Crystallized Honey (Creamed Honey)

Honey lasts a long time. It's been found in tombs, still in good shape. However, under certain conditions honey will crystallize. My understanding is that the crystallization happens when there are tiny particles in the honey that act as seeds for the formation of the crystals and when the temperature is around 57 degrees F.

All honey doesn't crystallize but some of my favorite harvest bottles from this year did just that. I went out of town for a week and left my thermostat on 55 to save on heating. When I returned my favorite honey had become creamed honey.

When people make creamed honey on purpose their goal is to have a very smooth creamed product. The seed grains in this honey must have been perfect because the honey was smooth and perfectly creamy. Or, as my bias would lean, my method of harvest without an extractor may result in only the tiniest grains coming through the filter.

However, at this point in the year, most of my harvest from 2008 is gone and we love honey at my house. This morning I decided to take one of the last non-chunk jars of honey and reliquify it. To do this, you have to heat the honey.

Part of what I value in my harvest methods is that the honey is never heated - the hottest it has ever been is the interior temperature of the hive. But to re-liquify the honey you have to get it to 160 degrees and keep it there for a minute or so before turning off the heat.

I put the creamed honey in a pan of boiling water. I put a candy thermometer in the honey so I could monitor the temperature.



As the temperature rose, the honey became clearer.



At the end of the process, the entire bottle was again liquid honey. Because I got it to 160 degrees, it won't recrystallize. What we lost in flavor from heating the honey is worth it to me to have the liquid again.



I also have some jars of chunk honey (comb in a jar filled with liquid honey) where the liquid part of the honey has crystallized. I can't imagine that this process would work for the chunk honey because the wax would melt.

Blue Heron - the Queenless Saga

As you'll remember from earlier posts, my hive at Blue Heron was started with a nuc that had no queen. There was little or no brood in the box and we saw no queen and no evidence of a queen - no new eggs or larvae, very little capped brood, all in all a sad state of affairs.

To cope with this I gave the hive brood and eggs on two frames, hoping that they would make a queen. They made at least one perfectly lovely queen cell and the hive is calm, quiet and seems to be chugging along.

Meanwhile the nuc supplier calls and wants to "make us whole" by giving me another nuc, this time with a queen. I called several beekeepers whom I respect: Cindy Bee, Jim Ovbey, and I posted on Beemaster. Everyone agreed that the hive that made its own queen needed to have a chance.

So we got permission from Blue Heron to install the nuc in a second hive. I will keep an eye on the first hive to see if the queen they made successfully mates and begins to lay eggs. If she succeeds, then we have two good hives and I'll move the newest one somewhere else. If she fails, I will combine the hive I installed today with the first hive since we know there's a good queen in the new hive.

Here's what our process today looked like:



Now the supplier feels good about coming through with a queenright nuc, I feel good about Blue Heron allowing us to temporarily have two hives there, the whole process provides a great teaching/learning opportunity, and the new queen in the first hive has a chance to prove herself.

Everybody wins!

Ga Tech Sustainability Project

Having this blog is so much fun! I get contacted by very interesting people as a result of this.

The other day I got an email from two Georgia Tech grad students who are working on a project about sustainable endeavors for other countries. They decided that they would like to explore the ways in which beekeeping might fit the bill.

They came over and had biscuits and honey with me while we discussed lots of aspects of beekeeping. Then we all suited up. I unfortunately didn't get a picture of their friend, Gabe, who was with them as well. We cobbled together enough protection for all of them, although Gabe, who only had a veil and an ill-fitting one, at that, was the least covered.

Dale and Karen wore my extra outfits and we went out to do a hive inspection of my hives. We actually opened and looked at all three of them. Each student examined parts of the hive. Here's Dale holding a frame and looking at the brood pattern.



And here's Karen trying to see eggs with the sun at her back.



In all I spent about 2 hours with them and I had a great time. I hope they got what they came for - it certainly was fun for me!

The state of Blue Heron's Queenless nuc hive

As you may remember, on March 8th I put two frames of brood and eggs from my hives at home into the Blue Heron hive. My hope was that they would make a queen to make the queenless situation queenright.

I checked on Thursday, the 19, and sure enough, they had made a beautiful queen cell. I'm sorry the picture is out of focus. I forgot to put the camera on macro and I forgot my frame rack. So I didn't hold either the frame or the camera steady and it wasn't macro focused.

I went through every frame of the hive. The bottom box had all syrup filled frames. The second medium box into which I had put the brood/eggs frame also had no eggs or larvae.

Important note: I couldn't light my smoker - we've had rain for several days in a row and all of my pine straw in my yard was damp. I worked these bees with no smoke and they were calm as if they had a sense that all was well in their world. There was no queenless roar and the bees did not act angry.



In addition to this lovely queen cell, the frame also had two opened queen cells on the bottom of the frame. I think these may have already been there, but I took again a shaky shot of them as well.



My guess is that if there were a four day larvae on March 8 on the frames I brought them, then tomorrow (Sunday) or Monday, is when Her Majesty should emerge from her cell. She'll hang around the hive a little and then go on a mating flight. Let's hope all of that happens without incident, including her return to the hive without being breakfast for a bird.

Then we might see eggs and brood in the Blue Heron hive!

Memorable First Day of Spring - Beekeepers Everywhere Take Note: The White House will have BeeHives!

In the groundbreaking for the organic garden at the White House, beekeepers have cause for celebration. There will be two beehives at the garden, managed by a White House employee who is also a beekeeper.

This should bring more attention to our favorite pollinators and bring beekeeping to the forefront as an interesting, multi-layered hobby in which to engage.

Trying Out the New SHB Trap

Today I had time to go to Costco to get oil for my Freeman SHB trap. I put the oil in the trap. The tray slides out easily from the back of the bottom board. It was covered in hive debris since it has been on the hive for a week. I dumped the debris and tapped the edge of the tray against the deck rail, but as you can see, some debris is still in the tray.

I filled the tray - the instructions say to fill it half full. Since it slants down due to gravity, I actually had to fill it almost to the top on the edge fartherest from the hive in order to have enough oil in the tray. Sliding it filled with oil back into the hive was difficult. I wished that I had something the level of the opening to rest it on while I filled it. The backward slant made pushing the filled tray into the hive sort of awkward.



Once it was pushed in, I also followed the instruction and pulled it back toward me about 1/8 of an inch to keep it from taking on water on rainy days.


To fill the tray took this much of a five quart bottle of oil, the cheapest they had at Costco. The oil cost $6.99 so I'm guessing it will cost about $3.50 to fill a tray each time you do it. Jerry suggested getting throw-away oil from fast food places, and I am sure there are cheaper ways than Costco, but that is easiest for me, so I wanted to try it following what I would ordinarily do.



Note: I just got this email from Jerry Freeman of the Freeman SHB trap:

Linda,

From your picture, the tray is pulled too far out the back. In the proper position, it will be 1/4" inside the back and 1/8" from the landing board at the front. This sounds confusing so I'll try to get a picture of this on my web site.

Thanks,

Jerry

It's raining in Atlanta now, but I'll go push the trap further in as soon as I can!

I won't check this hive again until next weekend - I'll post pictures to see if there are dead Small Hive Beetles. Jerry is sure there will be.

Beekeeper Error and the Walk Away Split

When I set up the walk-away split (three frames of brood and eggs, two frames of honey and pollen), I truly walked away, but I kept worrying. Did I put enough bees in the nuc? Would they be able to sustain themselves and build a queen cell?

I worried so much that on Wednesday, I decided to feed them. I'm not feeding my other hives. They all have stores of honey left over from winter and don't need anything from me. So I put a Boardman feeder on the nuc, planning to remove it on Friday, add the second medium box (empty) to the nuc, and put in a baggie feeder.

Today I cam home to robbing and bees flying frantically all around the nuc. There are shards of wax on the ground, indicating that the bees have been shredding the caps on the honey frames in the nuc.



And even when I moved the bottle from the Boardman, the bees clung to it for several hours afterward.


At the end of the day, great destruction took place. My beekeeper error was being lazy and putting on a Boardman feeder instead of making the effort to set up the baggie. I've posted on Beemaster to see if I can redeem myself in some way. I'll let you know.

Keith Delaplane speaks to Bee Club on Honeybee Decline

In the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers' Association, we are so lucky to have frequent access to Dr. Keith Delaplane. Tonight he spoke to the monthly bee meeting on "Honey Bee Decline and Why it Matters."

I love to hear him speak and always learn something. The University of Georgia has received a grant of $4.1 million dollars to study the decline of the honeybee and Dr. Delaplane is the chief investigator for the grant.

Tonight he wanted us to understand why it is important to be concerned about the plight of the honeybee. When asked why they are interested in raising bees, the top of the list for most beekeepers is honey production. Much lower on the list is the honeybee function of pollination. However, pollination and the role of the honey bee in it is key to why we should be concerned about the decline of the honeybee population.

While there are many vectors of pollination: the wind, gravity, water, bats, monkeys, wasps and butterflies, bees have the highest rate of pollination over all of these.

Bees are ideal as pollinators. They are hairy all over and in addition their hairs have split ends which encourages pollen to stick to them. Bees tend to visit flowers in succession, which makes them great vectors for pollination as they seek out what they really came for: the plant's nectar.

Keith had graphs showing the decline in honeybee population. However, as the honey bee population goes down, the acreage in this country planted in crops that need to be pollinated has gone up. This creates a losing equation. In addition, honey bees are less in the pollination business because there is habitat loss and change in the environment. And today's agriculture is machine based rather than animal based so less forage crops are planted.

He put up an interesting chart from the UN Food and Agricultural Organization showing that crops that are not bee pollinated are the ones that meet 90% of the world's food needs. These crops included: banana, barley, cassava, coconut, corn, millet, potato, rye, rice, sorghum, sweet potato, wheat. None of these crops need bees.

On the other hand, meat and dairy products need bees because they need pollinators for forage crops.

Interestingly, developed nations such as the US, Canada, the EU countries, Australia and Argentina have a higher quality of life and thus include more complex diets, based on many more bee-pollinated foods. However, underdeveloped countries whose people subsist on the UN FAO list of crops above, want bees for honey production.

Delaplane pointed out that it doesn't matter if the beekeeper's focus is honey production. The by product for the community when honey production is the point of beekeeping turns out to be pollination!!! And honeybees do well in less developed countries because from an economics perspective, it takes little to get started - you only need a rooftop for a hive - you don't even need land!

And although the many species of solitary bees by themselves do a super job of single flower pollination (fruit set can result after only one visit from the solitary bee), the honeybee visits in droves and thus a colony of bees (social bees) can be a very effective pollinating machine.

We were lucky too that he stayed after his talk for questions on many beekeeping subjects. In the Q and A, someone asked him about poisons in the hives and he said that his research is showing that many of the chemicals that are part of modern day beekeeping are very deleterious to the bees. Maybe mites die, but in the long run, the bees are badly affected.

He cited the beekeeping of Georgia's only Master Craftsman Beekeeper, Bill Owens, who doesn't use any chemicals and really doesn't subscribe to IPM either, but doesn't lose any more hives than the person who does do chemicals in the hive.

Dr. Delaplane reminded all of us that on May 14 - 16 the Young Harris Beekeeping Institute is taking place (this is its 18th year) and that registration is now open. Young Harris is where I earned my certified beekeeper certificate and (last year) my journeyman certificate.