Pouring Wax Block for Young Harris

I'm leaving for the Young Harris Beekeeping Institute on Wednesday night. I'll take the course for the Journeyman Certification (Journeywoman??) and stay for the lectures about beekeeping. I really enjoyed it last year and learned a lot. This year will be a lot harder.

I've spent time documenting my public service credits - you have to have five for Journeywoman. I put together a notebook with the documentation in it - I gave talks at the Atlanta History Center, a garden club in Stone Mountain, an elementary school in DeKalb County; I am doing ongoing work with a Dunwoody Girl Scout troop; and my blog has been accepted as a public service credit by the powers that be. (Whoo Hoooo!) Just for insurance, I also documented one of the three swarms I collected (you can count 2 swarm collections as public service credits).

Just for fun, I thought I would enter a wax block in the honey contest there. Virginia Webb, a world champion honey producer in N Georgia (her honey won best in the world at Apimondia a couple of years ago) enters wax blocks in the Young Harris contest, so mine will not hold a candle (ha, ha) to hers, but I thought I'd try. So I melted my wax in my Presto pot and followed what I have learned from pouring so many blocks - this is the 11th pouring I've done.

While the wax was melting, I heated the pan for the mold in the oven at 300 degrees along with the measuring cup into which I would pour the wax from the Presto pot.


I boiled two full teapots of water on the stove to put in the cooling pan. The wax block sets up best when the mold is in a pan of hot water in the way that one would bake a custard. Before the wax was finished melting, I put the mold (coated with a slight coat of Pam) into the larger pan and filled it with one pot of boiling water.


The melted wax was then poured from the hot measuring cup into the mold and I poured a second pot of boiling water into the surrounding pan. See the steam rising?


I'll leave the wax until the morning when it should be completely cooled and then remove it from the mold pan and polish it with panty hose. I've also bought a new queen sized pair of panty hose to carry the block to the contest in one of the stocking legs. This should keep the sheen from polishing it and should protect it from marking on our journey to Young Harris.

You can see from the last picture that the wax poured evenly and is cooling evenly. That is the secret to a good wax block. With my luck, I'll turn it out tomorrow and there will be some flaw on the top. Oh, well, I'll probably enter it anyway!

I'm also entering one of two photos that I like of bees on flowers. I'll pick one before the deadline on Friday. I've printed my two favorites out so I'll have both with me.



Post Script: I popped the wax out of the mold to find that it had stuck on two sides and I couldn't pour it again before I left for Young Harris.....so I won't enter it this year and instead I will just take my bee picture to enter in the photography section of the contest.

Hives at Blue Heron Nature Preserve

My new beekeeping buddy, Wade, has a new hive at the Blue Heron Nature Preserve. This is a community garden. People rent plots and grow organically at Blue Heron. There are three beehives located at the preserve. Several beekeeping friends have asked or emailed me to find out if I know who they belong to. It's such a great idea to put hives at the site of an organic community garden - so we are all curious.

Lucky me, one of the beekeepers there emailed me to comment on my blog. Mystery solved!

He was concerned about his hive and the performance (or lack thereof) of his queen. I offered to come for an inspection with him and he took me up on it. Wade (who has an injured foot and is clomping around the trail in spite of it) is one of the best smoker lighters I have ever met. He alluded to Boy Scouts, and I imagine this experience serves him better as a smoker-lighter than it did me to be a Girl Scout!



Wade had seen the queen in his nuc when he installed it, but when we opened the hive, there was no sign of a laying queen - no young brood, no eggs, lots of empty cells. The only brood in the hive was old, emerging now from being laid about three weeks ago. We did find opened queen cells. One of the queen cells was appropriately opened (see yellow circle in the picture below - you may have to click on the picture to enlarge it for better viewing). Wade is pretty sure this cell was not open the last time he inspected.

In addition to that opened cell, we also found two other intact, closed queen cells.

We decided that probably his hive had requeened itself and the virgin queen had not started laying yet. If this is the case and there is, in fact a queen, she may not lay for three weeks. If Wade had had another hive, we might have taken a frame of brood and eggs from it, but the other two hives belong to other people and were started at the same time as his.




We closed the hive up. You'll notice the hive box sitting on top of the inner cover. Wade is doing this as a way of storing the hive box until the bees need it.



We opened his friend Kent's hive and found beautiful brood patterns throughout the hive. Perhaps when he and Kent are back at the preserve at the same time, they can move a frame of Kent's into Wade's hive. A frame of brood and eggs would allow Wade to give his bees the opportunity to make a new queen in the event that they are queenless.

Oops! Used the Wrong Sized Frame

Before I went out of town to a conference in the middle of the honey flow, I put a super on each hive to allow them to use the space to make honey. My smallest swarm hive was one on which I quickly put together a super and threw it on the hive before leaving.

Today I opened the hive to find that I had put shallow frames in a medium super - WHOOPS -

In an inspection I always remove frame #2 as a way to start examining the hive. This allows me to move the frames within the hive - not needing to take each one out unless it seems necessary. Removing this one frame in position #2 also means that when I put the frame back into the hive box, my bees press against each other rather than against the hard outer wall of the hive box. I think I kill less bees on inspection this way.

As you can see the bees in this hive have built combs filled with honey in the space left by having a shallow frame in a medium box. I worried about how to handle this and posted about it on Beemaster.



In the end, I opened the hive up again and took off the medium box with the shallow frames. I scraped off the burr comb and put it in a cake pan. I then added a medium 8 frame with all medium frames (DUH). I took each frame out of the original box and examined it. Most had not been built out. Three had comb attached to the bottom. It's beautiful comb (see picture below), but is not in a useful place.


I didn't want to take the honey the bees had worked so hard to produce. I took the burr comb in its cake pan and put it under the top but on top of the inner cover. This should inspire the bees to move the nectar into the hive itself. I didn't have a shim to put around the cake pan, but I did have several 2X4s cut the right lengths. So I set up a fake shim under the top and set the cake pan there. The bees can clean it up and I'll remove it tomorrow.



Here's the clean new box on this hive (which will have a name before morning - the hive, not the box).

Thoughts about the First Year of Beekeeping

At the end of my first year of beekeeping, I was asked to put together a program for my bee club about bee-ing a beekeeper for the first time. Google has recently made it possible to put presentations on blogs.

It's a light-hearted look at the foibles of the first year. Here's the presentation for your enjoyment.

Bee-ing with the Girl Scouts

Today I helped the Girl Scout troop in their first hive inspection. Before we inspected the hive, we got a set of frames ready for the super which we planned to add.

The girls nailed a wedge into this frame to hold a sheet of foundation. On the other frames they either glued popsicle sticks for starters or starter wax strips for the bees to use to get started building comb.


Sierra glues in the popsicle sticks.


Morgan gets the starter strips ready to be waxed into the frames.

Then we opened their hive to find that the queen is laying a lovely football shaped pattern just like one would ideally wish for. They had two purposes for their inspection: To see if the queen had laid eggs and to see if the bottom box had been fully built out.

They were able to see young brood. We didn't see eggs but saw very young brood (tiny c-larvae) so we know the queen is active and doing well. The bottom box was 90% built out. They had already put a second brood box on top of the first one and after I left, I thought perhaps we should have removed it....but we'll see how they do going forward.

Since it's the height of honey flow in Atlanta, we added the honey super that they had prepared to their hive.

Ventilation and the Screened Bottom Board

I am short a couple of screened bottom boards. I didn't mean to have seven hives, but two swarms came home with me and I had ordered three new nucs this year, feeling sure that one of my hives would die over the winter. The hives lived, the nucs came and I brought home two of the three swarms I caught. As a result two of my hives are on solid bottom boards and they are hot.

My first year when I saw the bees bearding, I was sure a swarm was about to happen, but I wasn't acquainted with Hotlanta beekeeping at that point. Now I know that slatted racks and screened bottom boards make all the difference. Most of my hives have both but the equipment I have ordered to fix the situation on my other hives has been back-ordered for a while.

This morning at 6:30, it is already hot in the less-ventilated hives. Below you can see my apparently queenless hive with bees all over the front porch, even hanging off the front edge. I love the way they cling to each other like circus acrobats. You can see this ability in the close-up of the entry. This hive has a solid bottom board - not good for either ventilation or varroa mite control.




One of my hives out in the yard is on a solid bottom board. The bees here are also gathered on the front porch.



You can really see the effect of the SBB and the slatted rack in Bermuda. Bermuda is teeming with bees, but it has plenty of ventilation so there are less bees on the front of the hive. The bottom narrow piece of wood at the bottom of the stack is the slatted rack on this hive and the whole thing sits on a screened bottom board. Makes a real difference!

Note to Self: Wash Beesuit BY ITSELF

My beesuit is now two years and two months old, but the first month didn't count because then I didn't have bees. As it enters its third year of service, my suit has some permanent propolis stains. You can see them in the close-up.

Bees make propolis from sap and it is a sticky, gummy substance. It can be many colors, but mostly my bees make a rust-colored propolis. When it sticks to your suit, it doesn't wash out very well. The suit below has just come out of the dryer, having been washed in Chlorox, but you can still see the propolis stains.

I made the mistake this laundry round of washing my beesuit with my other white laundry. Now I have two white nightgowns as well as a couple of white t-shirts with obvious rust-colored propolis melted into their fabric.

Take it from me: Wash your beesuit by itself!

Hive Inspection - Interesting notes

I forgot to report on the queen in the queen cage. She was introduced and four days later the candy had been all eaten and the queen had been released. I took the empty cage out of the hive and closed it up.

Today I am back home after being gone for a week. I wanted to check on my hives to see how the empty boxes were faring.

In the first swarm hive, the bees were drawing comb in the starter strip frames, but not too rapidly. This is how the comb looks when they first get started with it. Gradually they fill the frame - often starting with three sections like this one.



In the second swarm hive, in spite of having a new box above the brood chamber, they had built burr comb on the tops of the brood frames. I scraped it off and tried to line up the frames in the second box to match the one below. I find that the 8 frame boxes are not as tight as the 10 frame ones and it is easy for frames not to be in line.

Interestingly in this hive and one other, the new wax, instead of being clean white was bright yellow. I didn't take a picture in this hive but did in Mellona. There was good brood and eggs in this hive which is building up well.



Here is some of the new yellow comb from Mellona - quite pretty and I wonder why it isn't white. Usually comb darkens or discolors when the bees walk over, leaving footprints as it were. Maybe there's lots of yellow pollen out there to stick to their little feet!

The worse part of this inspection day was that the queen released hive shows no sign of having a queen. There was not a queen sighting and no brood or eggs. There was a queen cell that had been ripped open, implying that a queen at least had been present, but if she is, she's a virgin and not laying yet and the queen I got from PN was supposed to be mated.

So I added another frame of brood and eggs from Mellona to this hive. If they don't make a queen and don't get going, I'm going to combine them with another hive. There are tons of bees in this hive and they deserve leadership.

I thought I'd post this picture. In the hive below, I had used a rubber band to hold the one foundation piece I had put in their new hive box. After the bees started drawing the comb, they cut the rubber band and dragged it out the door! You can see the red rubber band on the entry way.

Well, this post has been a hodge-podge of interesting bee stuff. I'll try to focus more the next time!