Adam at AZapiaries is starting to take orders for next spring’s bees. I am concerned that my bees won’t make it, but I am also worried that this is a losing proposition. My bees are doing poorly and I am not sure that I want to spend $450 to replace all my colonies.

I have time, but I have to decide before Christmas.

The early October snow storm has done some damage.The bees are cold and inactive. One hive has a huge tree limb sitting on it, but the hive did not collapse. One tree limb hit my stack of supers and broke the top one up.

I fed the bees the day before the storm. It has been cold since. Some of the hives did not touch the sugar syrup. One of the hives finished it. The rest have finished some of the sugar. I am concerned about the hive that did not eat anything. I am wondering if there are any live bees in there.

The weather should warm up into the mid 50s for the next week. I hope that the bees find the sugar and store it away.

If the bees die this winter, that is it. I am selling the equipment and finding another hobby.

I cleaned out a camera and I found the pictures that I took while building the basket for my do-it-yourself honey extractor.

It is made of two pizza pie pans held together with threaded rod. The holes in the top are now bigger because I had to do a few deep frames when I had a hive collapse. I have added springs to hold the frames steady inside the basket. I have cut off the top of the central rod to make it shorter as I bent the rod when I had an accident with the drill.

I filed off the top of the rod square to make it easier to grab with the drill. The drill is the cheapest Craftsman variable speed drill that they had. I spin the frames one side at a time after opening the caps with a fork. (A simple table fork worked better than the expensive hot knife.)  I start slowly and work up to a decent speed. It takes about a minute or so to completely dry out the frames. I then flip them and the second side takes even less time because the frames are lighter.

The garbage can with its strike plate and the pipe to hold the basket in place are in an older post.

My earlier attempt at a basket self destructed after one use. I just noticed that the basket shows the long rods at the bottom of the basket. Cut the excess off. Use Nylon tie wraps or galvanized wire to weave around the basket so the frames don’t slide out.

Click on the slide show to see the larger images.

The drill that I use to spin the honey went nuts and my home made honey spinner is a little knocked around. The drill got stuck “on” and the cord wrapped around the shaft bending it. Notice that the 3/8 inch shaft is bent. If I did this again, I would use 1/2 inch threaded rod and make the shaft shorter on the top. The long shaft makes it easy to bend.

The spinner is made from two 17 inch aluminum pizza pie plates with threaded rod holding them about 2 feet apart. I used galvanized wire to keep the frames in, but as you see the wire breaks. There are 4 galvanized springs that hold the frames in place. I can do 4 deep frames at a time. I have to flip then to the other side. It only takes a minute to spin out all the honey using a drill to drive it. I have a small pipe in the bottom of a trash can to hold it in place while it spins. I can spin about 50 pounds before I have to empty some honey.

The hives are very low on honey all of a sudden. I robbed Fanny and got only 15 pounds of honey. The rest of the hives are very low and the weakest hive died.

I was not paying close attention to one of my weak hives. I assumed that it was putting something away, but last week the hive just collapsed due to starvation. I should have paid closer attention. This hive never made comb and never put away honey, but it had a fairly large population. I am saddened by the loss of this hive and the time and money I put into it. I could have fed it sugar, but I don’t think it would have made it through the winter.

I will be feeding the other hives, now. The late summer was great and the bees really increased. September was deadly, though. I watched the bees coming in with pollen and I thought that they were OK. I was wrong.

A month ago I checked the supers on the new hives and they were full. When I went to harvest, the comb was empty for the most part.

I have to take the supers off of the rest of the hives and feed them. It is dark when I get home and it is just getting light when I get in the car in the morning so I have to do this on the weekend. I will feed them as much as they will take between now and the end of the month. I’ll check to see if they have put away enough honey for the winter, then. If not, I will feed them on warm days.

I want to take the top feeders off by Thanksgiving and spend that weekend wrapping the hives with roofing paper for the winter.

During the year I harvest honey in small amounts whenever I run out of bottles to sell. I try to get 10 full medium frames from the hives which gives me 30 to 40 pounds of honey. I leave the partially full frames behind.

In the fall, however, I have to take all the supers off the hives. Currently there are 7 supers on the hives. I did not put supers on the two hives that I got from Goose Rock farms (Martha and Ethel). These nucs did not fill the deeps with honey so I never put supers on. I got these later in the Spring and they did not really do well. I hope they will make it through the winter. Connie, my weak hive, has no supers.

Fanny and Justine, the hives that I got from A & Z up in Connecticut are doing very very well and each has 3 mostly full supers. The unnamed hive that was a guest hive is doing well enough so that I put one super on her. I re-queened this hive and she is now doing very well and has recovered from the abuse that the owner gave her.

I figure that the 7 supers should give about 15 pounds each which should be 70 to 100 pounds of honey. Perhaps less since I robbed Justine September 3rd and she has not had time to refill the frames.

Soon, I will take off all the supers. This is work since I clean the bees off them by hand and the bees are not happy about me robbing them. This should be Indian Summer in late October. I might put it off until November, but I should not do it when the weather is cold. First, because it will chill the bees, and second, because cold honey does not flow, and I will have trouble spinning the frames and filtering the honey.

I thought that I may have waited too long to re-queen Connie. I am still concerned.

The life span of a bee is short. They live 28 to 35 days. Some may live a little longer. I think that the bees were already getting old in the hive that I re-queened. The new workers will not emerge for about 21 days from the time the queen lays them. There may be a few days where there are no bees taking care of the brood. If that happens the new brood die. I am hoping that there will be enough bees, along with the queen to care for the new brood and keep them warm and fed.

In the cool weather a bee  can live a 5 months. Bees born in September and October are supposed to last the longest.

The hive acts like it is doing well. There are lots of bees by the entrance and the workers are bringing back pollen. This is sign that the hive is “queen-right”.

I released the queen on September 12th. If I see new bees on October 3rd then I know that Connie stands a chance over the winter. The new bees will be smaller and golden in color. The hive is now half Russian, but the new hive will probably be all Italian. The new bees might be part Carniolan. The place where I bought the queen had some Carniolan hives and the queen was naturally mated which means I don’t know who the fathers are.

The new bees are smaller than the old bees, so I will look for color and size on October 3. Keep your fingers crossed.

Connie, my part Russian hive, has been fading for about a month. I decided last week to re-queen her.

The symptoms are that she has no activity at the front of the hive. There were 2  or 3 bees hanging out, but no foraging. This is a sign that the hive is in trouble. I thought she had suddenly died, but when I opened here up, there were lots of bees, just hanging out, and there was lots of honey in the main hive. I took the supers off because they were empty. Clearly, Connie had not been foraging when the other hives are packing away honey.

Last night I drove down to Summit NJ where a beekeeper named Ivan has a lots of bees and always has a few queens. I got a very lively and fat queen from him. There was a language issue, so I guess I got an Italian queen. He said had Carnies and I asked for one, but this looks more like an Italian than a Carnie. I will know when the new bees come out in three weeks.

I put the cage in the hive last night and when I came home from work tonight, it looked like they were not treating her aggressively. I released her and she ran right into the hive. It was very cool to watch. She acted like she wanted to get down to business.

Even beforeI released her, the hive was showing much more activity. Suddenly there are dozens of bees running off and returning with pollen. I think she was accepted and is now dominating the hive.  It looks like a different hive.

I will know for sure 18-22 days from now when the new brood emerges. I should see new bees, somewhat smaller than the older bees, flying around the entrance.

It is only a month and a half before the first frost. I am hoping for a long warm autumn so that Connie can build up some population. Connie can lay thousands of eggs a day, and from the looks of this queen, she might just do that.  She already has a good stash of honey in the hive boxes. With a little luck, Connie will come out next Spring healthy and happy.

I suited up tonight about 7PM and went back and robbed Justine. She had 3 supers, each with 10 frames, but I only took full frames and wound up with ten. Some of them were very heavy, some were 3/4 full on one side and the other 100%.

I spent the rest of the night scraping off the caps and spinning the honey. (I had alreadyspent two hours this afternoon cleaning the spinner and the buckets.)

I filtered the honey, once with the course filter to get the big wax chunks, and once with a fine filter to get the rest. It still has wax. I had to prop the spinner up so that it dripped into the first bucket and at 11pm it was still dripping a little, but there was very little left. I have the last bucket tipped with a bucket holder to drip into the bottling tank.

It looks like around 35 pounds of honey. This is pretty good from 10 frames. Supers average 15 to 25 pounds each. I could have taken more honey, but I left the partial frames for the bees. I’ll get those frames the next time.

35 pounds is about 42 or more bears.

I have to make the new labels tomorrow morning and start bottling up the bears.

I’ll put the sign out when we get a few dozen bottled.

The honey was mostly the black kind you get with goldenrod. The rest was golden honey from summer flowers. The mix came out a deep brown like bourbon. It tastes dark and nutty. Erica prefers the light flowery spring honey. I like this dark and aromatic fall honey.

I sold the last of the honey that I harvested last month. I have to go out and get some more.

I harvest honey late in the day, just before dark. This way the bees leave me alone when I do the extracting. If I do it during the day, the bees find the honey and I spend most of my time skimming off drowning bees. If I get the frames around 7:30, it is dark by the time I start extracting. The bees are all in bed. I turn on the lights in the back and from 8pm to 10:30 I am uncapping, spinning, and filtering honey. By 10:30 I have a couple of 5 gallon pails  full of honey that are ready to bottle. I put them up on the counter so Erica can do the bottling the next day. The pails have “honey cocks” so Erica can just turn the honey on and off when she fills the bottles.

I have about 100 12oz bears left, I also have two dozen 8 ounce bears that I give away at Christmas. I might use all of these up in the next harvest.

I am ordering glass containers for this fall so that I can sell them (at a premium) for Christmas presents. I might not have enough bottles for the next harvest, so I might have to do this soon. Bottles take up a huge amount of room, so I don’t want to order before I need them.