This year, Christ the King Apiary is a proud winner of three awards at the Arlington County Fair. We won 1st place for our Ross Round entry in the comb honey category, 2nd place for our “Black Jar” (rated on taste alone) entry, and 3rd place for our Extracted Honey entry. May thanks to all those people who volunteered to look after the bees, extract and bottle our honey. All your hard work has been rewarded!
This year was another good year for honey production. We will have 480 jars of honey and 25 Ross Round comb honey packages.
Here are some pictures from this years extraction day. Thanks to all who came out to assist!
When we established the apiary at the parsonage we planted a garden around the edge using native plants. This year, we have had very strong blooms of Bee Balm and Cup Plant. These blooms have in turn attracted both our honey bees and a wide variety of native bees. Here are some pictures of the bees we have been attracting
We have postponed grafting again so we could make some hasty splits to prevent swarming. Our latest plan is to graft 3 weeks in advance of harvesting honey. We will take advantage of the harvest by taking bees from our colonies to make mating nucleus colonies. These colonies will produce new queens for our colonies. After making new queens, we over winter these colonies using them to make up losses and to sell.
The nectar flow has been good and our bees have done well collecting it to make honey. At last check, we found more than 400 pounds of harvestable honey in our hives. We are now up to 17 colonies with the recent splits. We think this is the “right” number to meet our communities needs and will manage our apiary going forward to this size. This means we will be selling excess bees and doing more “Demaree” splits.
To sell bees, one must have them inspected by the Virginia Department of Agriculture Plant and Livestock Inspection Service. We completed this inspection on April 28, 2025.
The month of April has been a busy one. The bees have been gathering nectar and pollen from maple, holly, plum, pear, apple and cherry trees; autumn olive, and various ornamental shrubs; and violets, henbit, dandelion, dead nettle and other ornamental shrubs. We performed weekly inspections; created 6 new colonies and caught a swarm. All 11 over wintered hives are strong. We have made some new frames, done some equipment repairs and moved some equipment to the Critchfield’s for storage / use for the season. On April 25, we had our bees inspected by the Virginia Agricultural Inspection Service. Our bees are in good health with low pest numbers and no signs of disease.
Because of the dryer than normal weather, the nectar flow has been lighter than average so far this season. With about 6 weeks left to go for the main nectar flow, we are hoping for more light rain and warm days.
Plans to raise new queens have been delayed for a few weeks. We are now planning to set up the starter colony and graft into it the weekend of May 3rd.
Last fall, we placed a tray containing a block or sugar on each hive to provide supplemental food for the bees over winter. As winter went along, the bees migrated towards the top of the hive as they ate the honey and bee bread they stored. On warmer days, they would move to the top of the hive and feed on the sugar block.
Now that the days are getting longer and the bees are once again producing brood, it is time to help the bees get ready for the spring nectar flow. Tasks we performed this weekend included reconfiguring the hive so that the brood is in the bottom hive box; cleaning the bottom board of dead bees and debris that accumulated over the winter; removing the candy boards (the hives have plenty of stores to last for the next month by which time the nectar flow will be on); and installing new “Swiffer” sheets to trap small hive beetles.
We also installed a frame of drone comb next to the brood in each hive. The cells on a drone comb frame are larger than the typical cell. Before the lays an egg, she measures the size of the cell with her antennae. When the cell is bigger, she chooses to lay an unfertilized egg which becomes a drone. Because we are going to raise queens, it is beneficial to encourage our hives to make plenty of drones so or queens can readily mate. Since drone larva tend to attack varroa mites, we will pull the drone comb out after our queens are mated and freeze it, which will reduce mite numbers without using chemicals or pesticides.
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!
One common refrain from beekeepers is that if you ask any two beekeepers a question you will get three answers. This is particularly when you discus when the beekeeping season runs. We feel the season starts in January when we first treat for mites during the winter brood break and ends when winter preparations are complete.
To get the bees ready for winter we have checked and treated for mites and have fed them extensively. The dry warm weather has meant that our bees have been active but have had little to forage on. This means they have been consuming large amounts of stored resources. To ensure that they have enough to make it through the winter we have fed our 11 hives in excess of 450 pounds of table sugar.
Other winter preparations have included putting on entrance reducers, adding closed cell insulation to the top of the hives under the covers, and placing candy boards on each hive.
Other than perform weekly visual inspections of the outside of the hives and the occasional peek under the cover to check on the state of the candy boards, we will leave the bees alone until January when we will look to perform oxalic acid treatments of the hives when they are naturally brood free.
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.
With the National Weather Service predicting sunny weather and a high of 88 degrees, it looks like this year’s Honey Harvest Festival will have pleasant weather to go along with the 15+ craft vendors, barbeque from Rocklands, live music and a petting zoo. The festival is free to attend. At the end of the festival, the Great Falls Philharmonic will present the world premier of new orchestral music. If you wish to attend the concert, you can get your tickets here http://gfphil.org.
We will be selling our award winning honey on a first come first served basis (limit 5 units per customer). Our honey is minimally processed, all natural, and was created by bees on the church property (you can check them out before you purchase if you like). We also have apiary tours where you can learn about beekeeping, and the amazing lives of bees.