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Wow that sounds crazy. Hope you get better!
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Sep 7, 2010 04:04
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So I run a beekeeping club at my university and we have a few hives on campus that we maintain and show off to freshmen. We also do a yearly honey harvest, which was this past weekend. We ended up with a little less than we had last year, but still managed a pretty good haul. Here are a tiny sampling of the pictures from the harvest: We had a huge showing for the harvest. Way more people than we had suits or space for, but it all worked out and I think all the people that wanted to work with the bees got to suit up.  We started too late in the afternoon, by the time we finished bottling it was dark out and getting close to bedtime   Tossing the girls into the air. We didn't get a single sting, which I was shocked by since there were so many people.    We were loaned a pretty schmancy uncapping knife for the harvest. It worked pretty well, but it was definitely the most dangerous part of the harvest. At least three burns!  A small small part of the afterparty cleanup.  :}   The haul! We ended up with a little under 5 gallons of honey at the end of the day. 
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Sep 7, 2010 07:12
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Maximusi posted:My neighbor, who is a doctor, saw my bee sting and basically told me that I was allergic. It's not normal to swell that much, apparently. After that, I took 2 benadryl a day just to get the swelling and itchiness down. I posted this pic on goon doctor as well and they told me the same thing. :/ A lot of GPs are terrible at allergies. Reactions to beestings vary wildly, even in the same person. Your reaction can depend on a variety of factors, such as: Where you were stung. How often you've been stung. How deep the stinger worked itself. How quickly you removed the stinger. How much venom was injected. The hive you were working with. Here are two stings that I got yesterday:  Sting 1: Ring finger on right hand. Only a little penetration and a little venom. Got it out quickly and it's gone already.  Sting 2: Different hive, working without gloves again. She got me full on, stinger fully embedded and a full load of venom. Pinched out the stinger. Little pain, as long as I don't flex it, but the local swelling is impressive. It was taut, until I took Benadryl and iced it.
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Sep 7, 2010 14:20
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For me it took like a week for the swelling to go completely down.
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Sep 7, 2010 18:51
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Maximusi posted:For me it took like a week for the swelling to go completely down. Mines back to (practically) normal today. Swelling lasted for about a day and a half, which doesn't seem too bad.
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Sep 8, 2010 14:22
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I pulled all the full frames out of my two supers this weekend. I wasn't expecting any honey at all this year as I started the hive from a 5 frame nuc at the end of May. 15 frames were mostly capped and it worked out to about 45 pounds of amazing honey, very light and not overpoweringly sweet. My question is what to do with the supers now? I have two large bodies on the bottom and the top one is pretty full of honey, I'm just wondering if they would be better off with that and a super for the winter or if that would make the hive too big and harder to keep warm? 
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Sep 12, 2010 22:24
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I think the answer depends enormously on where you live. Here in California, the fall nectar flow is just getting under way, and our winters are mild. We've returned all three supers to the bees (along with the foundation wax and whatever honey wasn't thrown by the extractor) and I wouldn't be surprised if they fill all three before the end of the season. Moreover, we might have two or three nights all winter that get below freezing. Last year we had a really cold winter and actually had snow on the bay area peaks down to 2000 feet twice. The point being, our bees won't need as much honey to keep warm and will be able to keep a larger space warm just fine. On the other hand, if you live somewhere that it's likely to be snowing by the end of October, they won't have as much fall nectar to make honey with; and if it gets very cold or stays below freezing for many days on end, you'll need to take more measures to insure they can keep warm. I'd suggest getting advice from your local beekeepers on the subject, because they'll be most familiar with the nectar flow and seasonal changes where you live. Oh, and also: that honey is gorgeous, it's very light and almost has a greenish hue to the light yellow. What's it taste like?
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Sep 13, 2010 06:06
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Thanks, the honey is delicious and easily the best I've ever tasted. Compared to store bought, it's half as thick and about 75% as sweet. It soaks right into bread instead of chilling on top. Clover and alfalfa were pretty dominant around here for a while. I'm up in Eastern Ontario so I'll ask around. We can get -22F for a week or more up here.
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Sep 13, 2010 13:09
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Ikantski posted:I pulled all the full frames out of my two supers this weekend. I wasn't expecting any honey at all this year as I started the hive from a 5 frame nuc at the end of May. 15 frames were mostly capped and it worked out to about 45 pounds of amazing honey, very light and not overpoweringly sweet. Leperflesh is right. Talk to your local beekeeping association and see what they do about now. I live in NY, so our climate is reasonably similar. I've extracted my honey, and I've given the supers back to the bees for a week to allow them to clear out any of the honey that didn't spin out in the extractor. Then, depending on how their stores in the brood chamber look, I might feed them some heavy sugar syrup (2:1) to supplement. Now is also the right time to check for any brood diseases or mite problems and treat them appropriately.
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Sep 13, 2010 13:57
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I have really wanted to keep bees for the past couple of years and I think I may finally be able to do it this spring. Last weekend the Philadelphia Bee Keeps Guild held their first Honey Fest in a few different locations in the city. I attended the events at the Wyck House which were mostly geared towards keeping bees. I took some video that I thought some of you might have interest in. The first is a demonstration of opening up a hive and some basics on how to work it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3RNS-C7VU0 The second is a lecture by Kim Flottum, author of The Backyard Beekeeper, on urban beekeeping. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3triuBRrrFA The camera work isn't the best since it was my first time using my point and shoot cam, but the audio is fine, and the visuals on the first vid are good when I actually kept things in frame.
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Sep 17, 2010 14:42
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Harvested yesterday afternoon. We got seven pretty full frames out of a medium from each of our two hives. I was pretty pleased. Also did the powdered sugar test for mites and was really surprised not to find but one in one hive and none in the other. I mean, that's cool and all, but with all the doom and gloom I've been exposed to locally to verroa mites I was expecting to be ordering treatments today. My girls ROCK! drewhead fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Sep 18, 2010 |
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Sep 18, 2010 14:46
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Just harvested 3 frames of honey. I noticed there was a lot of pollen packed beneath the honey. Kinda weird. How's everyone else doing? Do you think you're going to harvest more, Leperflesh?
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Sep 27, 2010 02:11
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I got a total of 17 good frames of honey from a new hive, so happy. Click here for the full 1600x1200 image.
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Sep 27, 2010 02:33
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Maximusi posted:Just harvested 3 frames of honey. I noticed there was a lot of pollen packed beneath the honey. Kinda weird. How's everyone else doing? Do you think you're going to harvest more, Leperflesh? We're actually still putting our harvest into jars - we ran out (twice!) and now we got a few really really big jars which, annoyingly, are too heavy once filled for our sensitive scale. We've jarred 37 pounds of honey, plus the huge jar which is probably another 10 pounds, and it looks like we've got another 8+ pounds left in the bin. So our estimate that we'd get 45 pounds looks to have been low by a good 10+ pounds. This also means we are getting substantially more per frame than we did just draining the frames like we did in the spring. Back then, we drained 8 frames and got 14 pounds; this time, we spun 20 frames in the extractor and got at least 55 pounds. So we went from 1.75 pounds per frame to about 2.75 pounds per frame! OH! And we put a queen excluder across the wooden slats in the bin, and then put all the cappings on top, so they could drain. It worked beautifully! So we were able to recover pretty much all of the honey from the cappings. We haven't been out to inspect - we were supposed to do it this weekend but other priorities came up. It's been really hot though, and the bees look super busy, so I bet they're socking away honey still. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Sep 27, 2010 |
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Sep 27, 2010 02:47
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All of you are amazing. I wish I was able to keep bees! Maybe someday... Are any of you selling honey? Possibly on SA Mart?
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Oct 6, 2010 03:25
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They seem to have found the CCD culprit! http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/science/07bees.html?src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB
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Oct 7, 2010 15:41
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That's a promising development, but I'm gonna withhold the wild celebration until it's confirmed by at least a couple more teams. The media has a habit of grabbing things like this and running with it to a point well past what the researchers themselves would actually support.
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Oct 7, 2010 18:54
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This fungivirus (virungus?) is obviously a diversion created by cell phone towers and big-pesticide-resistant-corn-crops to keep us from The Truth!! 
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Oct 8, 2010 14:05
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lags posted:This fungivirus (virungus?) is obviously a diversion created by cell phone towers and big-pesticide-resistant-corn-crops to keep us from The Truth!! Actually, this may not be too far from the truth: http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/08/news/honey_bees_ny_times.fortune/index.htm The researcher who published the study had/has a major grant from Bayer, producer of neonicotinoid pesticides that some have linked to bee die-offs.
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Oct 9, 2010 00:48
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ShotgunWillie posted:Actually, this may not be too far from the truth: Doesn't look good, but at the same time it could be much worse. It's pretty messed up that bayer does this kind of thing. I had just watched those urban beekeeping youtubes and I was pretty pissed when I saw this - for some reason I've had the notion that everyone who works with bees is pretty much cool.
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Oct 9, 2010 20:02
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So we finally finished getting all our honey from the July harvest filtered and weighed and into jars. It came to seventy pounds. 70. Pounds. From 20 medium frames. Far beyond our guesstimates of like maybe 45-55 pounds of honey. It means we got 3.5 pounds of honey per frame using the extractor. So that brings this year's total harvest up to 84 pounds. We inspected the hive last weekend. We have all three supers on there (because my wife wanted to give the messy, honey-coated frames we'd harvested back to the bees to clean up) and there wasn't that much new honey in there; a fair number of frames with maybe a third to a half of the frame having uncapped, half-filled cells. A few random capped cells. They're still really busy out there but now I'm thinking we ought to have left them with just one super, so they could concentrate on just building up and filling that one instead of spreading across three. But now it's too late... can't really take the frames, they have uncapped honey (so not suitable for harvest). Fortunately it doesn't get that cold here for a while yet. At some point we may have to pick through and just try and get the best frames together into one super, and then take the other two supers' worth regardless of their state.
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Oct 10, 2010 23:50
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Wow, that's incredible. We only harvested 1.5 supers this summer. I think the whole swarming thing really shafted us on honey.
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Oct 11, 2010 04:10
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Leperflesh posted:Fortunately it doesn't get that cold here for a while yet. At some point we may have to pick through and just try and get the best frames together into one super, and then take the other two supers' worth regardless of their state. This is sort of what I do. I harvest all my capped honey and let them clean out the supers overnight. Then if there are any uncapped frames, I extract everything and use it for mead Delicious mead.
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Oct 11, 2010 21:14
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ShotgunWillie posted:Actually, this may not be too far from the truth: Dr. Bromenshenk did not actually receive funding directly from Bayer. He received money from Sun Seeds inc. to train bees to focus on onion pollination, and then Sun Seeds was later purchased by Bayer. http://missoulanews.bigskypress.com/missoula/not-so-sweet/Content?oid=1319017 Aside from that, his research on the acoustic detection of bee pests and diseases along with using bees for land mine detection is some pretty neat stuff. He's working on developing an inexpensive handheld "tricorder" of sorts that can identify whether a colony is afflicted with AFB, varroa, nosema or chemical contaminants.
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Nov 1, 2010 02:13
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So winter is rapidly approaching for those of us who lucky enough to have seasons. Last year I wrapped the hive in insulation batting tucked into giant trash bags. I'm a bit torn on whether I want to do so again this year or go with the "let 'em tough it out" option. There's a fair amount of debate either way and both sides seem to make a good argument. Anybody care to weigh in from either perspective?
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Nov 1, 2010 05:31
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TouchyMcFeely posted:So winter is rapidly approaching for those of us who lucky enough to have seasons. I live in NYC, so I get real winters, but not deathly cold ones. How cold do you get? I leave my hives with plenty of ventilation. I worry more about condensation than cold, so I leave a varroa screened bottom board on the hive, along with a notched inner cover to facilitate a bit of air flow. They seem to do pretty well.
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Nov 1, 2010 06:23
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Alright, my wife has been asking me to "ask the goons" about this. On Oct. 16, we tore down the hive for a full inspection, to see where we were with the bees. So, we removed all three honey supers (all of which have open cells of honey, but no frames are more than maybe 25% full at the most), and then for the first time since we added the first honey super, we removed the queen excluder and checked out the brood chamber. Definitely something we should do more often but it's a pain in the rear end and disturbs the bees, so we've been avoiding it. Anyway, there's a big brood chamber (two deeps), lots of good looking bees, but we saw something really weird. This is the center frame of the upper deep:  Here it is in larger resolution:  Closer up:  Detail of the previous pic:  Another angle:  Detail of the previous pic:  As you can see, there's lots of capped brood cells. However, a number of cells are uncapped, showing not-fully-developed metamorphosing bees! Seems wrong, I believe the bees are opening incomplete chrysalises. You can see the "purple eyes" of live almost-bees... and you can also see some cells containing what appear to be killed semi-developed bees as well. Hard to see exactly what's going on but it sure looks like the workers are opening some cells and killing the brood. Any idea why they'd do this? We definitely saw eggs, and we caught a fully-developed (fuzzy, yellow and brown) bee just emerging from a cell on another frame as well. There was no bad smell to suggest foul brood either. We had the mite board in for four days, but when we removed it we couldn't find a single mite (and we've seen them before). So, this suggests it's not varroa. We had one beekeeper over for dinner a couple nights ago, and we showed her the pics. She suggested our bees may have tracheal mites, based on a couple of pics that showed bees holding their wings in the "K" pattern (not folded all the way back). But I don't know if that could be related to this open-not-done-bee-cell thing. Any ideas? Are we misinterpreting what we're seeing here? Fact is we've not had the brood chamber open since the spring, and at that time we saw nothing like this, but all in all we're still newb beekeepers, so if this is totally normal and/or those aren't killed half-formed bees, that would be a big relief. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Nov 4, 2010 |
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Nov 4, 2010 08:34
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Leperflesh posted:Alright, my wife has been asking me to "ask the goons" about this. K wings is the most common sign of tracheal mites, so if it's still warm enough, you should treat with menthol/thymol and knock the suckers out. That brood pattern, the uncapped pupae and the chewed up pupae ARE likely indicative of a Varroa infestation. I assume you're using a varroa screened bottom board with your mite board, and if so it's odd that you arent seeing many drops, but you should do a sugar shake (put a handful of bees in a jar with a #8 mesh lid and powdered sugar, seal the top, shake them hard and then shake out the powdered sugar and mites (the bees will calm down after a few minutes and you can release them)) or a drone check (use an uncapping fork to spear some drone pupae and remove them from their cells). I think that you'll find varroa with either method. They chew up the brood like that when the brood is dead and they want to remove it from the hive. The instinct to remove them is a good one ('hygienic' breeds are measured in part by how well they perform this task) but that many is a lot and suggests that they aren't keeping up. Have you been seeing any 'stunted' or 'wobbly' bees crawling in front of the hive? Whereabouts are you located? It's pretty late in the year to be doing a full hive inspection, at least where I am. P.S. Can I use your pictures on my blog? I'd credit them to you, of course.
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Nov 5, 2010 18:35
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I'm in Concord, California, where it has been in the mid-seventies all week and the bees are still making honey. We can expect rain and cooler weather, but "cooler" means low 50s at night, mid-60s during the day. Midwinter we can expect a half-dozen or so nights when it drops (just) below freezing, but more than that would be unusual. We have seen some wobbly bees near the hive; not a huge number, but on any given day if I wander around I'll find a half-dozen in the grass, generally up to 20 feet away from the hive, crawling around but not able to fly. We don't have a "varroa screened bottom board", I don't think - what is that? The bottom of our hive has a mesh, and then allows us to slide a board in below that, to catch everything falling out. In the spring/summer we found a small number of mites when we used the board for a few days, but in october we found none at all and thought that was pretty encouraging. Thanks for your help. I'll show your comments to the wife tonight and then we'll decide what to do.
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Nov 5, 2010 19:33
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I've noticed that sometimes before winter, the bees will haul out developing pupae for them to die. I guess they get worried if there's not enough honey for all the bees. That pattern looks strange though.
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Nov 5, 2010 20:04
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Anyone attending the Washington State Beekeeper's Association Apprentice Beekeeping class at the Snohomish Washington State University extension this November? There are ~40 people in the class, I was hoping someone else was a goon.
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Nov 5, 2010 23:01
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Does anyone have tips on finding places that will let them keep bees on their property? I have a roof I can climb on to that might work, but I am thinking that, neighbors aside, it might be a bad idea since its only accessible via windows. I can post pics if it would help. I attended the last Philly Bee Keepers meeting to ask there, but we just assembled, listen to a lecturer, and departed. I don't know if all the meetings are like that or not, will find out when I go to the next one. The email list wasn't terribly helpful when I tried it back in the fall. Getting very excited to keep bees next spring! I have read 4 books, read a lot online, talked to some local urban bee keepers, attended a beginners class, and gone to 2 bee/honey festivals. Just need to find a place to stick my bees!
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Nov 6, 2010 13:22
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Well, it looks like we've probably lost our hive. We went out this afternoon to dust the bees with powdered sugar and put in a "mint cake" grease patty thing a fellow beekeeper gave us. But there's way fewer bees in the hive than there should be; and the brood chamber is empty. No eggs, no live brood, just very sparse dead capped cells and the odd dead bee. The live bees are working the honey and still coming and going, and seemed very docile, which I guess would be odd for a queenless hive? No sign of a succession chamber anywhere either, so, I'm thinking they might have swarmed when we weren't looking; or, they've been dying for weeks and we just didn't know. Pictures shortly.
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Nov 11, 2010 23:35
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Leperflesh posted:Well, it looks like we've probably lost our hive. Docile is common in a queenless hive, they get lethargic without their leader (according to my local beekeeper).
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Nov 11, 2010 23:54
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Center of upper brood chamber: You can see very sparse capped cells, many of which are breached. The bees are not working these cells at all; we didn't brush this off, it's just abandoned-looking.  A detail of another frame. It looks like a few of those grubs might be alive? But I don't know how I'd be able to tell for sure.  Here's a larger detail of one of the frames from the lower deep. You can see how most of what few capped cells remain are breached.  Another frame from the lower deep  And another  There's still a few hundreds of bees around and this is midday in 70s weather, so there's bees foraging too. The upper deep had several frames of full capped honey, and the three supers had some honey stored too, so it doesn't seem like they ran out of food or anything like that. When we inspected on Oct 16 there were far more bees around, but between then and now it's possible they swarmed without us seeing (we can't see the hive from indoors). We've had some rain but also some warm days. Or, the queen might still be in there, but it sure doesn't look like she's laying if she is.
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Nov 12, 2010 00:10
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I've noticed that the bee population drops drastically during winter. Maybe they'll survive.  I'm sorry that really sucks.
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Nov 13, 2010 20:24
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I can't seem to find any breeders in my state. Let's say, theoretically, I decided to 'commandeer' a wild hive that I might theoretically come across. What if it theoretically all works out and I get this hive back to my backyard bee HQ and I introduce the wild hive to it's new home in my backyard. Would this work? Theoretically?
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Nov 14, 2010 16:13
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Dick Danger posted:I can't seem to find any breeders in my state. This works. Practically as well as theoretically. However, it's hard and I wouldn't recommend it unless you have a decent amount of experience. Feral colonies can be great. If they've survived more than a year or two in the wild, it means that they're of decent genetic stock, at least in terms of mite and disease resistance. They may, however, be more aggressive and less productive in terms of honey than their bred and purchased counterparts. When people obtain feral hives, either from trees or house 'cut outs', they often will wire the naturally shaped comb full of brood and honey into standard Langstroth frames. You see those handy little holes drilled into the side of each? They're perfect for wiring in wild comb. Most beekeeping supply catalogs sell 28g stainless or galvanized wire for frame wiring use. It's the same stuff you'd use to wire in established comb. You just run wires on either side and tighten them enough to hold it in place. It's pretty simple but takes a bit of practice. Once you get them in a hive (remember to take it far enough from their feral location that the foraging bees can't find their way back to the old hive), they'll start building the comb into the frame and on any foundation you give them. The problem with feral colonies is that you have NO idea as to their genetic makeup, which determines much of their behavior. You can roughly estimate that a colony is italian, or carnolian, or whatever other breed in origin, but you can make no determination as to the quality until you've had them for a while and observed their behavior. Are they calm on the comb, or do they pelt you ever time you pop open the inner cover? Do they produce lots of honey, or barely enough for them? How's their mite population? Etc, etc, etc. With a feral colony, you have to keep an extra close eye out for signs of pests and disease. These days many feral colonies are founded by bees that have absconded from their former hive because of bad conditions due to disease, pests, poor management and more. You'd have to be very vigilant to ensure that you don't just inherit someone else's problems, and until you've established that the colony was healthy, you'd probably want to keep them quarantined from other, known good colonies.
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Nov 14, 2010 17:57
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Leperflesh posted:Center of upper brood chamber: Sorry dude, your bees absconded. It's not that they died, it's just that something was making the hive so unbearable that they just up and left. Without having seen your hives, I can't really tell you what it was. Really bad mite infestations are a common cause. Lack of food/water is another. Too much heat. I see that your hives are out in the sun; if it's 70 in November, how hot does it get in the summer? How much do they have in the way of stores? It could be so many things, but in any case, your bees are gone. A few hundred bees probably isn't a viable population. A winter cluster of Italians can contain up to 10,000 bees, to put it in perspective. Speaking of winter, does anyone here have pictures of their hives in winter that I could use for my blog? I'm writing a series of articles on overwintering practices and am having difficulty finding pictures that I can use (open source or w/ permission.)
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Nov 18, 2010 20:26
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Bizarre quote:David Selig of Red Hook, Brooklyn, a restaurant owner and amateur beekeeper, was disappointed that instead of honey his bees had produced a red concoction more reminiscent of maraschino cherries, or of cough syrup. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/nyregion/30bigcity.html
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Nov 30, 2010 22:54
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