Mail Order Queens

My Honeybee Genetics queens finally arrived from their long postmarked voyage from Vacaville, CA. Unfortunately, they arrived a day later than I expected and I only had 2 hours to pick up the bees and install them into their new homes before the family had to hit the road for a camping trip.

The packaging says it all

My local post office called as soon as the bees had arrived. I opened up the package and gave the bee's cage a spritz of water to keep them hydrated. The queen bee travels in her own little cage with her own entourage of worker bees to tend to her every desire. The queen bee doesn't feed herself or clean her own waste. She is good for laying eggs and that's about it. 

Each cage has it's own queen and an entourage of workers

On one end of the cage, there is a candy plug made out of honey and powdered sugar. When I install a new queen in an old hive, the old hive's bees have to eat the sugar plug to get to the queen. You can't introduce a queen to an established hive because they won't recognize her "smell" and will instantly kill her. Most of the bees will try and kill her, but a few bees will feed her though the cage and she will start "smelling" familiar to the old hive. If all works out well, by the time the bees eat their way into the queen, they will accept her. 

I was able to install the new queens into Ethiopia, who's previous queen magically disappeared and into Ireland, who didn't make a new queen after I removed their old queen. I didn't have enough time to install the last two queens, so I carried their cages home in my front pocket (a great place to carry queen cages because your body temperature and humidity is the perfect bee environment). I won't be able to instal the last 2 queens until Sunday so I put the queen cages in a large orange queen cage, with a dollop of honey and about 20 nurse bees I brushed into the orange box. The queens can stay in the large cage with worker bees for up to a week. 

Shirt pockets were made to carry queens

Large Queen Carrier with a dollop of honey

Adding some worker bees 

After I added the nurse bees, I closed up the orange carrying case and put it in my house. I can't leave the queen cages with queens in them open in a hive with a loose queen. If I do, the loose queen will spend days trying to kill the queens inside their cages rather than laying eggs. 

Where have all the queens gone?

I just checked my AMYO farm hives this morning and am having major queen drama! Ethiopia's queen has gone missing, leaving a barren waste land of empty brood cells. Japan has a queen, but she has only laid about 20 brood on each comb, when she should be laying 3000 per comb and the comb is really odd looking. Ireland should have started making emergency supercedure cells after I removed their queen, but they didn't.

I was considering raising 3 new emergency queens, but it is getting fairly late in the season. I'm going to be closing up my hives end of September and it will take these hives until end of August to have a queen who is laying eggs.  I think I am going to expedite this process and buy some queens on the internet. Mail order queens. They're coming in tomorrow USPS and I can't wait for the call from the nervous postal employee telling me to hurry up and pick up my bees.

I've had mixed results raising queens this year. The early splits in spring turned out some amazing queens, but I also produced the pure evil queen from Russia. I'm taking a weekend class in a couple of weeks with Zia Queen Bee and hope I can pick up some interesting tips in their "Into Her Majesties Quarters, Queen Rearing Workshop".

All those pointy tips on the comb is NOT NORMAL! What's up with these bees?

Making Beeswax (aka where tacky t-shirts get laid to rest

After you have played with your solar melter and you get out a majority of the bee trash, you have one more final wax cleaning to go from semi trashy to full on sparkly clean beeswax. 

You start out by breaking apart your semi trashy wax and adding it to an old yogurt container (or a glass jar) and floating this in a pot of boiling water. It's very important that you use a double boiler method to melt your wax. You can't add direct heat to beeswax, otherwise it will turn into a molotov cocktail on your stove. This stuff is good for lighting on fire, and that's why they make candles out of it. 

Trashy Wax

Trashy wax in a plastic tub

You melt the wax until it is completely liquid and then pour it into a fine sieve. I'm using an old t-shirt I cut up that probably says something like "fireman make the hottest lovers" and I was too embarrassed to wear out in public. I have a rubber band holding the t-shirt material onto an empty plastic container. 

Decanter our the fine trash on the very bottom so it doesn't clog your t-shirt

After the wax has been filtered and is still hot, you can pour the sparkly clean wax into ice cube trays to have individual .5 oz chunks of beeswax to use. I've coated the ice cube trays in coconut oil as a release, so the wax doesn't stick to the tray. This is my first time using an ice cube tray. In the past, I have just poured the wax into a plastic tub and then hacked away at the lump of beeswax to get chunks for making product with. This seems like a great way for me to lose a finger, so I'm moving on to ice cube trays.

Solar melter- you put your beeswax in there

You would think when making beeswax that you just scruntch up all of the comb you have pulled honey from, melt it down and put a wick in it. Not so. First you have to separate out all of the pollen, bee cocoons, bee antennae, possibly some wax moth cocoons and all the dirt and dust that keep your candle from burning well. I'm personally not a candle person but I don't want to be rubbing bee trash all over my lips with my homemade coconut swirl lip balm.

Solar melter, you put your beeswax in there

The first thing you do when rendering down your comb is to get a big roasting pan. I got mine at the local thrift store for $8. Steep prices at Thrift Town. Next, you pour in a few inches of water into the bottom of the roasting pan. The water is for the wax to float on top of as it melts away from the bee trash. Without the water, you won't be able to easily peel the hardened wax away from the pan. After you have water in the pan, you pour in your crushed up comb on one end of the pan and you prop up the pan so that as the wax melts away from the comb it collects at the other end of the pan.

This next step is very important. The finishing touch for your solar melter is a piece of glass or a plastic trash bag over the whole pan. This increases the heat inside your solar melter and keeps the bees away from your irresistible smelling concoction. I was a dummy and decided to go without a top for my solar melter because it is 100 degrees in Albuquerque right now and didn't feel inspired to pull apart my framed Tricentennial poster so that I could use the glass. Long story short, I came out to a bee massacre in my back yard. 100's of bees were trying to get into my solar melter to suck up honey, only to start cooking in the melting wax! No!!!! I grabbed a clear trash bag and covered the whole thing and released bees for the next hour, while shooing away the scavengers around me.

After a full day of cooking, I let the wax cool down in my melter and then peeled up the beeswax pieces. Tomorrow, I will do a final filter on my wax.

It's working, the wax is melting off

That looks really cool

The finished product, compost on one side, wax on the other

Honey Tithe

Whenever I harvest honey, I feed the honey that I can't get out of the comb back to the bees: the honey tithe. I put all the crushed, drained comb in a colander in the backyard by the hives. The essential part of this process is that I hide the colander in a tree, otherwise it's a bee feeding frenzy! If I just left the colander in the open, there would quickly be thousands of bees dive bombing my backyard (not so good for neighbor relations, here in the heart of the city). After a few days the bees almost completely clean out the wax, leaving it for me to render into beeswax.

bees eating the honey drippings

Some people don't like to feed the bees the left over honeycomb because of the possibility of spreading any kind of disease from one hive to the others. I'm a laissez fair kind of beekeeper, so I do it anyway and haven't had any sick hives to this day.

1st harvest of the year!

In honor of my good friend Sara, I harvested some honey on the day of her wedding. This way she could always have the taste of the day that she said "I do" to the fabulous Pat.

The harvest was small, but mighty. About 4 bars of comb were ready to be harvested. That means that at least 90% of the honeycomb were capped. If I harvest the honey before most of it is capped, then the honey can ferment.

When bees make honey, the forager bees collect nectar from flowers and store it in their honey stomach. At the hive, they give it to the house bees who "chew" it for about half an hour and add enzymes to break the nectar into simple sugars. The house bees then pack the nectar into honeycomb and then fan the nectar to evaporate out most of the water. When the honey has about 18% water, then the bees plug the comb with a cap of wax.

In top bar hives, you cut the entire comb off of the top bar.

 Then you smoosh it.

And Crush it, and tear it above a colander.

Then you lick of the top bar with a toddler.

Then you precariously stack everything on top of a bowl.

Then it oozes.

 And goozes.

 YUM

Queen of Russia WANTED, dead or alive

Holy moly, I peaked in at Russia today and got my but handed to me. Those ladies were M-E-A-N! No sooner did I open up a space around the first topbar did I have bees pelting my face net. I just happened to have my gloves on because I was straightening out the semi touchy hive Switzerland, otherwise I'd have a sting for every finger.

Russia was a hive that I noticed had almost complete queen cells about 40 days ago. Since then, Russia raised their own devil spawn queen child and in turn, she laid 10,000 devil spawn children, who all had hatched and were just waiting for me.

I'm so happy I caught this hive when there was only 5 bars of brood. I had to pull out every single bar and endure mad bees pelting my face mask and arms, while hunting down the evil queen. I finally found her and had no qualms about squishing her against the floor of her hive. I know this sounds callus, but if this hive grew any bigger, it would be totally impossible to deal with. Every bee has her mother's genetics and if the queen is aggressive, all the workers will follow suit.

I then decided that rather than letting the bees raise a new queen with possibly aggressive genetics, I would just join this hive with super awesome Costa Rica. Costa Rica is a small swarm I captured in the Nob Hill area of Albuquerque. They are chill, lovable, and most importantly, not EVIL. Hopefully, the relaxed environment of their new hive and queen will calm down Russia's workers.

Dead queen, you are going to a better place.
She is in the middle, surrounded by workers touching her. 

No more Russia