Pollen Substitute and Regicide

July 28, 2017July 28, 2017 Lazer Creek ApiaryLeave a comment

I guess I need to start by telling you that the pollen substitute did not cause the regicide — I was an accessory to that crime, but I have no idea of how hubby actually disposed of the evil queen once I helped catch her! We have another hive that has just become more and more unreasonable over time, and they now go straight for the upper thighs when we even approach them, never mind get started with a hive inspection. We had purchased a new queen — one that was purported to be from a calm strain and also a strain that is very good at dealing with Varroa Mites. After we removed the old queen, we waited 24 hours to re-queen, placed her in a queen introduction frame, sprayed the frame and the frames in the hive with Honey B Healthy to mask her pheromones — and they still killed her. Talk about frustrating. We’ve had other evil hives turn nice, so we haven’t given up on them yet, but I have had quite a few choice words for them over the past month.

The production of new brood has fallen off in all of our hives over the past month, and we really want to build them up before the fall flowers (Goldenrod and White Milkweed, mainly) start to bloom. We’ve noticed that all of the hives have a lot of nectar and honey stored, but very little pollen, so we decided to give the pollen substitute another try.

Now, when we put this stuff out in spring, the bees showed no interest whatsoever. This time, they are flocking to it like the dog to canned food! We already saw an increase in bee bread in the frames of hives we inspected yesterday. I placed the first batch in bird feeder that gave the bees plenty of access at the bottom, but provided shelter from rain. I only put a small amount in and the bees crawled through the holes, through the inch high pollen, and became trapped in the feeder. I understand why a little better now that we’ve watched them roll the powder around, roll around in the powder, and generally behave like little dung beetles rolling the powder up into little balls which they then take home with them. By the end of the first day, they had moved all the remaining powder to one end of the cookie sheet — and there was not much remaining.

Of course, my English hive has to be different and they are showing little interest in the powder that I laid out in a tray especially for them up in their private garden! I did experiment with some supplement with sugar water and giving them a protein shake — they loved that. Maybe they are just spoiled. Maybe they like soup. They were in the supplement dish this morning trying to get to the rain water-supplement mush.

When we were updating our hive inspection spreadsheet last night, we started a new page to track available resources by date. Hubby had noted last year that the pollen death starts around the same time that the pink and white Crepe Myrtles bloom in our garden. There was also a nectar dearth last year because of the drought, but this year the bees keep bringing in nectar, but not enough pollen. We now know to watch for this next year and maybe get the pollen substitute out sooner.

We continue to battle small hive beetles, but we’ve cut the brush back from around the hives again and we know that helps. I plan to put some landscape fabric down to minimize what can grow back, and we’ve also discussed relocating the hives over time. The area right behind the hives is so very uneven, with trenches that are above knee-height, that we can’t bush hog in there until we do some leveling and clear some of the timber-harvesting debris. We can’t continue to weed eat that much, but that’s what it takes to keep the blackberries and vines at bay. The hives that are coming back from the sunflower field we definitely be in the other cleared lane and we’ll put some DE and landscape fabric down under the hive stands before we even go get them. There is still so much to do and there is so little summer left — we really need to spend some time panning for gold down at the creek so that we can stay here forever!

Cooking · Lazer Creek Apiary

A Good Thermometer is Hard to Find

July 17, 2017 Lazer Creek ApiaryLeave a comment

One of my main frustrations with cooking with sugar, whether it be jam or fondant for the bees, is the inconsistency of the texture of the final product. I know I have to get this right before I’m ready to start selling any jams. I’m now on my fourth thermometer and finally both batches of jam I made are exactly the firmness that I’ve been aiming for all this time.

I’ve been using the metal candy thermometers that clip to the side of the pot with varying results. Even on the best batches, the jams were not as firm as I wanted until I used the above Thermobib thermometer. I made two batches of jam this week and both are the same consistency.

The jam in the picture is spiced apple and fig jam. It’s probably a little more chunky than most people would prefer, but I like to taste pieces of apple in the jams I make for us. It is a simple recipe – 1 pound of figs, 1 pound of Granny Smith apples, 4 cups of sugar, 1 cup of water, 1 teaspoon coarse salt, 1 tablespoon of cinnamon, and a teaspoon of nutmeg. I chop the figs first and cover them with a cup of sugar and the salt to draw some of the moisture out of the figs. Then I peel, core, and chop the apples, add them to the fig mixture and dump the rest of the sugar and the spices on top. When the figs have been resting for at least 30 minutes, I add the water and a strip of the apple peel, and bring the mixture to a boil while constantly stirring. It needs to stay at a rolling boil for a minute or two and then it’s a matter of just boiling enough moisture out to reach the magic temperature of 220 degrees. Remove the strip of apple peel before ladling the mixture into jars. (The pectin in the peel helps the jam set and the rest of the peel makes a nice, healthy snack while cooking!)

I used a recipe from Delicious magazine for the blackberry apple jam, with the modification of boiling the blackberries in the water first and then straining out the pulp and seeds through muslin. This is a good option for people who need to avoid seeds. Personally, I just don’t like having to get the seeds out from between my teeth! As posted in a previous blog, I’d already boiled the blackberries when I picked them at the farm, so it was just a matter of defrosting them and warming them through a little before straining them. I chopped the apples a little finer for this batch.

At the end of “cooking day,” we had two batches of jam from new recipes and had bottled 33 pounds of honey. I love seeing the purple of the blackberry jam and the gold of the spring honey with the sun behind it.

One other recipe I tried this week was figs in honey. I don’t know if the flavors will integrate over time, but this is a recipe that I would only make for family in the future as it uses too much honey for us the market it. I do want to try Roasted Figs in Honey as an ice-cream topping sometime, but again just for family. Sometimes we just need to enjoy what our fig tree provides for us without turning it into jam first!

I’m very happy to say that these were the last recipes I tried on our old, boring, beige counter-tops and that I am looking forward to cooking in our almost-updated kitchen. More about that in the near future…..

Hive equipment · Home Remedies · Honey · Lazer Creek Apiary · Pests - Bees

Rain is a Good Thing

July 7, 2017July 7, 2017 Lazer Creek ApiaryLeave a comment

Luke Bryan sings that “rain makes corn…” but we are happy that rain also makes honey. This time last year we were in a severe drought in both Georgia and South Carolina and our bees had few resources of their own to get them through the dearth. Right now, there are no signs of a dearth in our hives; we are seeing lots of nectar and a fair amount of honey in every hive.

The sourwood trees have just about finished blooming, and the sunflowers over at our neighbor’s are kicking into high gear with beautiful, dinner-plate sized blossoms. We have three hives pollinating his sunflower plot and they are clearly loving life. Sunflower honey is reputed to aid gastrointestinal, respiratory, and kidney health, although it has a downside of crystallizing faster than most other honeys. We are hoping to harvest sunflower honey in August, but we don’t know how much we’ll have this year as we only had new frames available to put in the hives and that is going to slow down honey production as the bees will first have to draw comb. We’ll be better prepared next year.

We inspected some of the hives with bees that tend to crawl on the ground and up our pants legs yesterday, and the blousing garters we bought appear to be doing their job of keeping the bees on the outside of the pants legs! Today was a much more enjoyable day as all three hives we inspected originate from the same queen and they are the kindest, gentlest bees we have. They also appear to be very good at keeping pests at bay, although two of the hives had spiders in the lid which added some humor to the voice recordings! The bees had killed one of the spiders, but it was still quite fresh and squished in the most disgusting way under hubby’s hive tool. I have overcome my dislike of bugs enough to squish most hive pests, but I’ve apparently got a long way to go before I squish spiders — or stop screeching when I see one!

These hives also oddly avoid the bottom brood boxes on their hives and will only lay eggs in there when they absolutely have no other room. We have often spotted swarm queen cells in an upper box of a hive that has plenty of room in the “basement.” One hive even preferred to use the entrance at the top of the hive until we put a screen inner cover on for additional ventilation and thereby forced them to exit through the “normal” opening.

Screen inner covers offer more ventilation for bees, which is especially important here in the south and when transporting bees. We’ve also observed wax moths and spiders on top of the screens, unable to enter the hive. Since we switched to using these in summer, we have not seen a single wax moth inside a hive. Our hives that always struggle with small hive beetles are also able to herd the beetles out of the hive proper and above the screen. We were horrified yesterday at the number of beetles in two of the hives, but almost all of them were above the screen. We added borax traps on top of the screens and we’re using beetle blasters inside each hive to help reduce the numbers. We’re getting closer to denuding the area around the hives in our problem area as we know sunlight deters the beetles — there’s just so much timber-cutting trash mixed in with the vegetation in that area so we can’t simply bush-hog.

All-in-all, we are very happy with the progress our hives are making. We no longer have any hives that are aggressive without provocation, although we have a couple that I would like to re-queen with stock from the “nice” hives. We are not having to supplemental feed bees this July and we have recovered all of our winter losses. We’ve gone a week with neither helicopters nor bee stings! Life is good on the farm!