It's a Wrap

And so our beekeeping season comes to a close.

Fluffy aster seeds wait for a breeze to come and take them away to a new patch of ground.

The leaves had fallen from the trees. The temperature had been dropping. It was time to wear gloves in the morning to keep my fingers warm. A hat made waiting for the bus a little more comfortable.

And the bees weren't flying any more. They weren't taking the syrup either. It was too cold.

I held off putting my winter wraps on until a really cold day when I knew no bees would be flying.

Last year I made the mistake of putting the wraps on on a warmer fall day. Bees that returned to their hive that evening were confused at the change and couldn't find their way in.

Many perished from the cold and rain, their bodies littering the front stoop. It was a sorry sight.

I hate these mistakes--ones you don't think about because you haven't done it before. So, if you are new to putting wraps on I hope this advice helps you. Put them on when it's so cold the bees are all inside.

I went a step farther this year and put them on, not pulling them all the way down, just to give the bees a few days to adjust to the hive change. Then on a really cold day I came back and pulled them down snug.

The entrance reducers had been put on about two weeks earlier so the bees were already adjusted to returning to their smaller entrance in the corner.


I came to the yard one day to discover the reducer pulled out of place--raccoon activity--so I used duct tape to hold them in place.

The wraps are made by NOD Apiaries. They're made of strong black plastic that has polyester-like batting sealed inside, just like a quilt.

When using wraps, there's two things to do. One is to put a nail in your entrance reducer. This catches on the plastic and prevents it from slipping all the way down and closing the entrance completely.

The second is that there needs to be an upper entrance. It acts to release extra heat and prevents excessive moisture and condensation forming inside the hive.

The following weekend this happened. Snow. Tons of it. I'm in London, Ontario where we got 1 meter of snow in 2 days. Just north of the city a town of Lucan got 1.5 meters.

We all got a three days off work to spend at home shovelling out our driveways. Children were happy to have a "snow day" and stay home from school.

I haven't been to the bee yard yet to see how they fared. One thing about snow is that it acts as an insulating blanket.

I'm sure the bees are as snug as a bug in a rug.

Eating lots of Honey and our Words

Twenty hives, eh.

Oh yes, we're eating our words now... with spoonfuls of honey of course.

You see, last summer the weather was horrible. The bees worked their butts off like usual but it just rained and rained. When it didn't rain, it was cold and cloudy. The result was the poorest honey harvest in Ontario--ever.

That was our inaugural year and it was pretty easy going from our end. The hives built their numbers slowly. The honey harvest was very modest. Overall it wasn't too much work for Dad and I.

That's what got us into trouble.

We thought this year would be easy too. We talked about increasing to a bee yard of twenty hives. We figured we could manage that many.

In the spring of 2010 we bought two nucs which increased our bee yard to four hives.

Spring came quickly with hot weather and loads of sunshine. The bees loved it and they built up their numbers rapidly. The weather held too and didn't get cold again. The hives grew and grew in number.

They were bringing in tons of honey... and they were running out of room.

I was expecting a slow start like last year. I wasn't ready. I didn't have enough honey supers (no $$ saved to buy them). Then I had to nail them together and paint them.

All summer long I was painting honey supers. It seemed I was buying supers every week.

All my jeans got paint on them. Everyone knew what colours my hives were by looking at my jeans.
Even the beekeeping suppliers ran out of supers and there was one week when the honey was overflowing and I had no supers to give them.

When I did get them, they never got painted but instead were put on the hives straight away.

While we were brushing bees and stacking supers and extracting honey for hours and hours Dad said, "Are you sure you want twenty hives?"

"No," I said. "Right now we can't keep up with four."

The running joke in our family is to ask if we think we can manage twenty hives.

No, four hives is a nice number, one for each corner.

And lots of honey to spare.

And Now for Something Simple

Have you ever reached into the small gap under the hive to try to pull out your sticky board and found that it's stuck in there?

I have.

I tried using the hive tool to catch it and pull it out but that didn't work.

I tried using scissors and all they did was push slashing cuts into the plastic board.

Check out the mite counts on the board pictured above. This is during a treatment so the mites are dropping. But there were tons of them.

2010 was a great honey year but the mites got a foot hold (literally) on the bees this summer too.

I use the corrugated plastic boards as sticky boards and I coat them with Crisco shortening to make them sticky.

Finally, after using pliers like tweezers I was able to get my sticky board out. That brought me to my simple solution: Poke a small hole in the board and run a cord through it. Tie the cord in a loop. Viola - a pull string.

And it works like a charm.

City Orchards

Honey for Sale. At last.


My 'marketing manager' (Dad) has been very busy socializing and selling our honey. It's nice to have some cash to put toward those beekeeping supply bills.

Our hives are at City Orchards in London, Ontario. The honey is sold there by Les who is an apple farmer and of course Dad is selling it to his friends or any stranger that crosses his path.

The location has been a real blessing. The bees appreciated having over 700 apple trees to forage from in spring. I just hope that next year is as good a year for bees as this year was.

I have A LOT of catching up to do on this blog. I apologize for not posting 'as it happened'. It certainly wasn't because of lack of interest. Quite the opposite. I'm sure you can relate--lack of time.

But, I've got many photos so now that the season is winding down I'll be posting our experiences with the bees so stay tuned... maybe you now have time to read the posts! (I'm behind on reading the blogs I follow but that's what winter's for right? To catch up).

Tomorrow I'll be putting winter wraps on the hives. Wraps--I guess that's the word now as the beekeeping season winds down and the bees start to cluster in their hives.

How did your summer of beekeeping go? Did you harvest lots of honey? I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to leave your comments. I enjoy hearing from other beekeepers and enthusiasts.

Fall Treatments for AFB, Nosema and Varroa Mites

My mite counts have been high. Really high. It was scary looking at the mite boards a few weeks ago.

Just about every round dot on the sticky board from the bottom of the hive was a mite.

The count would have been well over 300 in a week. Easily that many. Damn. Or I should say Damn Mites.



My poor hard working bees. I knew they needed some help.



I certainly prefer to use Formic Acid over other chemicals but for this fall treatment I opted to use Apivar strips.

The strips are made of plastic with a v-point cutout at the top of one end. They slide down vertically between the frames of the brood chamber. The v-point catches on the top of the frame which holds it in place.



The instructions advise to place the strips at a maximum of 2 frames apart and to put them in where the bees are clustering, where the brood are.



This pesticide works via contact, unlike Formic Acid which is a vapour. With Apivar, the bees brush past the strip and that's how the treatment is applied to the bees.


I recharged the sticky boards and have done a 'before' mite count so that I can compare the 'after' treatment mite count.

I also gave the bees an AFB treatment, mixed with fruit sugar and sprinkled on wax paper. A few weeks ago I also gave them baggies of sugar water, placed on top of the frames, with Fumagilin to combat Nosema.

I notice that my one hive (#1) takes down all the medications right away whereas the other three hives are slower to eat up theirs.

Of course, no honey supers are on the hive at this time while this chemical is in the hives.

Latest Reports on Cause of CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder)

You may have read these articles already or received them via email from beekeeping newsgroups.

Just in case you didn't here are links to the stories and information behind the latest research information available regarding Colony Collapse Disorder that were released last week.

This post is more for a historical record for this journal. I found it very useful to read both the scientific report and the news reports.

Here is a link for a story in NPR referencing the study:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/10/07/130397460/military-and-scientists-find-new-suspects-in-dying-beehives

Here is a link for a story in the New York Times referencing the study. This one is not so scientific in description and gives interesting background info.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/science/07bees.html?_r=1

This is the research paper on the discovery:
http://www.plosone.org/home.action

Fall Hive Visit

We were really blessed today with awesome weather. The whole long weekend--it's the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend--will be great weather. Temperatures from 19 to 22 Celsius.

At a glance you could tell the bees were pretty happy about it too. By 3:00 p.m. they were all busy flying, coming and going on their foraging trips.

I checked the hive top feeders. I'm giving them a strong mixture of sugar syrup right now, hoping they'll fill their combs up. I'd rather have them have too much honey than not enough.

Winter is only a few months away. It's hard to imagine winter after the exceptional summer we've had, combined with today's great weather.

Hive #1 with my specially bred hygienic queen always amazes me. They eat all the AFB medication. They eat all their Fumagilin B sugar water. They clean up everything that's put in the hive right away.

And these well behaved bees eat up all their sugar water. They're very progressive bees and great producers too.

Hive #2 I'm concerned about because of excessively high mite counts. I blame myself in part because without a queen excluder in place, the queen had laid some drone eggs in a foundationless frame I'd given them. It was meant for comb honey. I probably should have cut the drones out. Maybe that helped increase mite counts.

I had done an experimentation by not using an excluder, based on many comments from beekeepers that don't use them. My final conclusion: Next year I'll use them.

Hive #2 has been slow to eat their sugar syrup baggies, their AFB medication, etc. Now this hive has always done things a little differently than the booming Hive #1. But Hive #2 produced just as much honey as Hive #1--they just do it differently, slower. While Hive #1 had tons of bees up in the feeder and at the top of the hive, Hive #2 didn't appear so busy until the inner cover was removed. They were there all right.

The two Nuc hives are doing well and they've got lots of bees

They aren't taking back the syrup too much but I believe it's because they've got enough workers that they're bringing in nectar from the fields.

Our blooms right now are: Asters, Chrysanthemums, Golden Rod, and Sedums. Those are the main ones. The area the hives are in is very blessed with many wild flowers.

I got stung too. After finishing and doing several impromptu group education sessions (people coming by the purchase apples from the orchard come by to ask about the bees). But what stung me was a small yellow jacket. Figures.

I found my wrist where I was stung was swelling. I really find ice helps to take down the swelling as well as pain or irritation.

It was interesting to see how a small bit of water collected from rain on a container lid is used by the bees as a source of water. Why not? It's not far to fly--about two feet from the hive.