bee escapes

Propolis: Bane of the Beekeeper’s Wife

There are many things that set me off on a rant but the worst ones involve Any Other Person messing up My Stuff. It doesn’t have to technically be my stuff. If I use it and/or clean it, it counts as mine.

Any beekeeper wife will agree that beekeeping presents some challenges with protecting stuff. For instance, you can not melt wax using any pots or utensils you ever again would want to use for food prep. And even then, there are better and not better ways to clean up the wax tools. But the worst offender by far is propolis, the sticky stuff that bees use to seal up nooks, cracks, and crannies in the hive. It is all over the top and bottom edges of the honey boxes. And then it gets on everything else.

And it won’t come off. Clothing, countertops, floor, you name it, if propolis was there it will stick there.

Sunday, our newest junior beekeeper donned the junior-sized bee-suit to watch PopPop BeeMan pull a honey box from Hive 2. His sister stayed back at the house and joined in to watch the honey spin and be bottled. They learned quite a bit about the honey harvesting process.

Seth uses the smoker

They also learned that MomMom does not like to share.

BeeMan had used a bee escape to minimize the number of bees in the honey box. It’s a clever contraption that allows bees to go down to the hive box at night but then they can’t figure out how to get back upstairs. It’s a great way to bring the honey home without a couple thousand accompanying bees. Nevertheless, there were still some bees that made it back to the house with the honey. BeeMan blew off those he could with my new leaf blower but, still, a few made it into the mudroom where we process the honey and they were buzzing around the room.

Checking out the bees on the bee escape

What to do with buzzing bees inside? Vacuum them. BeeMan got the hand vac, but it was not sufficiently charged. So he asked for the vacuum.

Oh. No. Absolutely Not.

I explained to the children that I just bought a wonderful new Shark vacuum and have used it only two weeks. BeeMan may not get sticky bee glop on My Brand New Vacuum.

There is, however, a fully functioning old vacuum in the basement for BeeMan to use for any vacuuming needs he might have. So he sucked up the stray bees who continued to buzz in the dust bin while the children worried for their health.

Fast forward to today. The old vacuum still sits in the mudroom, the captive bees now dead. (Don’t tell the kids.) I have moved on to another project– cleaning out bathroom cabinets in preparation for painting them. I grab the hand vac from the charger. You know, the hand vac that BeeMan didn’t use because it wasn’t fully charged?

He didn’t use it.

He touched it.

The handle is all gooped up with propolis.

Arrrrghhh!

Propolis on My Stuff

But the internet is a wonderful thing. Rusty at Honey Bee Suite discovered that propolis can be removed from a camera with isopropyl alcohol. Well, having just emptied all the contents of the bathroom cabinet, I happen to know that I have isopropyl alcohol (and two bottles of witch hazel and more bottles of lotions, creams, and ointments than I know what to do with). Right at my feet. In one of these eight bags of stuff. Oh, there’s a whole bag of cotton balls, too.

Three cotton balls later, the hand vac is sparkly clean– and sanitized, too. It was super easy. This is great! Now, after we are done harvesting honey, I can use alcohol to de-goop the counters and floor. Despair is lifted. I can return to the bathroom project.

No more propolis!

But first, I better go inspect the leaf blower.

The First of This Year’s Honey: Beating the Bear

We pulled four frames of honey today. They were capped and we are so afraid that the local bear will defeat our electric fence and get to the hives again that we decided to pull some honey as soon as possible.

Those of you familiar with our bear escapades will remember that last year the bear came by three times, knocking the hives over without managing to procure any honey. The bees were pretty traumatized, though, and took out their anxiety on Mr. Beeman, buzzing at him with a ferocity he had never seen.

Beeman, understandably, does not want to lose any honey to this bear.

Early this week, we noticed that one hive had some frames that were capped. Yesterday, Beeman put a bee escape on that hive to prepare for taking the frames. A bee escape is a maze-like board that goes between the top box and the next box down in the hive. At night, the bees go “downstairs” where the queen is. With the bee escape, the bees can go down, but they can’t figure out how to get back up. That leaves the top box relatively bee-free, which makes it a whole lot easier to take the box. Ha! We are smarter than the average bear.

Bee escape

Well, mostly smarter than the average bear. Beeman forgot to plug the electric fence back in after adding the bee escape. He remembered at 3 a.m. Talk about an electric jolt! He jumped out of bed to plug in the cord and then made his way by cellphone light to the bee yard to make sure the hives were still intact. If any bear were in the vicinity, the sight of Beeman in the woods in his underwear at 3 a.m. would have scared him away, for sure!

We spun the frames in our new-last-year electric spinner. It is much more efficient than hand-cranking, although it doesn’t provide quite the same upper arm workout.

Today’s honey is much lighter than last year’s. Last year’s honey had the strong molasses-like taste of tulip poplar. This year, the honey is lighter and more delicate with definite wild berry overtones. No surprise, since we have been picking blueberries by the bucket and tons of wild raspberries are just now ripening. (I just have to figure out how to beat the deer to those berries!)

The air has also been aromatic with wild rose, honeysuckle, and, recently, the oak leaf hydrangea, which is evidently a pollen feast for every pollinator in the area. They have been all over it!

So, 2018 was robust and 2019 is more delicate. Yum to both!

Honey Harvest 2012

Maywood Honey 2012

If there’s anything more satisfying to a beekeeper than seeing buckets of harvested honey, it is seeing that golden sweetness in jars.  It’s a little bit  arrogant on our part to take pride in a good harvest since the bees make the honey, but there’s enough work on the part of the beekeeper to justify it.  Thousands of cranks of the honey-spinner and sixty-seven jars of honey later, we can rightly call it our harvest.  And it’s a yummy one too.

Last weekend, we spent a calm morning in the bee yard.  Our goal was three-fold.  First, to collect four honey boxes.  Second, to do so without making the bees really angry at us.  And third, to get the honey back to the house without bringing along a horde of buzzing companions.  That third goal was not insignificant!

Off to the bee-yard

Very few bees in this honey box because of an effective bee-escape

John’s pre-harvest preparations were overall pretty helpful.  The bee escapes that he put on the hives significantly reduced the number of bees in the honey boxes of Hives A and B.  Hive C still had a honey box full of bees.  John wonders if perhaps the bee escape got blocked with burr comb.  And Hive D’s honey box was empty but they had not been doing anything up there anyway.

Setting the fume board on a hive

To clear out the honey box on Hive C and to clear away the cloud of Hive A bees who were looking for a fight, John used the fume board.  The fume board is a hive lid that you squirt with a nasty smelling liquid.  The bees can’t stand the smell and dive deep into the hive.  Humans aren’t too crazy about the smell either, which explains why the bottle was shipped in a bazillion layers of plastic wrap.  After a few minutes of fume board, the honey box is nicely empty of bees and John can easily remove the honey boxes and load them onto the tractor cart for transport to the house.  The fume boards get stored in the cabin where we don’t have to smell them.

Taking the honey to the houseWith the hives closed back up and the honey boxes covered with plastic to keep bees off, John brings the honey to the house.  We take the honey inside immediately and, after a quick beer (hey, it was hot in those beesuits!), begin spinning the honey.  Honey is dripping off the boxes and we want to get it  contained  before the ants find out that there is a party in the mudroom.  The mudroom, by the way, is so clean you could almost lick the honey off the floor.  (Almost being the operative word here.)  Amazingly, considering the thousands and thousands of bees down at the hives, only four (that’s right, 4) bees make it into the house.  They are unceremoniously but apologetically squashed.  (For all you theology nerds, that means that we were sorry to kill them but we gave a good defense on why we had to–namely, self-defense.)

Removing the cap

At the sink, John cuts the caps off the frames of honey.  The wax is put in a colander to drain into a pot.  I’ll deal with the wax later.  The frames, now oozing honey, are placed into the honey spinner.  The spinner is a big low-tech centrifuge made out of what looks like a plastic trash can.  It works with good ol’ fashioned elbow grease.  Round and round I spin the handle while inside the tank the honey spins out of the comb and drips to the bottom of the tank.  Let’s just say that it is a good upper arm work-out.  There are lovely stainless steel electric models that one could buy for hundreds of dollars, but until the spinning sets me up for another joint replacement or we get a lot more hives, the manual model will suffice.

Spinning the honey out of the combs

From spinner down into the bucket

One of our favorite moments in the harvest is when the honey starts pouring from the spinner into the storage bucket below.  The deep golden sweetness oozes from the spininer, passes through a filter, and fills up the bucket.  This year we had to buy a second bucket.  All told, we collected about six gallons of honey.

Buckets of honey waiting for jars.

After a few days, the air bubbles settle out of the honey, my arms recover, and my order of jars arrives. Now it is time to jar the honey. An evening is spent filling the jars, writing “Maywood Honey 2012” on sixty-seven self-adhesive labels, slapping them on the jars, and wiping the stickiness away.  Stickiness, by the way, is everywhere–the jars, the counters, the floor all have a slight film of honey.  And bits of propolis, which is what bees use instead of duct tape.  Propolis on a counter can’t be wiped; it has to be scraped off.  And then you have to figure out how to scrape it off the scraper.

Finally, it is all done.  The harvest is in.   The kitchen island gleems with jars of golden-brown honey.  A celebratory bowl of maple walnut ice cream drizzled with our own honey is my reward.

Preparing for the honey harvest

I want that honey!

Today was  an exciting day as we got the hives ready for harvest.

Today’s tasks:  to put bee escapes on the honey  boxes and  put entrance reducers on the front entrance to the hives.  The goals:

The beekeepers, with junior bee-guy just observing today

(1) to get the bees to exit the honey box without getting back in, and

(2) to try to prevent robbing by minimizing the size of the hive opening.

We were also able to look in the honey boxes and assess how much honey we will collect.  As an added perk, we collected some burr comb and had our first taste of this season’s honey.  The plan is to harvest this coming Saturday.  I can justifiably say “we” now because I have my own beesuit and can do more than just watch, even though today I mostly just watched.  Our junior beekeeper did not suit up today, as he had already changed to go play with friends.  He stood in my usual observer’s spot and picked the bark off his walking stick.

John and I recently read a good beekeeping book, Confessions of a Bad Beekeeper, by Bill Turnbill.  In it, Bill shares many things he learned from mistakes, such as not closing up every little flap on his beesuit and, as a result, getting stung by a bee inside his veil.  I thought of him as I very carefully zipped my suit closed.  I thought of him again as John and I assessed “what we learned today.”

We learned:

  • Burr comb

    When you prep the hive for harvest, go prepared to deal with burr comb.  We had nothing with us to put it in.  John didn’t want to plop it on the ground because the scent of all that honey might instigate robbing.  Plus, we wanted to taste the honey.  So, I had to run back up to the house to get a container with lid.  Meanwhile the hive was open with the scent of honey wafting around the bee yard.

  • He’s smokin’! But he forgot to bring the entrance reducers.

    Also, if you plan to put entrance reducers on, you should actually bring them with you.  This time John ran back to the house while I stood in the bee yard with a plastic container full of beeswax and live bees.  As bees made their way to the top, I would shoo them off and away.  Many, though, were trapped in layers of dripping wax.  I could almost hear them calling to their comrades: ” I’m trapped!  Help!  Get the jaws of life and get me out of here!”  Others, alas, were doomed, drowned at the  bottom of the container in a puddle of honey.  I was so fascinated watching them that I didn’t even take pictures.

  • Nailing the bee escapes in place

    It would be a good idea to have extra honey  box lids with the bee escapes already attached.  John thought the bee escapes would just fit over the exit but they had to be nailed tight.  It was awkward trying to hammer a tiny nail with a hive tool while wearing gloves, so John took off  a glove to hold the nail while banging on the honey box with his hive tool.  I can’t think of a better way to get someone angry with me than banging on their house before stealing their stuff.  He did not get stung, though.

    Bees entering and exiting the honey box.

With the bee escape in place, bees can exit the honey box but must re-enter the hive through the front entrance. This should make it easier for us to take the honey–there won’t be so many bees in the honey box.

  • We learned that Hive D is lazy.  Even with the addition of a honey box to get them moving, the honey box was quite clean.

  • The orange stuff is propolis.

    Hive A makes the most propolis.  Propolis is like bee caulk.  They use it to seal the hive.  They did a fine job filling their honey box, after a slow start which necessitated requeening the hive.

  • Hive C did a great job filling their honey.  They are a new hive, like Hive D,  but they are producing better.

  • One of many full frames

    Hive B, going gangbusters since the first sign of spring, has filled the better part of two honey boxes.  Way to go, Hive B.

  • So, on a positive note, we learned that we have four honey boxes pretty much full of honey.  Woo hoo!  This looks to be our biggest harvest yet.

  • Straining the burr comb for a pre-harvest snack. Yes, the dead bees are in there. That’s why we’re straining it!

    The honey is a beautiful golden color with hints of tulip poplar and other florals.  Not as strong in flavor as our wonderfully pungent first harvest, it has more presence than our last harvest, which was light and delicate.

    Preview of this year’s honey!

Saturday, weather permitting, is harvest day.  It’s time to order more jars.