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.