Bee Chronicles

7 July 2020

What a spring!!

We could not ask for a more perfect spring blooming period. It has been long and cool with just enough moisture to keep the nectar up. The storms have not been severe enough to punish the flowers.

By the time you get this publication we will be two weeks behind. If you live in Blue Ridge/Elijay, more behind. This is why it takes 2-3 years to start to be a beekeeper. Just so you know what to expect and when in your neighborhood. The climate is different just around the corner. The lake is at 2000 feet altitude. I am at 2250-2750 on my property which is in the shade of a north facing mountain.

As a farmer, I have to complain about something. The blooms came too early. Especially, if we were growing the packages into strong colonies. The flowers were 4-6 weeks early. The impact was that the colony populations were not large enough to collect extra honey. Everything collected went into brood rearing.

Now (22 June) the populations are just getting large enough to matter. I have one colony that was a swarm, and 3 that wintered over that are respectable. The wintered over ones are all double hive bodies. They had to put up a lot of honey before they started working their honey supers. Even though I fed a lot of syrup, they didn't get into the honey supers early. The swarm is now full population wise. Being in a single deep they now are clustering on the outside of the hive and have a honey super above a queen excluder. On single deeps I like to put a queen excluder to keep the queen out of the honey super. The queen excluder also restricts the bees moving nectar up to the honey super so I dill some 3/8" holes (bee space) in the handle groove on the front of the honey super. The bees will use this as another door bypassing the queen excluder. This helps put up honey faster.

The big news is Sourwood is blooming. As I came up Hwy 515 from Atlanta (18 June), Jasper is in full bloom, Elijay south is blooming, Elijay north is starting to bloom, Blue Ridge is weak, Blairsville is thinking about blooming. I see bloom fingers all over. Some are just starting to show color, some are not. The ones in the sun are showing more white. We have to be eagle-eyed here. As the blooms develop they go from small green balls to white balls. Then the balls open into bells. The rows of bells start to open at the top and (slowly we hope) open down to the ends of the fingers or threads that hold the "bloom cluster".

I have looked out to 2 miles from my apiary. That is how far the bees will fly looking for food. At 2 miles I see along the county road white most of the way down the fingers. This means the buds are nearly fully developed. 100 yards from the apiary I only see green and not very many little green balls. That means the buds are still developing.

The good news is the bees will have a longer period of foraging sourwood than if all the trees bloomed fully at the same time. It is time to get the honey supers on.

If you bee populations are good, it can take a colony 7-10 days to draw out the comb, fill it with honey, and cap it completely. Have an extra honey super on hand for each colony. I think we will definitely get a 3 week nectar flow. The longest sourwood season I have seen was 7 weeks

Your next concern will be: Do you have access to an extractor? How do I want to put up my honey? Smoosh, extracted, cut comb, chunk comb? Do I have enough 3 gal. buckets to collect it in? Why not use 5 gal. buckets? (because they are too heavy) But you need a few 5 gal.s to extract into. You can't let the bucket get too full or it will swamp the wax strainer. Oh, so many things to think about!

Things not to worry about. The Chinese Chestnut is blooming at the same time as the sourwood. You see large white trees near old houses. Chestnut will turn you pretty light sourwood darker. Oh well! Nothing you can do about it. It is still your style of sourwood honey, different from the beekeeper across the county. Basswood is a light colored rather weak tasting honey that also blooms during sourwood season. It just adds volume to your sourwood honey without changing the flavor.

At the end of sourwood, the sumac will start to bloom. It is a dark caramel flavored honey. Any frames of sourwood that are already capped will be unaffected. Uncapped cells might get mixed with the sumac. That too is unavoidable and okay. It just gives you another flavored late summer honey.

When you extract you can mix all your honey together and call it "wild flower honey". But hey, they are all wild flowers. I like to keep my mixed up spring flow, separate from my sourwood. I like to separate my light sourwood from my dark sumac contaminated sourwood. Now I have at least three different flavored honeys. If you were lucky enough to keep track you may also have blackberry and black locust honey giving you 5 kinds of local honey.

I just learned that acacia honey is famous and rare and expensive. Guess What? Acacia is just the Greek name for our Black Locust tree. Later I will publish how to be your own honey judge for color and flavor.

We have had swarming all spring long. Early swarm hurt honey collection. If you lucked out and caught some swarm you now have more colonies to nurture. The aim is to go into the winter with extra colonies hoping some will survive.

After Sourwood the hives will all want to swarm. Even those that have already swarmed might want to do it again. There are too many ways to slow swarming to mention here, come to the meeting. However, the trigger to swarming is lots of adult bees, full brood chamber, a hive full of honey and no where else to store more.

Just before a nectar flow is a good time to lightly split the colony. This makes more room for the queen to lay eggs and reduces the number of bees in the colony. Adding a honey super helps give the colony more space and more work to do.

A light 2 frame split and the addition of a honey super is an excellent way to keep the colony fired up working and at home. Pull the frame with brood that the queen is on and one frame of pollen and honey mixed with the bees on it. You can put them in a nuc box or a 10 frame box. Add 2 foundation frames to the colony you "robbed" (this creates more work).

Your new "nuc" has very few foragers so they require the stored frame of food. The queen will continue laying eggs but at a slower rate due to the lack of foragers. The nuc will catch up quickly. After nectar flow you can rebalance populations giving the nuc more foragers speeding up that colonies winter preparations.

The hive you moved the queen out of will continue working close to normal. The bees will draw a new queen who will hatch and go to work laying eggs about the time the nectar flow ends. The result will be they are ready for winter.

When I was in Montana early June I found some "Buzz's Bees" honey. He just happens to be one of my queen suppliers. The clover honey had sugared solid. A common situation for clover honey collected on the Great American Prairie.