Extracting Honey

Honey Extraction

This past Sunday, August 10, 2014, we took our frames of honey from our backyard beehives to be extracted down at Dakota Bees in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. We'd removed the frames from the supers the day before and stored them in the back of car so the bees couldn't get to them and take the honey back to their hives.
Taking the supers and honey frames off the hives was pretty exciting in itself as the bees don't really like their hard earned winter food supply being taken from them. We smoked the bees a little to calm them down and used Bee Quick to chase them down out of the supers and into the lower deep boxes. It worked sort of well, but would've worked better if the weather had been warmer and sunnier. As it was, we got 3 supers and 25 frames full of honey off of the hives. Most of this came off the two older hives. We didn't get much of anything off the 3 hives that are new this year, but we didn't expect to.

Frame Before Uncapping

Frame After Uncapping

We headed over to Dakota Bees in the morning with our frames. Greg showed us how to use a heat gun to uncap the honey cells on the frames. This worked very well for most of the frames, the heat quickly popping the tops of the caps off of the honey. The heat gun doesn't heat up the honey, but heats the air gap under the cell cap, popping it off. For the few cells it didn't work on, we used a honey pick to open up the cells.

12 Frame Extractor

Extractor and Honey Bucket

Next, we loaded up the large extractor with the frames and spun the honey out of the cells. The extractor is basically a large centrifuge, pulling the honey out of the cells with centrifugal force and then letting it drip down the walls of the extractor and out the spigot at the bottom, where it then goes into our honey bucket.

Bucket of Honey!

Chris took a video of this process. After we got all our honey extracted, we headed home to put the honey into jars for permanent storage. We washed a bunch of brand new pint jars and some half pints (they mail easier than full pints) and filled them up from the brand new 5 gallon pail with a honey gate on it. Filling the jars by ladelling it out would have been much messier. Now we have enough honey to last us a very long time.

Bucket with Honey Gate

Honey!

Bringing in the Pollen

Today was a lovely warm sunny day. It was a great day for working in the yard, not only for me, but also for the industrious creatures out in the back of the yard. The bees were out collecting pollen to feed their young. I hope this means the queen is laying well and they're gearing up for all the apple blossoms that will be out in a few weeks. One week ago I saw white pollen coming in from the maple tree, but now the pollen is dark yellow to orange and looks very much like the pollen in all the crocus blossoms in the yard.

The Bees are Out and About!

Today was a glorious warm sunny day - one of the best we've had so far this year. The sun was out, the temperature was warm and the wind was fairly calm. The sun shown on the fronts of the bee hives, warming them up and letting light into the tiny little front doors. The bees, who have been clustered inside keeping warm most of the time this winter, came out for some flying time and to relieve themselves. There are now lots of little brown spots all over the area near the hives. There was also the chore of carrying out the dead. Bess don't live very long and some die in the hive during the winter and these corpses need to be carried out of the hive and dumped. Normally the dead bee is carried off a distance from the hive, but when it's quite chilly out, the body will get dumped just off the hive landing.
The bees were also flying about looking for anything tasty, so I put out some broken up honey comb I had stored. After finding the sticky sweet wax, some bees went back to the hive to report their find by doing the happy waggle bee dance on the front of the hive. The excited bee would dance around in a figure eight while waggling its butt. Through out the day, the bees worked hard to clean the honey off the wax. Once they've gotten all the honey out of this wax that they can, I'll use it for making beeswax candles.


Today I also saw my very first flower of the year - iris reticulata.


I'm surprised a bee wasn't on it. It's the only flower I saw anywhere today. Yet some bees found enough pollen from somewhere to fill their little pollen baskets and bring it back to the hive. Look at the bulges on the hind leg of one of the bees entering the hive in this picture.

Bee Town USA: An Educational Tiny Town of Beehives

Honeybee - Apis melifera   photo by C. Netter

Greg, the beekeeper has started a Kickstarter project to fund Bee Town USA. This will be a project to promote bee conservation through art by creating a curiosity that attracts the community to visit. Read all about it here. Greg is the person who educated me about bees - both honeybees and our Colorado native bees. Beetown's purpose is to educate the public about these bees in a fun way.

Thirsty Bees

Honey bees need a good source of water. They need this for more than just hydration of themselves as individuals, they also use water for cooling the hive and for thinning honey to feed brood. The temperature inside the hive has to be constant or the brood will die, so bees have their own form of "swamp cooler". When the hive gets hot, they bring in water and cool the hive through evaporation by fanning their wings.

Fortunately for the bees in the back of my yard, I have several water gardens. The bees can stand on the edge of water lily pads to suck up water. There is also the  "bird bath" I put out years ago, which has become a major watering hole for bees. On hot days there is quite a line up all along the edge. I put rocks in it to help bees get out if they fall in. Bees are very poor swimmers and drown rather quickly if they can't get a hold of something to pull themselves out.

This watering hole is a great place to see the variety of  honey bees from the hives out back and from other places in the surrounding area. Some are the typical golden honey bee with tan fur and some are quite dark with grey fur like the one below. The bee on the left above is almost entirely black.

Bees Dancing on the Front Porch

For almost a week the bees of hive 6 have been washboarding. Washboarding is the term used for bees rhythmically rocking back and forth in a large group. While it sort of looks like they could be scrubbing the hive, nobody really knows why they do it. Studies have shown that it is going on inside the hive as well as outside at the entrance. Here is a closer view.

The Anythink Library Bee Cam

Greg, the Beekeeper, just sent me a link to the Anythink Library Bee Cam. He has two hives at the Commerce City, Colorado location and the library put a video camera on these hives.
http://beecam.anythinklibraries.org/view/index.shtml
Not only can you view the hives in real time, you can control the camera by zooming in, tilting it up and down as well as panning right to left. You can watch the bees as they enter and leave the hives. Very bee geeky.

The Beekeeper Inspects His Hives

Today the beekeeper came over to see how the hives are doing. I stood back and took lots of pictures which can be seen in this slide view:

Some of the comb is held in the frames by chicken wire.  This comb came from the original hive that was removed from somebody's house and the chicken wire holds it in place until the bees have glued it into the frames with more wax. When the comb is sufficiently fixed into the frames by the bees, the beekeeper removes the chicken wire.

Some of these hives came from swarms and some from hive removals from buildings. So far, they all are making brood, which is a good sign.

Bee Hives in the Yard

Back in late May a local beekeeper advertised on Denver's Craigslist that he was looking for places to put his hives in exchange for some of the honey. I've wanted some hives in my yard for some time now so I jumped at the chance and contacted him. Greg, of  Dakota Bees (Dakotabees.com) came out to check out the yard and found lots of flowering plants, plus water gardens that would provide water for the bees so he said he would be happy to put some hives here.  He removes wild hives from people's homes and also captures swarms and puts them into hives.
The following week on May 26 the little yellow hive in the front of the picture above show up with a newly captured swarm inside. He showed us how to make sugar water for the bees to give them a start until they have made comb inside the hive. We took a video of them their first morning:
Hive video
On June 3, two more hives showed up. The first one contained bees from a wild hive removal from a home and the second one contained a very large swarm. June 4, another hive showed up with a medium sized swarm in it. June 8, the fifth hive showed up with another wild hive removal from a home.
I hope the bees do well in their new home.