Honey Harvest and Splits!

Today we had some folks come over to help us harvest honey! We were only able to snag 11 full frames, but the yield was fantastic: 23 pounds of honey! I was expecting to get about 40 frames harvested, but with all of the recent activity we weren't able to take quite as much as expected. 

Here is the result - pretty dark since we mostly harvested honey that had been in the hive through winter, you can see that there is some spring honey towards the bottom of the jar (it's much lighter):

Here is happy helper, Cara, uncapping some fresh spring honey:

Thistle (purple hive) recently swarmed, so the honey supers were mostly emptied. We got about 4 good frames of honey harvested from Thistle.

Mint (green hive) didn't yield quite as much honey because there was a lot of brood mixed into they honey supers. I haven't been using queen excluders, and it hasn't really been a problem until now. I put a queen excluder on both Thistle and Mint. We got 6 good frames from Mint. Here is happy helper, Evan, taking a look at one of the frames we found in the supers in Mint (you can see that the center is filled with brood, the edges have beautiful capped honey from spring):

On the bright side of having a lot of brood in the supers: we got to see some baby bees hatching! This was definitely a highlight for folks (she is in the middle of the picture, just starting to chew through the wax capping of her cell):

Buttercup (yellow hive) didn't have an escape board on it (one of the boards that drains the bees from the honey supers and had similar issues with brood mixed in with the honey. I took 1 frame of honey from them but then left them the rest.

I figured that Buttercup had the highest likelihood of swarming at this point (having come from a swarm last year and coming out of the winter as one of the stronger, well-balanced hives). So I attempted to do a split. I took frames with eggs, pollen, nectar, honey, larvae, and capped brood and transferred them into a fourth hive (about 5 frames total). There were no queen cells, so I hope that the bees will be able to select an egg to raise into an emergency queen, we'll see in the next 16 days or so what happens (it takes a queen 16 days to hatch from the day it was laid). Here is happy helper, Wyatt, helping select frames to put into the new hive:

Introduction to Beekeeping Class

Today was the Introduction to Beekeeping Class for the Beekeepers' Guild of San Mateo. This year I helped organize the event by coordinating volunteer speakers, collecting raffle items, managing signups and participating in a Q&A panel at the end of the day. Here I am answering some questions during our lunch break:

This was an all day event with 60+ new beekeepers in attendance! It was a great success thanks to everyone's help :)

Adding Supers

It is only February and I am already throwing on all of my honey supers! This year has been very warm so far (with very little rain). This might be a strange season for honey...

This year I am trying to switch over to RiteCell frames - these are very sturdy, inflexible plastic frames. Before I had used foundation with a very thin flexible sheet of plastic coated in wax. It holds up pretty well, but I wanted to try these RiteCell frames:

During my last inspection, I threw on supers filled with RiteCell frames. Green hive is doing an amazing job filling them up with honey and brood, here is a RiteCell frame that I put in the hive about a month ago:

Purple hive seemed to be honey-bound... meaning I didn't see a whole lot of brood in there, mostly just honey and nectar. I threw another super on top so they had a spot to put nectar, hopefully that helps. I did start to see some drone cells, so maybe I can split these hive soon. Splitting is when you take frames with eggs and larve and move them into a fresh hive, this will turn one hive into two. I don't have a whole lot more space for hives, so I will probably sell the new hives if I am successful.

Here are the three hives! I'm almost out of supers! Time to order some more:

First Checkin

Due to the freakishly warm weather we've been having lately (in the 70s and 80s), I decided to check in on the bees to see how they were faring. There was a ton of activity in front of all three hives:

I only had enough time to inspect Yellow and Green. Purple over-wintered with 4 boxes, Green had 3 and Yellow had 2 and a feeder. I figured Purple was the lowest priority because they probably had enough space to start taking in nectar for a few more weeks.

When I opened up the Yellow hive, they were definitely running out of space. In this picture the bees are building burr comb through the inner cover of the Yellow hive:

Other than that, Yellow seemed to be doing ok for laying space, so I threw an empty super on top, making Yellow 3 boxes high. Almost every single time I have opened Yellow, I have seen the queen. Here she is again:

Green hive was also running out of space and had a ton of burr comb everywhere. It looked like they had no space to lay eggs, so I threw on an empty super below the top-most super, making Green 4 boxes high. Here is the burr comb in the Green hive:

The Green hive also seemed to have a lot of pests on the bottom board. Hopefully they are doing ok. I did notice some curled up wings in the Yellow hive - that is a sign that they have a high mite load. Here is the bottom board of Green, you can see a hive beetle and many mites (the little red circles) amongst the wax crumbs. 

Holiday Bazaar

Today my husband and I sold honey and candles at the annual Holiday Bazaar at my work. There was an amazing turnout, I nearly sold out of all of my 2013 honey! I do have a few jars left for anyone who is interested ;)

Freezing

BRRR! It has been extremely cold lately. Last year we had some cold snaps that finished off one of my hives in January. I'm a bit worried that this cold snap is going to freeze my weaker hives. Earlier this week it dropped to the high 20s, last night the temperature dropped to 30 degrees F. The water bucket I leave out for the bees was frozen. Mum dumped out the water for me and freshened it, here are the little sticks that I keep in the water to provide life rafts for the bees, frozen solid!

Luckily, there was activity in front of all three hives later in the day as it hit a high of 52 (even the weakest yellow hive):

Last Minute Checking

This is probably the last chance I'm going to get to check in on the bees this season. It's probably going to start getting chilly, it's barely reaching the mid 60s in the afternoon. If it gets much colder, it would be risky to open the hives.

I wanted to checkin on the yellow hive after my robbing disaster last month. Looks like the queen is still alive and well! I can't believe I found her again, I can rarely spot my unmarked queens. I usually have to look for other evidence that they are well (looking for eggs and young larve). Here is the yellow hive queen:

Though I found the queen, I also saw that the yellow hive has nearly cleared out their honey stash already! Rather than bringing in nectar, they seem to have just been eating the frames of honey I gave them last month. I was able to clear out 10 empty frames and reduce the hive to only two hive bodies. I also put on a feeder to try to help them through the winter... it's not looking good for this hive.

Even though the bees don't seem to be bringing in much nectar, there is certainly a lot of pollen is still coming in, check out this great shot of the bees carrying pollen:

While checking in on the hives, I found this ridiculous frame of honey! I must have forgotten to put foundation on a frame next to this one, because the bees just kept building it up. I have no idea how I'm going to harvest this: