I robbed one of the hives today. There were four and a half frames of honey in the super, which is only about 20 pounds at best. There has been so much clamor for honey that I decided not to wait.

The other hives had very little honey.

This has been the worst year for me. I lost all the bees over the winter and one of the packages that I bought this Spring. The only high point was that a dead hive somehow came back to life – perhaps a swarm found it. It is coming along, but it has nothing in the super.

I will have so little honey and my costs are so high that I am raising the cost per bear. I am still discussing this with Erica, who doesn’t want to do it.

After I bottle what I have, I will announce that honey is here, but I am limiting the amount of honey I’ll sell at  a time so everybody gets at least a little honey.

I have only three hives left. The last hive from last year died a couple of weeks ago. The hive boxes are out there empty and abandoned. I plan to split a hive or two if they are strong enough so I just leave them.

I noticed lots of bees in one of the abandoned hives. The colony died last fall. I guessed at the time that there must be some honey left in it and the other colonies were robbing it.

I went back over the weekend and this hive is full of bees. I popped the top and there were solid bees inside. They are cleaning out the hive and bringing back pollen. I might have captured an early hive, or there was a queen supersedure in the next hive. This happens when the bees make a new queen. I think that a hive might have made several queens and one went next door and took up housekeeping. This seems very unlikely, but is possible. Somehow I got a free hive without having to work for it.

I now have swarm traps up in the trees in the front of the house. My brother made one 4 frame nuke for me and I had a 5 frame nuke. I filled these with nice old honeycomb and poured a little lemon oil on them. This is supposed to attract a swarm. With luck I can have a couple of more hives by the end of June and perhaps I’ll be able to get honey from them in the fall.

I bought pollen patties to give to my bees to start them waking up for Spring. In past years this has worked. The pollen patties contain calories including protein and the bees respond by a population increase. I had three hives still alive about two weeks ago.

I went out a few days ago when the temperature was in the mid 40s (F), and found no activity at all, just dead bees. The cold snap where the temps went down into the low teens must have done them in. I put in a pollen patty in each hive just in case.

I went out today and in the first two hives there were no bees. In the third hive, there were bees tearing up the pollen patty. I’ll go out again with another one in a day or so.

It is disappointing to lose 9 out of ten hives, but it is heartening to see one lone hive hanging on. I have something to root for.

I ordered three packages from the guy upstate who is coming up Rt. 95 with a truckload of bees. He’ll be dropping off bees here on the way.

Adam at AZApiaries used to come to the West Nyack Mall, but this year he said he’d be stopping across the river in Westchester. That’s a hike for me and I’d have to pay an expensive toll and some expensive gas to get the bees, so I have decided to try an alternative.

Jorik Phillips at http://www.hudsonvalleybeesupply.com will be stopping by, either at my house or at the mall during the last week in March (perhaps early April if the weather is bad). He has another run scheduled for the end of April.

“Their bees are genetically diverse and are bred for honey production, hardiness and temperament. They carry the best traits of Italian, Carniolan and their local stock. The queens and bees come from the same apiary so you can expect them to have the same southern drawl.”

I think that this is a nice alternative to the Italian bees that produce lots of honey while the nectar flows and then starve to death in the fall, no matter how much you feed them.

I was out over the weekend looking in on my bees. I expected them to be dead, but I was surprised to see that they are still chugging along. The fondant that I put on the top of all  the hives is about half gone. It is hard as a rock, but they are nibbling away at it. I will move some fondant from the hive that died over to the other hives this weekend. I may put water on it to soften it somewhat before I feed the surviving hives.

I have to make a decision about new hives this spring. I have found someone who is buying a truckload of packages in North Carolina and is willing to stop by my house to drop off a couple for me on his way back. These are mixed bees, which I have decided might be better than the pure Italians that I have been getting.

There are other places within a couple of hours drive who are selling nucs, so I may buy some of these. All of these are mixed types – some Russian, some Carniolans, feral bees, and even some Buckfast.

My reasoning is that if I buy a variety of bees of different breeds that I might get lucky.

The guy that I bought queens from down in New Jersey had nucs last year, so I am going to phone him and see what I can get. The advantage is that this only about 15 miles drive and with the price of gas it makes his hives a bargain. He has recently divorced so I am also hoping that he may be wanting to get rid of some hives that I can pick up now.

My brother may have a bunch of nucs for $50 that he can get from a guy who does swarm captures.

I will also place some swarm traps on a few rooftops (one at my mother’s house and possible one in the village of Nyack).

My target is to have 8 hives so I would need 5 or 6 hives, depending on how my three make it through the winter. The hive that was smashed during Sandy, does not appear to have much population, so I am a little worried about her.

That would be $600 to $700 worth of bees. That would require that I sell about 150 bottles of honey. I am not sure that these bees will produce honey the way the pure Italians did. They are all of them “Survivor” bees of mixed types.

My fear is that one of these diverse hives will be sick with “foul brood” or infested with small hive beetle or varroa. This could wipe out my investment in a very short time.

I was out looking at the bees over the weekend and it I don’t think it looks good. One hive has a few dead bees at the entrance and, when I pulled off the top, I saw a small ball of live bees, but I don’t think they will make it.

On all three remaining hives, the fondant is about half gone. That means they are eating the sugar, but I am not sure if it is enough to make it.

The weather has turned really cold today. It was under 20° when I woke up this morning and it won’t go above freezing all day. There are two months of deep cold left before I can start Spring feeding. I put on top feeders with sugar syrup during the first good thaw in late February or Early March. The three hives will have to survive until then on their honey stores and the rock hard fondant that’s left. I might try some more fondant if they get near the end of the current batch. (about 6 lb. per hive).

The question now is whether or not to buy bees in the spring to get back up to 6 or 7 hives. It will cost me, perhaps $850, for 7 hives, if the ones I have die. AZ Apiaries is not stopping by the West Nyack Mall with bees this year. I will be paying at least $110 per package for bees from unknown sources.

My brother Ward thinks he can get nucs from a guy near him for $50 each. These are unmanaged hives from swarms captured last summer. They are mixed breeds, but are survivors. They may have heavy varroa mite loads. There are a dozen of these available, so I am asking Ward to try to reserve three. I don’t know if he will come through.

There is a place an hour or so north of us selling nucs for $135 each. These are mixed race survivor bees, but he claims to not treat his bees, so they may have varroa, also. $135 is expensive, at least for me. It would take about 25 pounds of honey to make this back. There is also a place about an hour south that is selling nucs for $125. They have $100 3# packages from North Carolina.

I figure that I have about two weeks to make my mind up. The bees go fast.

My brother Ward’s Honey: local honey rochester ny.

Ward has followed in his big brother’s footsteps. He still has honey up in Rochester.

All the Fall honey is sold. This year I have kept a few bottles for myself because last year I ran out around Christmas.

If we have a good Spring and most of the hives live through the Winter, we I will be able to harvest around the end of May or early June.

I opened the hives and there was not enough honey in the supers to harvest. The last time that I looked, they were coming along well, but September was not as good a month as I thought in spite of the heavy pollen counts.

For no good reason that I could see, one of the hives was totally dead and empty. Not even dead bees. This is frustrating.

I put Thymol strips in the hives. The back yard smells like thyme. Thymol is the essential oil found in the spice thyme. It kills the mites that kill bees, naturally, without pesticides. I also mixed up a batch of sugar water to feed the bees. I added some honey and a product – Honey Bee Healthy – to the sugar. It is spearmint and lemon grass and encourages the bees to take the sugar and store it. It also makes the hive smell nice and keeps the sugar water from fermenting. It is a natural way to help the bees.

A bee got inside my bee veil and teased me, pretending it was going to sting, but it never did. The bees were mostly calm, but one hive got upset when I started pulling the frames out to see how they were doing with honey. Lots of swarming bees adds a little tension to the inspection.

I was upset with the dead hive, also the hives are not doing as well as I expected. They seem light  with lots of empty frames. I will feed them again in a few weeks and I have to take out the thymol strips over Thanksgiving day weekend. Then I’ll take the feeders off and put some shims in place and then feed them bee candy, which is similar to bakers fondant.

I am seriously considering not buying new bees in the Spring to replace any hives that die. This is a very discouraging hobby and the bees are fragile. I have spend a few thousand dollars on bees and equipment and this has been the first year that I broke even on honey sales. I may have even made a small profit. I do not see this going anywhere. I have a full time job and the bees require more attention than I can find time for. I wanted to raise queens, but that is very nearly a full time job. Maybe when I am retired I will be able to work the bees better, but with this economy, I have to keep working as long as anyone will pay me.

I got about 50 pounds of honey on labor day, but I did not get a chance to extract it from the frames until this last weekend.This converts to about 60 or 70 bear bottles.

There are two buckets, one full and the other with a little bit, sitting on the counter in out kitchen. Erica will try to find time to bottle the honey today or tomorrow. Bottling is slow work and Erica has to stoop over to do it. Her sore back is no help here.

I am going to print out labels today and the honey should go on sale this weekend.

We have accidentally obtained a dozen one pound “Muth” jars which will sell for about $10. These are antique looking bottles with a cork. They are very pretty and make good presents. I am not sure if Erica will fill any of them this time. We may be using them for Christmas presents for out friends.

There are 4 hives with honey that I will rob when I get a nice weekend. That should be another 70 or 80 bottles if the bees did their stuff as well as I hope.

The bees are very healthy and have a high population. I hope that with the chill weather this week that they start slowing down for winter. All the hives seem full so they might have enough stores to make it through. This winter I will make a sugar concoction called “bee candy” to feed them a few times in the cold months.

The Chickens are just starting to lay eggs so there may be a dozen or so fresh eggs available by this weekend. Erica has been working hard on the “Fresh Eggs” sign.

I have two hives that have eaten through the screening that I put on top of the “top feeder”. As a result, I have not been able to feed them without getting a face full of bees. So – I’ve ignored them. This is not good.

I bought a couple of top feeders and put the screening on them and suited up. I replaced the feeder on each hive and gave them 5 pounds of sugar mixed with 2-1/2 quarts of water each.

I finally acted on these hives because they have not been feed in a couple of months and compared to the other hives, they didn’t seem as busy. My other hives have long beards of bees on the front. I’ve been feeding them a couple of pounds of sugar a week.

When I opened the two hives, there was lots of activity. I pulled a middle frame from the top super and found it to be 100% capped honey. This was a surprise. I expected to find them to be starving, what with me not feeding them and the high heat and humidity all July and August. They must have been finding flowers because they were indeed packed.

I checked one of the hives that I have been feeding and the top super was so heavy that I could hardly lift it. It looks like all the hives have one or two supers of honey. I did not put a second super on some of the hives because I thought it would be a waste of time. I think that I’ll put on the rest of my supers this week and continue feeding them heavily until I harvest the honey.

I am going to harvest honey on Labor day and I hope to get a bonanza!

I wrote up an article on “The Miller Method” for making queens. I did not publish it here because I wanted to verify all the steps by doing it myself. I sent it to my brother Ward because I did not have enough time this Spring to work the hives.

Ward ran with it and is busy making queens. The last I heard, he got a good frame of brood and cut it into points to encourage queen production. He put it in a queen-less box and that’s the last I heard. He should have cells by now.

I sent him some queen cell protectors for moving the cells to nucs. This weekend he should have some queens if all goes right. As soon as they are mated he will send me one.

These are queens from his “wild” hives. He harvested 100 pounds from them and they are extremely vigorous. I will split my good hives and introduce his queen. I should have smoky black bees in a month that produce lots of honey.

Ward has the theory that these dark wild bees are the original European dark bee (Apis mellifera mellifera) brought by the colonists in the early 1600s. They went wild and have been living in the woods for years, occasionally mating with Italian bees, but keeping their dark color. (There were no native American honey bees as far as I can find).

The original bee was considered gentle, but the hybrid variety is supposed to be a little cranky and more prone to defend the hive and sting. Nothing could be more gentle than the last batch of bees that I got from Georgia, but even my Golden Italians get a little bitchy sometimes.

These dark bees are hardy, although I wonder if they can resist the pests and diseases introduced lately into the bee population. They might have no resistance to Varroa and hive beetle.

On July 4th I robbed one of the hives and I was amazed at how full it was. So, on July 9th I went out after work to get some more honey from the hive next to it and there was hardly anything. All the frames were drawn, but only the center frames were capped. I pulled those and went to the next hive and it was the same thing. I was able to get 4 full frames eventually, but none of the hives had full supers like the first hive.

I’ve decided that I have to resume feeding. Last year I lost my strongest hive because it starved to death in the July dearth. I want all the hives to make it to September with enough stores. September and October have lots of fall flowers for the bees, but I don’t expect much honey.

If I feed each hive a few pounds of sugar a week from now on, I may find some honey in the supers in November. I take off the supers in November if the bottom boxes have enough honey. If the bottom boxes are light, I take out the queen excluder and leave the supers with any honey they have, so the queen can move up.

Feeding is cheap compared to having to buy a new package. I pay $2.45 for a five pound bag, but 5 pounds of honey pays me $40. It pays to feed the bees.

Two dozen bears are left so it is time to plan the next harvest.

There are 5 boxes of honey on the hives that I can harvest. It is too hot to do it this weekend. Monday, though, seems like it will be cooler. I will clean the equipment Sunday night (scrub everything with a bleach solution to make it sanitary). I will set up everything so I can go grab a box and process it.

A honey super (one medium sized box) fits on top of the hive with a queen excluder. The queen excluder keeps the queen from going upstairs to lay her eggs. The bees like to fill the top box with honey.

A honey super contains 10 frames with 3 or 4 pounds of honey on a frame. They never fill the ones on the sides, but they pack the ones in the middle.

I open the hive and use my smoker to convince the bees that there is a fire so they hide in the middle of the hive and they eat honey in preparation of running from the flames. When the are full of honey, their stomachs are so fat that they can’t bend their tails to sting me.

One by one I pull out the frames. I gently brush off the bees with soft brush and put them in a box. As I go I replace the frame with an empty one from the last time I harvested honey. These frames have honey comb all ready for the bees to fill so they don’t need to work hard to make more honey.

I use two pieces of damp cloth on the top of the hive to cover the area that I am not working on. This keeps the bees from charging up to protect their honey.

When I am through, I reassemble the hive, and if I did it right, the bees are not very upset and I did not get stung. (one fool bee always finds me though).

I bring back the box of honey to where I will extract it. I gently scrape the surface of the frames with a fork to take off the thin wax that seals the honey in. I then put the frames in my spinner and I use centrifugal force to force the honey out.

My spinner can handle about 40 pounds of honey before I have to empty it. That’s one reason I do only one box at a time.

I drain the honey out of the spinner through a fine sieve that filters out the wax and bee parts in the honey. It takes two hours to drain out most of the honey. I let the bees clean out the equipment the next day.

I then filter the honey again through a finer sieve and the result is clear honey without too much wax. The last bucket has a spout on it, and I set that on the counter for Erica to bottle up the bears.

The honey flows slowly so bottling 50 bears takes two or three hours.

We tie on the labels that I make, and the honey is ready for sale.

I robbed one of the hives. I can handle 10 frames at a time so I picked a hive and checked the honey super. I was amazed to see it was packed. A month ago I was afraid that they were starving because of all the bad weather and lack of flowers.

I carted back about 40 pounds of honey, put it through my homemade spinner and right now it is draining into a bucket through a filter. I will let it drain for an hour or so. I hope it doesn’t rain. I will bring in the honey tonight and filter it again through a finer mesh. The result will be clear light amber honey.

Erica and I will bottle it tomorrow night when I get home from work. I have to print up the “summer” labels so that we will have a finished product. Expect honey to available by Saturday morning at the very latest.

I wanted to open up some of the hives to check for honey. I was going to put on supers on some, but I wanted to do it fast so I didn’t smoke the bees.

Big mistake!!!

I chose a strong hive for the first one. Last time I checked the second deep was about half full I wanted to see if it was full and put a super on it. I pulled the top feeder and a million bees stormed out, very angry with me. I was wearing my vintage bell bottom jeans and the bees flew up my legs and I was stung 20 or so times all the way up to my thigh. I was stung through the gloves four times on one hand and once on the other.

Next time I will smoke the girls and wear tight jeans.

The Memorial Day honey sold out in 8 days. It was only 41 bottles, but it went quickly. I will try again by the end of the month. I might have honey on July 4th weekend.

I harvested honey from one of the hives. This hive made it through the winter, but is very aggressive. I was stung through the glove once, which is good outcome, considering how many times I’ve been stung. They were very angry about me stealing their hoard.

I wound up taking ten full frames that were mostly full. Some were packed on both sides. I left the partially filled frames for them and, hopefully, I can rob her again over the July 4th weekend.

The other hives are too young to have honey, yet. Their second deeps are not really full yet, so I can’t put on the honey supers. I have a super with the empty frames that I will put on a good hive next weekend.

Erica bottled 41 bears. The honey is a light amber color. A little darker than last year’s Spring honey. It has that Spring flowery delicate flavor. I am making Erica put two aside for my oatmeal in the morning. 20 bears are pre-ordered. As soon as I can get the labels printed up, I will put out the sign and announce on Facebook. This batch will be gone in a week.

I opened up all 8 of my hives. They are doing great.

The packages have all been installed about a month. They are packed with bees. In all cases they had 5 or more frames dense with bees and 7 or 8 full drawn frames. The nectar is flowing well here and none of the bees have been emptying the top feeders very fast, so I am satisfied that they are happy.

I pulled a couple of center frames on the packages and I saw eggs and brood. I put a second deep on all the package hives, except one. I don’t have enough deep boxes so I am making a temporary one out of plywood. I was tired last night and measured something wrong, so the first try did not fit the frames. For some reason I have about 15 unused deep frames and 20 unused mediums. I also have a bunch of deep wood frames that the mice got into and I need to replace the foundation. I have a pile of disassembled frames and some foundation, but the foundation was exposed to the heat. I may order some plastic foundation for the frames that need it.

I opened two hives that wintered and the split. I opened just the top and checked some frames. The top boxes each had 7 or 8 frames full of honey. I put a queen excluder on two of them and a medium super. I’ll have honey by Memorial day. The other hive had a medium super that I left on all winter. It was chock full of honey. I put another medium super on top of that.

I will pull the honey supers off on Memorial Day and spin the Honey. That should be about 100 pounds if things go well. I will check the new packages then and see if they need supers.

I will make the plywood deep this week and put it on the last hive. If it works I will make half a dozen medium honey supers. Plywood boxes with furring strip braces on the outside cost about $1.50 each as apposes to $20-$25 plus shipping for the nice boxes. I may buy a couple of deep boxes, but I can’t see buying medium supers. They aren’t going to be on over the winter and if they don’t hold much weight if I put them on top. If they only last a year or two they are well worth the effort to nail a few of them together – the bees don’t care.

I went out and opened all 9 hives this morning. The packages look good. Lots to bees and some new comb. I saw brood in all of them. That’s 5 new hives that are working. The queen boxes were empty and they looked like they had no trouble getting out.

One split seemed to be working well. The queen was released, and it was very active with lots of bees. I closed it up without checking for brood. Since there is nothing I can do if there is none, only time will tell.

The other split failed. The queen was dead in her cage and it looks like the bees went back to their original hive. This hive had not been taking syrup so I had already guessed it had gone bad.

The seven good hives have taken 10 gallons of syrup in these last 5 days and are ready for more. I have an extra top feeder now and I can put it on one of the splits. I suspect the racoons get any syrup left in the front feeders over night, because I find them scattered in the morning. You have to fill front feeders before noon.