Fun With Hot Wax....

...No, not that kind of fun! I'm talking about making beeswax candles! Needing my honeybee "fix" during the cold winter weather and needing some holiday gifts to give, I decided that I would make candles this year. It was fun and it went well. I have been collecting and saving wax for the past 3 years and it was time to put it to use. Here are some photos to help tell the story and learn you how we did it...

First step in cleaning old comb, melt in water bath

After melting the wax in a water bath, I let the wax cool and harden. The debris will settle to the bottom of the wax "cake". You can scrape off the large pieces of debris. Then melt the wax again and pour the liquid wax through a fine strainer to get the small pieces of debris out. You may need to strain it a few times. When it looks really clean, pour it into a mold (Tupperware container, Trader Joe's cookie container - see wax below). If your wax is too hot when you pour it, you will melt your plastic containers (I speak from experience on this one!). And oh yeah, don't use your cooking pots for doing this stuff, they will get ruined.

Cleaned Wax

Above you can see the cleaned wax. Notice the different colors. This is mainly determined by the age of the comb - the older the comb, the darker the wax. Some people use chemicals to lighten the wax and some say leaving it in the sun can lighten it. I kind of like the variety of colors. The lightest wax is obtained from the wax cappings you get during honey extraction.

Melting Clean Wax Before Pouring in Molds

To prepare the wax for pouring into molds, you want to melt it using a double-boiler, water bath method. Don't melt the wax directly in a pot over fire, wax is flammable and no one wants a fire in their kitchen!

                                     

Here you can see me helping the kids pour the hot wax into the votive molds. Notice the beehive skep mold also, it is filled with hot wax. Rubbing some vegetable oil inside of the molds helps the finished candles to release from the molds more easily (they also sell silicone sprays for this). I bought preassembled wicks for the votives (see below). I had to install the wick in the beehive skep mold. The wick comes through a tiny hole in the bottom of the mold and then must be secured at the top so the wick stays straight. I tied the wick to a small piece of wood on top (piece of shish-kabob skewer).

         

Putting the wicks in the votives. You must wait until the wax cools a bit, or else the wicks will wilt and won't be straight. Once you see a little cooled wax around the rim of the mold, you can gently insert the wick. The kids did a great job.

Cooled and Ready to Remove

Gorgeous!

We also poured some tapers. These were the most challenging, mainly because of installing the wicks. The wick had to be threaded through a small hole in the bottom and then secured on top, just like the beehive mold (except 10 inches long!). With some creative threading, I finally got the hang of it (used the shish-kabob skewers again). They do sell wicking needles for this, but I didn't buy one. When pouring these, one must not forget to plug the wick hole in the bottom of the mold, lest hot wax comes oozing out all over your kitchen table (yes, speaking from experience again!). You can use a small bit of hard beeswax to plug the holes and it works just peachy.

 

The tapers were also a little tougher to get out of the molds. After they had hardened and cooled down, I placed the entire mold in the freezer, which caused the wax to contract and made it much easier to get the candles out. 

The fruits of our labor. Not bad for our first attempt. I have a bit more wax left for some more candles and we're also going to try to make some lip balm. Fun fun fun...

A Summer of Strange Removal Jobs - Part I

I have done 4 honey bee removal jobs this summer and they have all been unusual in their own way. I worked with Joel and Jeff Eckel, of We Bee Brothers fame, on each of the jobs (though that's not the unusual part!). Maybe this wacky hot weather is causing some of this weird stuff, who knows. Let's have ourselves a looksie...

The first removal of the summer was at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in an old abandoned Navy theater that is being renovated into medical offices. The foreman of the demolition team called me in an effort to remove and save the bees before they needed to destroy and redo the roof. The bees were entering the building in the gaping hole in the top right corner of the building. 

The inside of the building was totally bombed out, there were no stairs to get up to the 2nd floor, so we had to haul our stuff up a ladder...

We would access the bees from a little bathroom and when I opened the door, my mouth dropped open. On the floor of this room was a tremendous pile of dead bees, 2 inches deep in places. I had never seen anything like it. I think that all that it meant was that this colony had been here a long time and this was just the accumulation of years of dead bees. I wish I could share the funky smell with you...

  Anyway, we set up some scaffolding and Jeff got to work and opened the ceiling to reveal the hive.

We vacuumed bees and removed comb. Jeff spotted a bunch of swarm cells as he was vacuuming bees and we quickly realized that we got this hive just as they were preparing to swarm. Lucky us! We got to see 6 or 7 virgin queens hatching out of their cells, a couple of them came out right into my hands (sorry no pictures)! When a hive is getting ready to swarm the workers will keep the queens in their cells until the colony decides that it is time to swarm. The workers will feed the queens through a small hole in the queen cell and they will keep adding wax to the cell as the queen tries to emerge, effectively keeping her confined until they are ready to let her out. Once we disturbed the hive, the workers could no longer attend to the queen cells and the queens were able to leave their cells. Pretty awesome! We caught 3 of the virgin queens and put them in queen cages with a few worker bees to attend to them. We would try, unsuccessfully, to get those virgin queens mated in our beeyards.




There were some parts of the hive that were tucked up in the rafters and we really couldn't access them without causing major structural damage to the building. I worked on tying the comb into frames in my little blue workshop (picture below) across the hall, nice ehh?

We removed as many bees and as much comb as possible and I think the demolition team just killed the remaining bees a few days later. I set these bees up in my Francisville apiary and when I went to check on them 10 days later - the hive was totally empty of bees! They left me! I think they were still in swarm mode and they just took off to who knows where. So, unfortunately, when it was all said and done I didn't get to keep the genetics and add this colony to my apiary. This is the first time I have ever had a colony abscond on me, drats!






The second removal job of the summer was in Conshohocken. Remember the swarm I caught earlier in the summer out in Conshy? Well, a few weeks after that one, I got a call from the same homeowner telling me there was ANOTHER swarm in his yard. Here's a quick video from that second swarm in Conshy, I caught the swarm actually happening and stood in the middle of it as I took the video. It was quite an exhilarating experience to stand in the middle of these bees! Turn up the volume so you can hear them!



I knew that both of these swarms came from a house nearby where bees were living in the walls and this was the second removal job of the summer. Joel and I did it a month after I had captured the second swarm. Fellow Guild member Amy Hsu watched us and took some great photos - all of the photos below were taken by Amy. When I got to the house and took a look at the spot where the bees had been entering the house, I saw something odd - there was no traffic going in and out. It was a warm summer day and the hive should have been busy working. I stood there for a few minutes and saw only one or two bees go in. Hmmm...

We got to work. We opened the ceiling and this is what we saw...

Wavy Honey Comb

Beautiful, no? Only problem is, this comb should have been crawling with bees! But there was barely a bee to be found, what gives? My only theory is that this hive swarmed twice and then for some reason they completely abandoned this space. They had been here at least a month ago, because I saw them swarm on that day. Between then and the day that we did this job, the bees decided to skedaddle. We did come across a handful of bees, but these were just some poor, lost stragglers. There was still a decent amount of honey in the hive, and there were some other friends dining on the delectable delight...

Wax Moth Larvae - Yum!

 

When a hive is uninhabited, it doesn't take long for wax moths to move in. In the photo above you can see the larvae that have infested the honey comb. They eat the honey, beeswax and pollen that is stored in the comb. They are basically the clean up crew for empty hives.  Normally the bees keep them at bay but once the bees are gone, the wax moths take over and completely destroy/clean up the comb.

Wax Moth Cocoons 

This is what the ceiling looked like. The first hole revealed nothing so we had to move the second hole over to the next joist space to find the hive. Sometimes locating the precise location of the hive is the toughest part of the job.

We cleaned out the ceiling cavity pretty well and wrapped up the job. Joel took the wax moth-laden comb to feed to his chickens, who I am sure very much appreciated the gesture!

Cleaned Out Ceiling Cavity

One Lonely Little Lady

So, two removal jobs and no bees to show for it (unless we count the two swarms from the Conshohocken hive, both of which are doing quite well so far). I did get some nice drawn comb from the Navy Yard bees, which I have already put into use in other hives. And I managed to salvage some other wax that I'll make into candles in the fall.  I'll write about the other 2 removal jobs in my next post...

Winter Recap and a Fresh Start

And what a winter it has been, snowy and cold like last year. Bee-wise it has been flat-out depressing. Following the debacle of the Francisville stolen honey frames, things only went downhill. Two more of my hives died, making a total of 4 dead and only one colony remaining. Those are some bad numbers - if I was a baseball player I'd be hitting .200 and riding the bench! As far as I can tell, these two hives met their demise because their populations were too small - both of these hives were queenless for a long period of time last summer and this hurt their numbers going into winter. One of the hives had zero pollen in it, which probably isn't enough to kill them but it certainly didn't help.

And as usual the silver lining is that I have lots of honey, pollen and drawn comb from my 4 dead-outs. After cleaning out the hives of bees I piled the equipment in my backyard - must have at least 80 pounds of honey sitting back there. Most, if not all, of that honey will go towards feeding my new colonies this spring (I'll get to that in a minute). My remaining living hive looks really strong and they should hopefully pull through the rest of this cold spring with no problem. If this hive is strong and the weather warms up a bit, I will split it into two hives in a few weeks.

Contrary to my beekeeping, this has been an awesome winter for me and the Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild. In January I was elected President of the Guild. Then in February we had a hugely successful event when Ross Conrad came to speak to us. We had over 100 attendees come to Penn Charter School to see Ross and everyone was extremely happy with how the day went. After Ross gave his two talks, we had a showing of a documentary called Vanishing of the Bees. It was a great event which we hope to replicate in some form next winter.

In March the Guild held its first Beginner Beekeepers Course. Four of the Guild officers, myself included, planned and taught the course. We had 20 "students" and this day also went really well. For me it felt great to be teaching again, something I haven't done for quite a few years. We plan to offer more and longer courses in the future.

OK, back to the bees. To make up for my losses this winter I ordered 4 small cell packages from the Seaborns at Wolf Creek Apiaries. I have already installed two of the packages at one of my new apiary locations. Woodford Mansion is located in East Fairmount Park and was built in 1756. I want to say a quick thank you to Bruce Schimmel and Martha Moffat for helping this apiary location happen (Martha also took some of the pictures of me below). Here is the front of the house...

This site should be a great home for the bees - in addition to tons of nearby red maple trees (an important source of early spring pollen), there is a new orchard that was recently planted around the grounds of the house. And the bees will have the run of the entire East Park, they should find plenty of food. Here are some more pics...

 A new home

Two packages in trunk of my car

Beautiful frame of pollen from one of my other hives

Queen cage with attendant bees

When bee "packages" such as these are made up by suppliers, they take a queen from one hive and worker bees from multiple other hives. So the workers and queen don't "know each other" yet and if the queen was not caged, the workers would likely kill her. So when you are setting up a new hive from a package, you generally give the workers a few extra days to ensure that they accept the queen. The workers will release the queen by eating the candy (the white stuff on the left side of the cage) and revealing a hole which she can crawl out of and then get to work. There are many ways to introduce the queen and I tried a new technique this time. I attached a small piece of wood to the queen cage and slipped it under the front door, with the end of the wood sticking out of the front door for easy retrieval. The most typical way of introducing the queen is to stick the cage in between frames inside the hive. One problem with this method is that in a few days when you go back to check if the queen has been released, you have to disturb the bees and frames in the new hive. The "front door method" allows me to just pull the stick and queen cage out of the front door with minimal disruption to the hive. We'll see how it goes when I check on the hive in a few days.

Queen cage slipped under front door and into hive

Workers dumped on top of queen cage

Frames are in, dumping the stragglers into the hive

I installed two packages and everything went very smoothly, no problems. I will go back in a few days to check on the queen and see how the bees are taking to their new home. Here's hoping this year is better than last for the bees!

Spring is here!

A lot has happened since my last post - all of the snow has melted, the sun came out and the trees are blooming.  In other words, the winter that wouldn't end has finally ended.  I wish I could say that all of the bees survived and are thriving but that is not the case - one of my hives didn't make it.

Shortly after my last post I went to check on the hive at The Spring Gardens and they were doing well - I was actually surprised to see that.  This was the hive that was really weak going into the winter and I had been feeding them honey all winter.   A month later on a warm sunny day I went to check on that hive again and this time the news wasn't so good - no activity at all in front of the hive and when I looked inside, all of the bees were dead.  They still had ample honey in there so they didn't starve.  Being that there was no obvious sign of disease, the most likely explanation is that the colony was too small to maintain the proper temperature inside the hive.  When a hive doesn't make it through the winter, beekeepers call it a "dead-out".  I was pretty bummed but not totally surprised. Here are some pics -

This is the view when I opened the cover, big pile of dead bees -                                  

After removing all the boxes, lots of dead bees -

I tried to find the queen in this mess but I couldn't.  Dead queens can be soaked in alcohol to make "eau-du-queen" - basically a tincture that can be used to attract swarms or wild bees to an empty hive.

A few of the frames looked like this:

This pretty much confirms that the bees were too cold - they climb into the cells in order to try to get warm.  All those little bee butts sticking out - a sad sight.

There is a silver lining to the loss of this hive.  All of the comb - some of which contained honey and pollen - can be used when I set up my new hives (oh yeah, I am getting 4 new hives this spring!).  The energy that this colony used to draw the honeycomb and collect nectar and pollen will not be totally wasted.  Using this drawn comb in the new hives will save them time and energy - they will have a nice head start.  The honey in these combs should also be enough so that I won't have to feed my new colonies any additional honey.  So I cleaned out this hive and separated all of the comb into 3 groups - comb with honey, comb with pollen and empty drawn comb.  Even the empty comb is helpful as it takes the bees significant time and energy to build the wax combs.  Here is a great shot of the start of some empty comb -

In honor of the fallen bees, I decided to take one of the frames of honey and harvest it for the family.  I used the simplest method for harvesting honey - crush and strain - pretty self-explanatory.  Cut some comb, mash it up and strain it - 

There was over one pound of honey in that frame and it was only partially full.  And let me tell you, that honey is AWESOME tasting - so flavorful.  Hopefully there will be lots more of that this year - so far the weather this spring is shaping up to be a much better year for honey than last year.  We shall see...

The Hive is Growing

I have done a few quick inspections to see how things are progressing in the hive. And things seem to be going well. Progress is a little slower than I expected, but it is probably more about my impatience than anything else. It is hard to resist the temptation to open the hive every day - but it's really not a good idea to bug them that much.

That being said, I did need to check to see how the bees were coming along in drawing out the honeycomb. The rule of thumb is, when the first box is 80% full of drawn comb, it is time to add another super/box to the hive so that they can continue to grow.

So I opened up the hive and saw that they had almost drawn out 8 full frames of comb - close enough to add a new super. I looked for the queen but was unable to find her this time, though I saw evidence (lots of larvae) that she was doing her job. When putting on a new super, some beekeepers recommend taking two frames of brood from the original box, and moving it up to the new box in order to entice the queen to start laying eggs in the new super. So this is what I did - took two frames full of brood and put them in the new super, then replaced the brood frames that I took from the original super with two new empty frames for the bees to work on.

The bees were very mellow during this inspection, they didn't bother me at all. No stings. Here's some video - complete with family narration and participation!



A week or so later, I wanted to check the hive again because, well, for no good reason other than I just had to see what was going on. The bees had other ideas! As soon as I opened the hive, I was dive-bombed by a kamikaze worker bee. She stung me on my forearm! After dealing with the sting, I had a chance to take a quick look to see how they were doing in the new super. They were drawing out comb nicely - here is a cool shot of them working on new comb - this is called "festooning" (what a great word!) - they cling together and make a ladder of sorts as they excrete wax from their wax glands.


Here is a close-up view...



But overall, the ladies were very cranky and they were buzzing all around my head and veil. As I was looking at one of the frames, lo and behold, the queen walks right in front of my eyes. I wasn't even looking for her but there she was. This might explain why the bees were cranky and defensive, because the queen was right there where I was looking. It also could have been because, once a bee stings someone (or something) pheromones are released that alert the other bees that there is trouble nearby. So having just been sting, the alarm had been sounded.

After spotting the queen, I just closed up the hive, deciding that it was better just to leave them alone that day. Besides, there was no good reason for me to tear apart their home any more than I already had.

Update on second hive...
I have had a really tough time getting in touch with the people who I ordered my nuc from - they had not returned any of my emails. I finally heard from them this week - they said that they should be shipping the nuc later this week - but I have heard that before from them, so I'm not too confident. We'll see - the plan is still to keep them at the community garden.

Her Majesty is in The House

Last weekend I did my first real hive inspection. This involves actually taking frames out of the hive to see what the girls have been up to. When you go in and essentially pull apart their home, the bees can get upset, so you want to go in with a clear plan and idea of what you are looking for in order to minimize disruption to the bees. The main thing I was looking for was evidence that the queen was doing her job - laying eggs. And not only did I see the evidence, but I had a fairly easy time finding the queen herself and I got to watch her for a bit. Very cool!

Besides seeing the queen, there was a lot to look at. The bees had drawn 5 frames of beautiful honey-comb. And in that comb, they had put honey, pollen and brood. I only have a few fuzzy pictures because I was trying to hold the frame and take a picture at the same time - not that easy - but you can still see the bees and some of the comb.





There was brood in all different stages of development and you can tell this just by looking. A brief recap of insect life-cycles - first the egg is laid (bee eggs are tiny and though you can see them if you look close enough, I didn't take the time to do this), then the larval stage - with bees, the larvae are "uncapped" - that means they are in one of the cells of the comb and the cell is open - you can see the little larvae hanging out in the cell. This allows the nurse bees to feed and care for the larvae. The cells are sealed (or "capped") for the next stage, the pupal stage. Then the bee makes a cocoon and finally emerges as an adult. For worker bees, this all happens in 21 days, for drones, 24 days.

http://animals.howstuffworks.com/insects/bee4.htm

So now I am waiting for the second colony of bees to come. They should be coming next week. It looks like the plan to put them in the community garden is a go. Hopefully I can find someone to help me document the second installation with pics and video.

One week old and plans for hive #2

Well, the girls (and a few boys too) seem to be doing great. They have gone through about 5 lbs of honey already, so they are eating well. Hopefully I won't have to feed them much more, but we'll see what happens with the weather. They have definitely started to make honey comb, but I haven't really gotten into the hive yet to see how much. I was watching them earlier today, which was a cool cloudy day, and they were bringing in tons of pollen. You could see some of the bees struggling to land and enter the hive because they were carrying such heavy loads. The colors of the pollen ranged from "curry yellow" to maroon to silvery yellow to bright orange. Here are some gratuitous pollen shots...


(BTW - if you haven't already figured it out, you can click individual pics for an enlarged image - which is especially cool with these shots)


If you look on the left-hand side of this picture, you can see a little sliver of comb down between the frames, that the girls have drawn out -



And this picture shows the difference in size between a drone and a worker. The guy hanging upside down towards the left side of the hive is a drone, all of the others are workers. The drones are almost twice as big,



Here is an interesting article that I came across that gives you a sense of how honeybees know their roles in the hive community, how they communicate and also how they locate flowers for nectar and pollen - pretty amazing for a little insect -

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/guest-column-lets-hear-it-for-the-bees/

The second colony should be coming in two weeks or so (this is the one that will come as a "nuc" - a mini-hive, as opposed to the "package"). A few months ago, I had the idea to see if I could keep one of the hives at our local community garden. The Spring Gardens is a huge, beautiful, well-established, 15 year-old community garden that is just a few blocks from our house - http://www.thespringgardens.org I contacted the garden and after some back and forth, I went to the garden today to meet with them and it looks like we are going to give it a try. They have a huge shipping container (approximately 10'x10'x20') that they use as a storage shed, which is surrounded by a big grove of bamboo. They suggested that I keep the bees on top of the shed in order to keep them out of the way. I am a little concerned that it might be too shady up there, but over the next few weeks, they will take a closer look at how much sun the roof of the shed actually gets. So that's an exciting possibility. It would give the bees a great source of food and also help pollinate the garden. I also just like the idea of connecting with the garden. If it works out well this year and all of the gardener's get more comfortable with the idea of having bees, I would love do some educational stuff with the hives or maybe keep a hive in the garden proper so that people could watch the bees.

I'll leave you with a little movie - turn up the volume and you can hear the buzzzzzzzzzz... (I was literally one foot away from the hive and not one bee even noticed me, they were too busy)