Author: beesatctk

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.

Our colonies are all looking good heading into the honey harvest.  Our new queens are all laying and the population decline that occurred during the brood break has ceased as new bees hatch out.  We successfully combined hives 7 and one of our swarms and that colony is now building up.  We also caught a 3^rd swarm at Steve’s house in Arlington which we have relocated to the Critchfield’s home.

The harvest looks like it will be slightly less than expected but still good given all that has happened.  As of this week’s inspection, we had approximately 250 pounds of harvestable honey on the hives.  In addition, the Ross Round comb honey super containing 24 or so fully capped sections is available for harvest.

Sorry I am a bit behind with the updates. This post is from April 15, 2024

The past two weeks have been warmer which has helped our bees forage for resources and for three of our hives to produce new mated and laying queens.  Our inspection this week found Hive 7’s new queen is now laying and producing a good brood pattern.  Similarly, our new queen in Hive 1, which we split 4 weeks ago, is now laying and producing a nice brood pattern too. Hive 9 which we created from Hive 2 two weeks ago has grown enough that we have added a second deep box. 

Since we split it from Hive 1, the queen in Hive 8 has been slow to resume laying and has produced a poor brood pattern.  In response, Hive 8 decided it was time for new management by producing a supersedure cell two weeks ago.  Since we needed a new queen in Hive 7 and we wanted to give the queen in hive 8 more chance to acclimate to the change, we took hive 8’s supersedure cell, and put into Hive 7.  On inspection this week, we saw that hive 8’s workers have again created a supersedure cell, confirming their desire for new management.  This week, we obliged them by removing their queen and are allowing them to create a new one.

Hives 5, 6, and 3 are queen-right and strong.  We added honey supers to all three.

This coming week is expected to continue to be warm and we are expecting the bees to continue to do well.