Beekeeping--a new beek's journey!PIC HEAVY (first week of Oct)

[lorihadams]

I'm looking for a way to use my goat milk and honey together....some really good soap could come of all this!

I would love to do some lip balms too. My kids love honey and eat it on everything so I will be glad when we can get some honey for us to use, probably next year.

Our bee club is trying to get some sort of mobile extractor set up for all the members. We are thinking of an enclosed trailer that has the extractor in it with a table and you get to rent it out and tow it to your house to do all your hives and then clean everything up and pass it on to the next person. One person would be in charge of it and has the responsibility to check everything out between rentals to make sure everything is clean and in working order. We are still trying to work out the logistics of it. I'm bummed I missed my meeting tonight but no babysitter=no fun.

 

[pinkfox]

so im assuming yall do langsham hives rather than top bars?

i grew up around top bars so ALL the honey was comb honey, i think if i were every dong it myself id go with top bars too, familairity and all, lol...top bars are great if you want to use the honey AND wax, might be worth looking into if you want to get into wax usage. (im not familiar with how to harvest the wax if using the box frames.

 

[me&thegals]

I have topbars. Once I get them consistently full of bees (with no freeze-outs or bear damage), I'd like to try Langstroths, too.

 

[keljonma]

so im assuming yall do langsham hives rather than top bars?

i grew up around top bars so ALL the honey was comb honey, i think if i were every dong it myself id go with top bars too, familairity and all, lol...top bars are great if you want to use the honey AND wax, might be worth looking into if you want to get into wax usage. (im not familiar with how to harvest the wax if using the box frames.

With the Langstroth hive, you can extract liquid honey or you can harvest cut comb honey or you can have comb and liquid honey in a single container. It is the beek's choice.

There are even specialty foundation/comb sections to use in the honey supers. for the Langstroth. Once the bees have filled them, each section fits into a special plastic container which can then be labeled and sold.

 

[valmom]

I am hoping our girls take to their new home as well as yours seem to have! I can't wait to see how they are doing. The beek I bought the nuc from said not to disturb them for about a week, then open it up and see if the queen is laying.

I would love to get some honey and wax, but I am already obsessing about not robbing them for the winter! Warm seasons are short here.

 

[lorihadams]

I know the feeling....today I am going to go purchase a smoker because for the life of me I cannot find the liquid smoke I bought....I have looked all morning. I already mixed up the syrup for the feeders and I am planning on working them around 12:30 today if I can get my neighbor to come assist.

On the agenda for today's inspection:

*clean and remove more burr comb from both hives
*add a full frame from hive #1 to hive #2
* add a full second hive body to hive #1
*replace both baggie feeders
*add a tenth frame to both bottom hive bodies to reduce the amount of burr comb being constructed (thanks Reinbeau)

We'll see how it goes and hopefully I can have more pics for y'all.

 

[lorihadams]

So, I just came in from working the hives. I didn't get as many pictures as I would have liked but my neighbor was helping me and he and I were using a smoker for the first time so we were a bit clumsy today. I did get a few pics.

Today I started with hive #2, the weaker of the two hives. I was going to replace an empty frame with a frame from the stronger hive but after opening them up and seeing that they seem to have increased in number some and expanded to the next two frames I decided to leave it alone for another week. I did remove a lot of burr comb and extra comb that was making the frames too wide and connectiing them together. Lots of cleanup today. One thing that I was really encouraged to see was lots of honey in the cells. Some of the comb that I had to remove had honey in it.

Hive #2 had lots of larvae, big ones in it so I decided to leave it be since they were so large and obviously close to becoming "bees". I think with time and a little patience this one will do pretty well. It seems to be pretty good so far and they had drawn out lots of comb on the adjoining frames. Once this next batch of larvae develop they should have pretty good numbers and draw out more comb.

With the addition of the smoker this time we did not locate either of the queens, but there were a lot of bees that had gone down onto the screened bottom board and we think that she may have been down there with all the other bees.

There were lots of cells with bright yellow and orange pollen in them. I took a couple of pictures of one of the frames so you could see it.

I was happy to see that hive #2 seems to be doing well. They haven't drawn out the frames as much as the other hive but they are working on it. I may go out there and replace the baggie feeder in a few days but not remove the frames.

I also added a tenth frame to the inside of both bottom hive bodies and added a whole empty upper hive body to hive #1 since they have expanded to all the frames and have almost completely drawn all of them out.

I didn't see any supercedure cells or swarm cells so that was good. I did see lots of honey and brood. I wish I could have gotten more pics but hubby is my photographer and I had my hands full with using the smoker for the first time.

I have to say that I am still undecided on the smoker. I have a headache from all the smoke and with the wind on our hillside it was kind of hard to get the smoke down into the frames to remove them. We had to add more material to the smoker twice just to keep enough smoke going to do any good. I was glad I had my neighbor there to deal with the smoker cause there was no way I could have done everything by myself.

Here are the pics from today....sorry I don't have more...
hive #2

Look at the top of the comb at the honey where I had to remove some of the excess comb from above the frames

One of the outer frames from hive #1 Look at all the pollen!

Honey in a piece of comb I had to remove

 

[lorihadams]

Oh, I forgot, here's a pic from the front with the new hive body on hive #1. The black rubber bowl in between has rocks and water in it for the girls.

I'm such a dork, I just noticed that I put the super from hive #2 on upside down....

 

[Quail_Antwerp]

Nice pictures!

And you have a beautiful place!

I'm hoping to get my pics from yesterday uploaded soon.

 

[lorihadams]

Thanks! We've worked really hard on everything....I'll be glad when the garage is completely finished and the electricity is run to the barn and the garage....running extension cords is getting old.

I can't wait to see more of your pics....it really gets addictive but the smoker kinda freaked me out cause it made the bees buzz SO LOUDLY and they all went down and clustered on the bottom of the frames.

I couldn't find the queens today either but then again hubby wasn't here and I was trying to move quicker than normal since my neighbor was good enough to come help.