Author: beesatctk

Despite the ongoing snowy, cold and windy weather, spring is only 3 weeks away. As time has permitted, we have been getting our equipment together and making plans for the 2025 season. We have been able to construct new hives for nucleus colonies we intend to create this spring using wood reclaimed from houses in Arlington. This wood has the advantage of being stronger and more rot resistant that newly harvested wood. It is also nice that this wood is not going to the landfill and that no additional trees are being cut down. Thanks to the people who have generously donated wood.

We have prepared equipment to raise new, replacement queens this year. Having replacement queens readily available will let us quickly requeen if one is injured or stops laying as she should. We will also combine some of these queens with excess bees to make new colonies to replace any losses and perhaps sell or give away if we find ourselves with and excess.

Over the next month, we will be moving some of our equipment into a new storage location at our Walker Road Yard.

Volunteer opportunities will occur again on weekends starting in March depending on weather. First tasks will be to reconfigure our hives for spring. Watch for updates on volunteering!

Cooler weather and alternately very dry, very wet and unseasonably warm weather have created some new challenges for our Apiary.  On sum, our bees have not brought back much resources and have been eating through the honey we have left for them, leaving them vulnerable to starvation this winter.  To counteract this threat, we have been feeding heavily.  Earlier, in late summer, we were feeding light sugar syrup to the bees to encourage a slow build up of resources and to stimulate colony growth in our smaller colonies.  This has been effective in helping with the strength of our colonies but has not helped our bees increase their stores.  On the contrary, our bees started October with less honey in their hives than they did in August.  For the past three weeks we have been adding thicker syrup to help then increase stores.  In September, we treated our hives at the Walker Road yard with oxalic acid vapor to reduce the number of varroa mites.  Prior to three rounds of oxalic vapor treatment, we found mite counts of 3 – 5 per 300 bee sample.  We have also reconfigured all our hives for winter.  This year, we are going to over winter with either two deep hive bodies, or 1 deep and two medium bodies.  Our goal is to have the hives filled out with honey, “bee bread” and brood starting November 1.  At this point, we will be largely hands off the bees for the winter, except for weekly walk by inspections, and an oxalic acid treatment in early January to help ensure that we start the new season in March 2025 with low varroa mite counts

Below are two pictures of the bees at Walker Road, in the early evening.

After more than a year of talking about it, we have finally completed and put in service our solar wax melter. This device uses the sun’s heat and gravity to warm filter our raw wax. We have tested it with the cappings from this years harvest and have found it to an efficient way to make clean wax with very little mess and loss.

The standard melter is simply a box with a glass cover with some sort of strainer and a collection vessel inside. Because Steve is an engineer and cannot ever leave well enough alone, our wax melter has a larger glass top than box to increase energy collection; a reflective insulation covering on the inside; and a thermometer so we can monitor heat levels inside the box.

Here are some pictures of it in action:

It has been a busy month since our last update. We have re-queened all our colonies, entered our honey in the Arlington County Fair, and have removed a colony of feral honeybees from a tree near the home of a family with small children. All this along with the routine chores of inspecting, feeding and manipulating our bees.

We have chosen to follow the practice of many commercial beekeepers to re-queen our colonies every year. We have chosen to use two methods. For half of our colonies, we removed the existing queen and allowed the colony to produce a new queen on their own. For the other half of our colonies, we purchased replacement queens from three different queen breeders in Virginia. We selected these queens based on the breeder’s reputation for producing productive, hygienic, and gentle bees.

We have entered our honey in the comb, strained and black jar divisions of the honey department at the Arlington County Fair. We will know Sunday August 18, 2024 how we did. Wish us luck!

We received news this past month of a feral colony of honeybees that took up residence in a tree in the corner of a yard that adjoins neighboring property belonging to a family with small children. The owners, after careful consideration, decided to ask us to relocate the colony to our apiary. Using a vacuum and a honeybee repellant, we drove most of the bees from the tree and then vacuumed them up. We left a bait hive near the entry way in the tree and, over the next several weeks, collect the remaining bees from the colony.

Jars and lids have been purchased and sanitized; digital scales cleaned and calibrated and our dedicated volunteers readied. Now it is time to bottle! As we did last year, we are going to bottle most of our honey in 3/4-pound glass jars. This size is good for gift giving and for personal use and allows us to distribute our honey to more people. God willing, next year we will have more hives contributing honey and we will be able to sell larger “Family Size” jars. With more Grace, we might even be able to wholesale honey to some of the restaurants in our community that have inquired after it.

Last week we found several colonies were at or above the threshold for treatment, so we ordered an Amitraz based pesticide. To further help with pest management,  we traveled on Wednesday to Sourwood Farm in Earlysville Virginia to purchase special mite and pest resistant queens.  Our overall management goal is to maintain very low mite and pest levels through a program of integrated pest management (IPM) that relies on multiple methods. Our IPM program emphasizes manipulation (selective breeding, brood breaks, and drone removal), natural substances, (such as thymol) mild, naturally derived pesticides (Formic and Oxalic Acid) and when appropriate, food safe pesticides (such as Amitraz).

Next week, we hope to get our solar wax melter working and to process this year’s wax cappings into clean beeswax for sale as beeswax, and lip balm.