies, one of them usually without a queen, are combined into a single hive as one big colony by using a piece of newspaper to keep them separated for a few days as they get used to the smell of each other. Those are the headlines. Now the details: Continue reading →
Here’s a video of me extracting some honey outdoors, something I wouldn’t recommend to anyone new at this beekeeping foolishness. (Cut down from a 15-minute video.) The video works as a review of the Maxant 3100p extractor which cost me $1400 (Canadian) after taxes and shipping a few years ago. Spoiler alert: The 9-frame extractor does the job, but the legs that come with were not my friends. The base of the extractor had to be bolted down to something unmovable and secured to operate properly and safely — at least for me.
So I pulled out my honey extractor and used it to whip some honey out of about six or seven medium frames. The honey wasn’t completely cured. That is, it wasn’t completely capped and some of the nectar was still floating around fancy and loose and therefore, technically, it wasn’t honey. But it was (and is) technically delicious, so who cares? Not me. I don’t sell it for public consumption, but I eat it all the time and so do my friends. It’s probably not a bad honey for making mead.
Here’s a 15-minute video that shows how the whole thing played out: Continue reading →
Here’s a 27-minute visit with me and my one beehive for September 2017. This is more of my behind-the-scenes beekeeping series, if we can call it that. It’s an excuse for me to post talky footage that I normally wouldn’t use because there’s more to listen to then there is to see.
