Bee Chronicles

May 2, 2017

To reduce the confusion on “Is it time to collect Honey?”

First you have to look at what is blooming to see if it is the correct flowers for honey. Here in the Mountains of North East Georgia, the bloom sequence is supposed to be, Black locust tree, Black raspberry, Black berry, and then Tulip poplar.

Black locust is an excellent very light colored specialty honey. It is hard to collect because it blooms so early it is frequently frost killed. The black locust tree produces a prodigious amount of honey. You a robust bee colony to take optimum advantage of the bloom. Do not confuse this with Honey locust trees which the bees do not even like. Who knows why they call it “Honey Locust”? The tree will be covered with clusters of white flowers. Each bloom will be the size of a grape and the cluster will be the size of a large grape cluster. The trees bloom from about 6’ tall in the sun to 90’ tall in the forest. The bloom should last about 10 days with not too hot temperatures. You will see the clear honey in the frames in the honey super. You can leave the frames in the honey super once they are capped. The next spring honey will be dark and you can separate the frames by color when you extract the honey. You will not get any other light spring honey.

Next should be the black raspberries. You can tell this plant because the young canes (branches to the non gardener) are ablueish. They should bloom for about 2 weeks. Then the black berries should start blooming and they should bloom for 2 weeks. Then the tulip poplar tree starts blooming and it can go for 3-4 weeks.

Now you honey supers are all full and you have to buy more because it is the best honey season you have ever seen.

Don’t get excited! It won’t happen like the fairy tale says it should. And we won’t live happily ever after. You have to have perfect weather and perfect colony populations. Never the Twain Shall Meet.

THIS YEAR! I thought the berries were frost killed back just before the dogwoods started blooming, nearly a monthy ago. I say that because they were not forming buds. The tulip poplar started blooming at my place about 14 April (a short week ago). All the trees were not starting at the same time. Now 22 April they are all blooming. The best way to monitor the Tulip Poplar is to watch the ground. What! For a 90+ foot tall tree? Yes, The first sign is the “sepal”, the prepetal, the casing to the flower bud, pops off. It looks like a large fingernail when it lands on the ground. First light green but turns tan in a day. If there is significant wind or rain the sepals come dope in a hoard. Next the squirrels love tulip poplar blossoms. I think they are sweet as indicated by the high sugar content in the sap and future nectar. Poplars used to be tapped like sugar maple for a sap syrup. The squirrels will eat the blossoms for as long as they are growing. The get 1-2 bites and drop them. This allows you to measure how far along the bloom season is and the condition of the flowers.

Now the black berries are starting to form buds but I don’t see white color in the bud, so we are at least 10 days out from blackberry nectar. The bees love black berries. You can watch them come out of the hive, stay 6’ high and zoom off to the berry patch. It makes a nice honey but we have a hard time segregating it here.

The black raspberries are hardly thinking about buds yet, but I suspect they will catch up.

This is the same pattern we had in 2016. Just backwards to normal. Last year we had some serious rain during the prime tulip poplar nectar flow. Rainy days and non flying foragers cut the honey production about in half. Also, it does us no favors to have flowers that should bloom sequentially, blooming simultaneously. What a complicated thought. Now on top of all this the bee populations growing from packages are not “big enough”. Sure they will work hard, but another month sure would have helped so the foragers could collect more honey. More bees in a longer bloom period equals more honey.

We “might” do okay if we can have cool weather (60-70 degrees) and not too violent wind and rain.

Bottom line put your honey supers on today 22 April. Sorry you won’t get this for another week.

It is now too late to treat for varroa mites. You don’t want to do that when collecting honey.

You do want to check you hive for queen cells as this is the end of the first swarming session. The book says, “The hive won’t swarm during a nectar flow”. You don’t want that to happen because all the foragers leave with the swarming queen. Hence, you don’t collect honey.

If you have capped queen cells there are several avenues to take. No guarantees on any of them. If you kill the queen cells you might stop the queen from swarming, maybe not. If you move the queen cells to a nuc you might stop the queen from swarming, maybe not. If you move the queen and 3 frames of bees and put 2 foundations in the nuc you probably will stop the queen from swarming, maybe not. I would put a queen excluder gate on the nuc to keep the queen in and the foragers can come and go. Now the hive you took her out of will have plenty of foragers to get through this nectar flow. They will grow a new queen but she won’t be working full steam for maybe 45 days which could put us up against sourwood nectar flow. Another decision for a later time.

If you have nucs and hives that are still growing, you can continue to feed them sugar syrup inside the hive. You don’t want you honey hives getting syrup out of field feeders. They might even visit their neighbors Bordman front door feeder. Put an empty box (nuc, honey super, hive body) on top of the brood chamber of the growing colony. Place a jar of syrup on top of the top bars not directly over the brood. You don’t want it to drip on the brood. Place the telescoping cover over the empty box with the feeder in it. Or, you might be using proper in hive feeders.

Now it is time to sit back and watch. Oh no it is not! Start getting your swarm traps ready. Any colony that was about ready to swarm and many that were not will be fired up and ready to go with in one week of the end of this nectar flow. Be ready to catch them by splitting hives a little bit. A really strong hive can spare a few bees. Do hive balancing. Get more bees into you weaker hives getting them stronger for sourwood while reducing your strong hive so they don’t swarm.

Again, several ways to do this. Start nucs and let them grow queens. Pull 3-4 frames out of a strong hive. One frame has to have eggs in it to grow the queen from. Put foundation in the donor hive.

Take a not full honey super off a strong hive and combine it on top of the week hive with all the bees that were working the honey in it. I use the newspaper trick between the honey super and the gaining hive. Remove the telescoping and inner cover of the gaining hive. Lay out one sheet of newspaper on the top bars of the gaining hive. This can be on a honey super or hive body. With your hive tool put 4-5 small slits in the news paper so air and queen scent can permeate the new honey super. Eventually the bees will eat the slits larger and join the bottom bees (3-4 days). Replace the inner cover and telescoping cover on the new honey super of bees.

Another way is to pick up the entire strong hive and move it to the location of the weak hive and put the week hive where the strong hive was. Do this in the heat of the day while the maximum foragers are out flying. Bees coming into a hive with presents (nectar or pollen) will be accepted. So the many foragers from the strong hive will go into and join the weak hive. The few foragers from the weak hive will join the strong hive. This bolsters the weak hive without too much impact on the strong hive. The distance of the move is immaterial. You will need a helper to move the heavy hives and best to use a hive carrying handle (see catalog) or check with your friendly bee buddy. Chuck Reeves makes a pretty nice carrier handle.

HAPPY BEEKEEPING