Squirrel Discovers Bee Products

A squirrel on my deck decided to eat what was left on this deep frame, propped outside my door. He thought it was a gourmet treat.

He moved on to a hive box that I had hopefully inviting swarms at the corner of my deck and used his teeth to get to the frames in the box before I discovered what he was up to.

What a fine set of teeth he has! He left a pile of gnawed frame and comb which I discovered under the hive box when I moved it and covered it. Last year I was on the watch for bald-faced hornets and yellow-jackets. This year we can add squirrels to the list.

Entering honey contests

I'm no expert in honey contests, but my comments on my videos about bottling honey have brought questions about honey contests, so I thought I'd post about it. Honey contest judging is based mostly on how the beekeeper handles the honey. The beekeeper doesn't make the honey so the honey itself is only occasionally judged for taste in such things as black jar contests. The honey judge does taste the honey and points would be taken off if the honey tasted bad or tasted contaminated, which could reflect on how the beekeeper handled the honey.

The main honey judging is on how you handle the jar of honey. This comes down to packaging cleanliness. You are not supposed to have any human fingerprints on the inside or outside of the jar. There should be a clean rim of the jar - not sticky honey between the top of the jar and the lid. When you are cleaning the jar for entry into the contest, you have to be careful not to get cloth fibers in the jar - a man's linen handkerchief is recommended for avoiding fibers.

There are guidelines on the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers web page for how to prepare your honey for a contest. Another wonderful guide on how to think about preparing honey for honey contests is here. Ultimately it comes down to how clean your jars are from lid down and how clear your honey is (indicating how you filtered it). But as the writer in the University of Florida guide referenced second says, "Judging honey is not like evaluating other commodities. The product itself is not examined so much as the care the exhibitor takes in putting it up for show."
However, honey should taste like the delicious honey it is, and the judges do taste the entries.

Here is an example of the honey contest rules for EAS 2006 honey contest. You'll notice that while taste is one of the items to which the judge pays attention, it is last on the list. I noted in red the cleanliness issues:

Honey Classes
Class # Description
H1 Three 1lb. jars of honey: Extracted Light
H2 Three 1lb. jars of honey: Extracted Medium
H3 Three 1lb. jars of honey: Extracted Dark*Entries must be in 1 lb., glass queenline type jars and may have metal or plastic lids.
International entries may use 500 gram universal jars. (see clause 3 on show rules)
H4 Twelve 1lb. jars of honey: ExtractedEntries must be in 12 identical 1lb. queenline type jars with metal or plastic lids.
International entries may use 12 identical 500 gram universal jars. (see clause 3 on show rules)H5 Three section boxes of comb honeyH6 Three packages of cut comb honey: 4 inch squareH7 Three round section of comb honeyEntries must be in the appropriate container: Window cartons, round section lids-both
transparent, cut comb box-all sides transparent. (see clause 3 on show rules)H8 Three 1lb. jars of creamed honeyH9 Three 1lb. jars of chunk honey
Entries must be in cylindrically uniform “wigwam” jar or in the new “shoulder” jar.
(see clause 3 on show rules)H10 One frame of honey: suitable for extraction
Frames may be of wood or plastic and should be housed in a glass sided bee proof enclosure. (see clause 3 on show rules)1. All entries must be the product of the exhibitor’s apiary and have been produced since the previous EAS Honey show.2. Entries will be judged on their individual merit. Cleanliness of the container, lid or hardware, uniformity of wax cut, proper fill of jar or container, cleanliness and clarity of the honey, moisture content, aroma and taste will be considered by the judges. In creamed honey texture and firmness will also be considered.
3. No tamper-proof seals.
Now I'm no expert - I've only entered one honey contest for my bee club last year. My chunk honey did get second place, but I have learned a lot more since then about how to put it in the jar.

Lots of Honey

Tonight I bottled more honey from a super I took off of Mellona yesterday. I bottled 12 queenline jars in case I want to put any honey in a honey contest. These jars once put in the dishwasher were never again touched by my hands.

I took the jars out of the dishwasher with a cloth towel; held them with the towel while they filled; still holding them with the towel, put the jar on the counter. I then put all 12 jars in the box in which they came. Tomorrow I will probably freeze them.

In addition, I bottled 9 other 12 oz bottles (one pound of honey in a 12 oz bottle). This batch is still filtering and I expect to get about 2 more 12 oz bottles before all is said and done.

All told so far I have harvested about 77 pounds of honey total from three shallow supers. I only took 9 frames from two of the supers and 6 from the third, so all of this honey has come from a total of 24 shallow frames of honey - which is about 3.2 pounds/frame.

Good year in spite of the drought.

Today I'm Trying the Solar Wax Melter

Today I'm taking the cappings from the crush-and-strain harvest I did to fill the chunk honey jars and trying to see if my solar wax melter works.

Some of you may remember that I built the solar wax melter last year, but didn't do it until October when it wasn't hot enough long enough in the day. The outside temperature needs to be at 79 for most of the day to make it work.

Today the high is supposed to be 92, and when I put the box out at 9:15, the temperature was 76 and rising. We'll see. I'll report back later and let you know if it worked this time.

As you will see from the slideshow, it worked just great! I wish I had left it alone until after dark. When I removed the paper towel, melted wax that hadn't filtered through it yet poured onto my counter and I would have saved that mess if I had waited. I pulled it indoors at 4 PM and the results were gorgeous as you'll see in the slide show. I can't wait to use it again, with my new lessons learned from today's first trial.

The pictures below will play as a slideshow, but if you click on the picture, you can go to the album itself which has captions explaining the pictures.

Harvesting Chunk Honey

I love honey comb. I love to melt it in my tea and drink it that way. I love spreading it on a biscuit and having the melted wax be part of the feast. I've done a video on how to harvest honey as chunk honey.

I previously did a post and video on how to do crush and strain to harvest liquid honey. You can see it here.

Please leave any comments or questions you have in the comment section. Here it is:

Splitting Proteus into Proteus A and Proteus Bee

Well, today I split the two-queen hive, but I don't know if I did the right thing. I moved the top hive into an 8 frame medium. I moved the brood frames into the first box over the slatted rack and SBB and then put the second box above it, with the honey frames from the old hive. I tried to keep the brood in the same place in the hive.

After I did the whole transformation I started thinking that I didn't really see any larvae today in the upper hive (Proteus Bee) although there was plenty there on Wednesday. There's a picture to the right of the brood pattern which looked more filled out than when I saw it on Wednesday, but I'm not sure there was any new brood since Wednesday. For a few minutes I thought I should put it all back and just remove the queen excluder, letting them be one big hive.

Then I decided that I might as well go ahead and make a split even if the queen were no longer present. So I took a frame of very young brood and hopefully eggs from Bermuda and added it to the brood box in the new hive. I put the two hives side by side, in the way that Michael Bush describes an even split.

Although now in looking at the first picture I wonder if the queen isn't the bee in the middle of the first picture on the left side. It's out of focus so you can't really tell. Well, if she is, great, and if she isn't there, the new frame of brood gives the hive an insurance policy.

I figure that this way even if the queen is dead, they have the potential to make a new queen. I had a hard time finding brood and eggs in Bermuda, but I could add another frame tomorrow and may do so, just to make sure.

In the even split method, with the hives side by side, some bees may drift to the new hive. In about a week, I'll switch the hive positions and even out the drift and hopefully also even out the population.

I looked in Mellona, my best honey producer, and found that this hive was honey bound in the way that Proteus was. Above the brood box in Box 2 was a medium, frame to frame honey. In this hive, I tried something to open up the brood area. I took out frames 3, 5 and 7 and put in their place starter strip frames. This encourages the queen to move up.

While I was looking for brood, I saw a swarm cell on one of the frames, so I think that the timing of opening up the brood box is either right on target or too late. See the newer looking frames in the picture? Those are frames 3, 5 and 7 of starter strips that I have added.

I put these full frames of honey in the super above Box 2 (Box 3) in positions 3, 5, and 7. To do this I had to remove nectar filled frames from Box 3.

I set the frames aside that I removed from Mellona - they were filled with unprocessed nectar (where are they getting it in this drought?). The bees from these frames which were leaning against the deck rails made a cluster on the rail and I took their picture. The cluster was gone 5 minutes after I removed the frames.

I really didn't know what to do with the frames. I shook the bees off of one of them and gave it to the new Proteus Bee and took the other two inside the house. They are mediums and the two upper boxes on Mellona (the hive where I got the frames) are shallows, so I can't put medium frames in them.

This is a clear argument for using the same size box all the time. I have on Mellona two shallow boxes of frames for clean-up. In the next week or maybe even tomorrow, I'll add another medium box to Mellona for brood and will put the nectar laden comb frames in that box along with starter strip frames.

I also harvested 9 frames of honey from Mellona, my best producing hive this year.

I ended my time in the bee yard today by giving Proteus A a powdered sugar shake. Proteus A is the hive where on Wednesday, I took the clear picture of the bee with a Varroa mite on her back.

Bees on the Butterfly Bush

Last year I saw butterflies on the butterfly bush, but never bees. Maybe this year with the worst drought in 50 years here in Georgia, the bees are desperate. These butterfly bushes grow just about 6 feet from the deck where the hives are. The bees are having a glorious time on these bushes.

I Saw the Queen Today!

I saw the queen in the small swarm nuc today. This is not a good picture but there she is right in the center of the picture. She scurried away over the top of the frame and onto the other side when she realized she was exposed.

I also saw the fruits of her labor (see the larvae in the following two pictures). She has been hard at work. I'm leaving this little swarm in the nuc until probably Thursday before the 4th of July. Then I'll move the whole kit and kaboodle into an 8 frame medium.

I have all the parts except for a screened bottom board that I ordered yesterday. So when it arrives and I paint the new hive, they will move into a new home. For the moment though, I was THRILLED to see her alive and in person (or in bee, as it were)!