I think a lot of homeopathic remedies are crap. When I am sick, I want real medicine that has lots of statistical data that it works. Anecdotal evidence is no evidence.

That being said, I am very pleased with the beeswax cream that I made. I have trouble with the skin on my feet and legs drying out in the winter. My shins and feet itch when the weather gets cold. I’ve been rubbing some of the beeswax cream into the parts that bother me, and it has done wonders.

The cream is beeswax and sweet almond oil.

The beeswax has honey in it and it also has bee venom. After I filter out the honey there is a bag of beeswax, dead bees and other junk form the comb. One time when I extracted honey, bees got at the sticky mess left behind, and several hundred bees died when they got into the pails and never left.

I heat the wax in a double boiler. The dead bees are heated with the wax. I filtered out the solid stuff and then I let the wax harden on the top. I add water to rinse out the honey and imputities, and then heat it and filter it again. Repeat. In the end I get bright sunshine yellow beeswax that smells of honey because I can’t rinse out all the honey.

The wax has honey in it. The beeswax dissolves the venom in the dead bees and a very small amount of that remains in the wax.

The cream moisturizes (the almond oil), it protects (with a layer of beeswax) and it treats the skin (with the antibiotic effects of honey), and I think it helps my gout (a form of arthritis) with the bee venom. My gout completely went away after a few treatments.

I know my legs are better and I think the cream did that. I am less sure that the cream helped the gout, but I am not counting it out.

I am not selling the cream – it is too complicated to make and actually costs quite a bit, making it too expensive to sell at a profit. Also I don’t want to go through the trouble of making labels for it.

At Christmas friends and family might get cream and lip balm, but I am sure that 90% of them will throw it out.

I went out to lunch and something caught the corner of my eye as I walked through a small flower garden at the back entrance to the County Office Building. A honey bee was working a blue flower. I was wearing my winter coat and the temperature was in the 50s.

This girl had braved the late fall chill in order to get a little more pollen for the winter. There must be a hive nearby, but there are nothing but high rise office buildings for as far as the eye can see.

During the summer these plants are covered in honey bees. There are also lots of bumble bees or Carpenter bees working the flowers. I don’t know where they live. There is a residential area about a 1/4 mile away and it could be that someone there is a beekeeper.

I had Justine’s video camera in my pocket and luckily the battery had some charge.

Here is the video:

We put a table out in the driveway with some bears and a jar with a sign saying “Honey $6”. We sell a lot of honey this way. The honor system works. You can get 12 oz bears of honey at the supermarket for $4 or less, but we charge $6 for real local honey that is  not adulterated, medicated or fiddled with. We are selling between $40 and $60 worth a week.

Sometimes people want to take the tour and if I’m here I’ll open a hive for them.

Erica spent the day making lip balm and hand cream from the wax we harvested. I leave the comb on the hive, but when I uncap the comb I get some wax. I melt this in a double boiler and filter out the lumps and dead bees. It makes beautiful pale yellow beeswax.

Erica is taking this and mixing it with sweet almond oil and shea butter. She makes it thicker for lip balm and creamier for hand cream. We bought some tubes for the lip balm and 1/4 ounce containers for the hand cream. Erica also made up some 4 oz jars for herself. The hand cream is great. I goes on oily but soon it is absorbed my the skin leaving a coating of beeswax. It makes your skin smooth and nice feeling.

Erica added peppermint oil to the lip balm and it tastes like Christmas.

We only have 12 of each, but since the experiment was a success, I will order more containers and she’ll make more. I have to make labels for them and we will sell them for about $3 or $4 each.

I have about two pounds of wax which I figure will make 120 lip balms or hand creams. I want to buy some fancy 1 ounce glass jars. I’d sell those for $12 an ounce. For each ounce of beeswax we use nearly two ounces of almond oil, so two pounds will make 5 pounds of stuff which is 120 1/4 ounce containers or even more of the 0.15 ounce lip balm tubes.

If we sell all the honey and all the lip balm and hand cream we will be on the way to breaking even on the bee expenses. This is only the second year of beekeeping. Next year I expect to do twice as well.

It went up to about 65 degrees yesterday, and it is almost as warm today. The hives were active and I actually saw workers returning with baskets full of pollen. There are some fall flowers out despite a week or so of killing frost. It looks to be a mild winter based on this warm weather in November. I found that the long range forecast for this area is slightly warmer than usual this winter with less snow than last year. The snow is not a big issue with the bees and I prefer more snow to less. I just have to make sure that the entrances are clear after a snow so they don’t suffocate. The screened bottom lets in enough air so that this should not be a problem, though. A lot of snow means moist ground in the spring and lots of flowers with a strong nectar flow and lots of Spring Honey.

I took the buckets that I used to collect the honey and brought them back for the bees to clean. They are very happy with this and I see very fat bees returning to the hives.

I put the hive entrance blocks on the hives last week when it started getting cold. I want to keep the drafts out of the hives. The bees did not seem to mind much and scrambled in and out of the openings without trouble.

I have not wrapped the hives or piled up the leaves around them, yet.

I tipped the hives to see how much honey they have. Just a push to see if they are heavy. They are very heavy, even the Russians. I see no reason why they should not make it through the winter.

I did not medicate them, but I have the Fumagilin and I will ponder using it. I would hate to lose a hive to Norsema, but I don’t want the stuff in the honey. Replacing a hive costs me $90, and I lose the honey crop for at least half the year while they build up. It may risk losing a hive rather than add Fumagilin. Fumagilin kills amoeba infections and has been used to treat cancer. It works great in honey bees. It is used on people, but large doses are considered toxic.

Last weekend I harvested for the last time this year. I totaled about 150 pounds for the year (37.5 pounds per hive). I could have had more, but I left all of the half filled frames in the hives. Each hive has two deeps with lots of honey and at least one super full of half full frames. I put the extracted frames back on top of that so they could clean out the last drops. I might pull the empties off in a while.

It is too cold now to bother the bees anymore (45F). Next week will be warm (over 60F) again. I am taking off time next week, so if it is warm I’ll work the bees.

This year I want to cut “blue board” and put that in the covers for insulation. I want to get some felt roofing paper and wrap the hives to help keep them warm this winter. The hives are about 6 inches off the ground on blocks, so I want to sweep dried leaves up and under the hives to help  keep the drafts down. I raked the leaves up under them last year and I think it helped.

I have about five pounds of wax. I am trying to figure the best formula for making hand cream and lip balm. It is not so easy as you need much more Almond Oil than you think, and the wax still floats to the top when it cools. The recipes on the internet don’t seem to be right.  The secret seems to be make tiny batches and use the microwave to melt the wax.

I mistakenly bought the bears without the flat space in front for the label last time, so I have to redesign the label with a hole in it to fit over the top, or else use a ribbon or thread to hold it on. The kitchen has piles of boxes with lots of bears, and we haven’t even started with the last batch of honey. We are selling 10 bears a week from the driveway. We should run out around Christmas. I put the Christmas presents in a separate box so we won’t accidentally sell them.

I have not been stung in months. Either the bees like me, or I have been very lucky.

I harvested Justine and Ethel. I have to get to Martha and Connie this next weekend. I have honey to fill about 120 bears. I ordered a case.  At $6 a bear that’s about $720, which brings the cost of each bear down to about $15. I figure to break even in the Spring.

People complained that they searched Google for Rockland County Honey so I created a web site. It’s not done yet, but it should be mostly there soon. I is “West Nyack Honey” dot com.

It is interesting how different the Fall honey is from the Spring Honey. Autumn Honey is dark, hearty and spicy tasting. The Fall flowers make for a chestnut brown honey. The Spring Honey was almost clear. It was mostly from trees like Maple, Oak, and Apple. The fruit trees gave it a flowery perfume with a subtle taste.

I took another super off of Justine. It was 7 very full frames of honey and it gave me about 25 pounds more honey.  There is one more super full of honey on Justine, but I may leave that there for the winter. She has two hive bodies full of honey and combining that with the super she should be more than fine. I’ll rob the last super in the Spring after she wakes up again.

I ran out of bears. I ordered a case of 12 ounce bears – that’s 285. It is hard to imagine that I will pack up this much honey.

I have 4 hives with three supers on each. Justine and Ethel had 4 supers, but the top super had drawn comb but no capped honey.

If I take two supers off of Ethel, Connie and Martha,  that is 150 pounds of honey that would well over 200 bears, depending on how much honey I get from each super. I have about 20 pounds in a bucket waiting for bears. I am not sure how to sell all of this honey.

I will take off a day maybe this week or next to do some more harvesting. I am getting better at it so I will try doing 2 supers at a time and maybe I can do all 6 in a day.

The honey was very dark as apposed to the spring honey which was practically clear it was so light. The honey was from summer and fall flowers, although I never see the bees on out garden flowers. They come in with baskets of dark red or orange pollen, but I can’t guess where they get it.

My honey spinner worked, but it tends to buck when I have it loaded with full frames. When I do the second side, there is less of a problem with it. I am working out the bugs and taking pictures. I’ll try to post a few here when I get time.

Yesterday I robbed a super from one of my hives in order to test out the honey extractor I made.

I have pictures and some information about building it, and I will post that is soon as I can.

The extractor worked better than I thought. My last one screwed up like an accordion when I tried it. This one stood up to five heavy frames being spun at one time.

What I learned was that when I did fewer than4 frames, the frames tipped over and sent the cage out of balance. I had to load empty frames back into the basket in order the spin them.

I bought a variable speed drill so that I would not have to spin the frames at very high speeds. I learned that I could get the frames up to a good speed (about 400 RPM) and it took about 45 seconds to completely dry out one side of a frame. This is very quick.

I will go back and create some kind of system to hold the frames in place when I spin. I expect that this will limit me to 4 frames. The extractor can hold up to 6 medium frames with just a slight overlap. It can easily hold 5 medium frames or 4 deep frames. I will set it up to do just the 4 frames in case I need to spin the deeps from a dead hive.

I was afraid that the light weight construction would warp when I spun the heavy frames (and they were heavy – most frames were 100% capped honey!). The basket took a beating, even when the frames moved about and it started to buck. At one point I put my knee on the top to hold it steady and while I spun a bucking bronco.

On the negative side, the bees found my spinner and the box I used for uncapping and I could not keep them out. I filtered out dozens of dead bees when I poured out the honey. Last night, the uncapping box was full of bees, too gorged to fly.

When I do this again, I need to find a way to keep the bees away from the works.

I gave away a six bears to friends and family. I sold 20 bears to neighbors by way of the roadside sign. We sold the last one yesterday. It took about two months, but sales did not really take off until the end of August.

By my best calculation each 12 ounce bear cost me $60 and we sold them for $6 each. This is the economics of beekeeping. Since most of the sales happened when I was not home, I did not even get to see the money.

I am feeding the bees about 5 pounds of sugar a week now. I hope that some of this winds up as honey in the supers.

In a few weeks I will take off the supers for the winter and leave just the two deeps. I will continue to feed them sugar water as long as it is warm enough for the bees to move about. I figure if it hits 50 degrees during the day, I can add more sugar.

I am going to get another order of pollen substitute for the winter. I put one in each hive at the end of August, but the bees have not finished them. They did not touch them for a while, but now they are starting to clean up the wax paper and the edges of the pollen patties are all gone. I figure that by the time a new order arrives that they will be ready for another patty each.

I received my pizza pie pans (my secret weapon in the battle against honey) and I will finish up my Honey Extractor Release 2.0 when I have the energy.

I have not been paying much attention to the bees. I noticed the other day that the populations seem to be down with fewer bees hanging out. Two of the hives looked like there was robbing going on so I put the entrance reducers on them. I am guessing that July with its heat and August with a dearth of flowers has hurt the bees.

I decided to put the feeders on and give them some pollen substitute. I have forced days off at work and today was a nice day so I put the feeders on today.

I stapled some plastic screen door screening over the tops of the feeders. I don’t like the bees buzzing me when I refill the top feeders. I did not anticipate that there were hundreds of bees hanging out on the inner cover and clinging to the underside of the telescoping cover. The screen prevented these bees from going back down into the hive. I had to prop the edge  of the cover up with a stick to let the bees escape. I am hoping that in a day or two they will wander back to the front entrance and back into the hive.

One of the hives, Connie, was quite bitchy. I did not smoke the hives. I was just taking off the cover and putting on the top feeder. The hives all seemed to take offense. I wore a veil, but did not suit up. When I went back without a veil to check them I was attacked and pursued. No stings, though.

I’ll go back at dusk and peek under the lids to see what is going on. The fall flowers like goldenrod, queen anne’s lace and ragweed may not be enough for the bees. I will have to feed each hive a gallon every week or so. Fall sugar is supposed to be thick. I used a half gallon container and filled it 3/4 with sugar and then topped it off with water. I hope that is thick enough. Every hive got a quart and I’ll give them each a 1/2 gallon on Sunday or Monday if they have taken all the sugar.

When I checked the supers at the start of August, the comb was well drawn, but little honey. I hope that they can store enough now to make it through the winter.