Making a stand, Honeycomb from heaven, and a busy bee month

What a month !  The Florida Bee Farm needed more room to accommodate all the new arrivals (3 swarms caught) and one split so a new stand was built and squeezed into the apiary.  A large Oleander bush and one papaya tree needed to be relocated and the ground needed leveling in the area of the new stand and it turned out nice.  Not as shaded as the other hives but there is some shade.

New hive stand and 2 of the 3 new hives at the Florida Bee Farm

New brood boxes needed painting and stands needed to be finished to work correctly.  Also bought several migratory covers to experiment with instead of the covers I'm currently using which seem to host more pests and ants than I care to deal with.  But I remember a couple old time beekeepers saying that migratory covers are best in Florida and they're probably right.  I'll probably change all my hives to use migratory covers because I'm tired of finding ants, spiders, frogs and lizards under the cover.

The tomatoes have really been getting most of my attention and have been producing quite a few delicious tomatoes.  Between many nice meals with them and multiple canning sessions, they are just about done for the season.  I learned a lot and picked up a few tips for next year when I plant tomatoes again.  This weekend we probably did our last canning of the season.   It's a bit of work but so very satisfying. 

Final tomato canning session of the year

My latest experiment that was started about a month ago is Hops.  I purchased a few starts from a company in Michigan and they're already 5' tall !!!  They're growing like mad.  It will be an interesting experiment and if successful they may be grown on a larger scale next year even though they're not officially a Florida plant since they may need cold to go dormant.

Honeycomb from heaven The Florida Bee Farm

More honeycomb from heaven at The Florida Bee Farm

The other day I was sitting under a tree and got up to do something.  When I came back, a 8" piece of honeycomb with some bees was sitting next to the chair.  Looking up, I couldn't see through the canopy of leaves to determine if any bees were up there.  Next day I walked by and there were two more pieces of fresh beautiful honeycomb on the ground.  Something's going on up in the tree but not sure what and why the comb keeps falling out.  Fresh made comb is quite amazing.  Very light, perfectly formed and just beautiful.

Finally, for the first time I did a split of one of the hives that was getting too large.  Stacking too many boxes on top of each other is too heavy for me to lift up high and it's also not good for the bees unless you add an upper entrance to the hive.  Because you don't want them coming in with their nectar and pollen and having to climb through a couple brood boxes and honey supers to drop off their load.  So I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  Another hive I was in this week may be in trouble as the brood wasn't looking good.  Possibly needs a queen. 

There's been an abundance of fresh vegetables, herbs and fruit on our table this month.  Delicious.  And the extra has been sold at the Indian Rocks Co-Op which has been a great group to work with.  A good place to get organic veggies, plants, and all sorts of things. 

Bye bye bees : (

Over two weeks ago I ordered some needed equipment from Mann Lake Beekeeper supply and they still haven't shipped !  This is their busy season and it looks like I'll have to wait.  But unfortunately what I was waiting for would have prevented the loss of many thousands of bees from the largest hive I had.  I was going to split the hive but looks like the bees did it for me.

Yesterday when I was getting ready to leave the Florida Bee Farm, I went over to check on the bees.  And it was an amazing site.  My busiest hive emptied out and zillions of bees were flying around in front of the hive.  It was loud too.  From about 20 feet away you could hear all the buzzing and excitement coming from the hive.  This time of year large honey bee hives make extra queens to facilitate splitting the hive.  Sometimes multiple groups will fly off to form their own colony's.  As a beekeeper, you try to prevent this by doing a split for the hive.  But in this case I was too late and off they went. 

I can't help thinking that the bees were excited to head out and move into their new home wherever it is.  It's nature and you just have to go with it.  The video I took with my phone didn't capture the big ball of bees in the tree very well but you can kind of make them out.

All hives re-queened and creatures of the night

Since all of my hives were feral hives, the State of Florida requires you to re queen them within a reasonable time.  Not all beekeepers follow this but I felt it should be done for my hives.  I chose a queen breeder in Ohio that specialized in Italian Cordovan queens which is a gentle genetic line of honey bees.  Plus those queens are a beautiful yellow color that stands out.

The re-queening was somewhat difficult while experiencing the worst weather we've seen in the 20 years we lived here.  Finding the existing queens for some reason was difficult for myself and another very experienced beekeeper that was helping.  In between monsoon downpours we would quickly look  through some frames until we had to close it back up.  Felt bad for the poor bees that put up with our intrusions.

On one particularly difficult hive where we just could not find the queen, I was taught a technique he called the "shaker method".  Basically a last resort effort to find a queen.  This entailed shaking all the bees off the frames and putting the empty frames in a brood box off to the side.  Then take another empty brood box with a queen excluder taped to the bottom and shake all the bees into this box.  Even shake the bees that are on the base into this empty box.  Place the box with frames on the bottom board/base and then place the box of bees (with queen excluder) on top of the box of frames and close it all up.  All the nurse bees in the box of bees will go down through the queen excluder to work with the brood in the frames of the lower box.  Several bees will be stuck in the top box including the queen and drones.  I did this and two days later went in and found the queen on the excluder.  Then this hive was ok to be re-queened.

On another hive I found the queen after a lot of intensive looking.  Very happy so I installed the new queen cage and then closed everything up.  Then while moving the caught queen I accidentally opened the clip holding the queen and she flew away.  She would likely fly back to her hive so I immediately slipped a queen excluder above the entrance to prevent her from returning and also preventing the new queen from getting established.  And that worked just fine other than the fact drones couldn't leave or return for 2 days.


The queens all come in their own little cage with several nurse bees.  The cage has an entrance capped with a plug of candy.  If you were to put a new queen directly into a hive, the worker bees would immediately kill her.  By leaving her in the protective cage for several days, her pheromone  scent permeates the hive and the worker bees get used to her .. all the while eating away at the candy plug to open the entrance of her cage.  Often the queen and her attendants with her will also nibble away at the candy on their side of the candy plug.  Usually only takes a couple days.

Yesterday was the second nice sunny day we've had in a long time so the hives were opened and  queen cages were checked.  Sure enough all the of cages were opened.  And the bees were like a bunch of excited little kids running in and out of the cages.  They just love that strong queen pheromone smell.

A friend suggested I put a few mouse traps on the hive to see if we have any animals coming in the night to try and access the hives.  Sure enough the traps were snapped when I arrived yesterday and one hive had the entrance reducer pulled out about 8 inches.  Some critter was trying to reach into the hive.  They were able to pull it out since the entrance reducer was loose from the temporary queen excluder.  Now that the queen excluder was removed that will hopefully not happen again because the entrance being wide open also started a massive bee robbing war.  Plenty of dead bees on the bottom board and a pile on the ground out front.  This time of year bees robbing hives is common.  Hopefully the reinstalled entrance reducer will make the hive easier to defend against robbing.

I've heard that your first year of beekeeping is the hardest and I believe that statement.  It's the year where you learn so many lessons .... often, the hard way.  It really is a lot of work but it's worth it.  These bees are fascinating and nobody .... and I mean nobody has them completely figured out. 

Five Queens a "piping"

Five new Italian Cordovan Queen Bees arrived via UPS yesterday after traveling from Ohio.  Fortunately they all looked healthy and active despite being held an extra day in a warehouse due to a screwup by UPS.

The first thing I did after opening the box was to give them all a few drops of water and honey.  Then I noticed the high pitched noises that new queens make.  Kind of like a trumpeting sound it's called "piping".  When there's several queens in a hive after queen cells hatch, this sound is heard ... a battle cry of sorts you could say.  Turn the volume up in the video and you should be able to hear the piping sounds.  Pretty cool.

Not only did we think it was cool, our cat was fascinated by the piping bees.