Will it Melt?

Finally here are the pictures. The container with the balls of wax with the seat cover wrapped around the pan for insulation was put in the back of the truck while I was parked at work. The third picture shows the scum left over. It is weird there is so much. The wax looked so clean before.



These two show the finished cake of wax from Friday. It is about 2 - 2.5 oz. I have done this process again and got another cake of about the same size. One more to go.


If you are interested, and since this is my historical log, here is what happened during the days:
Thursday:
11:40 softening up, the balls are flattening, but no actual melting.
12:40 soft but still not melting. I think the pot is at a point where it is radiating as much heat as it is getting. Maybe if I had a dark paper towel it would push it over the edge.
6:00 got a couple of drips so the concept is close, but not quite working.

Friday:
Today I wrapped the pot in a layer of black fabric with foam in it (an old car seat) to act as insulation.
11:20 actual melting happening! Today it is several degrees cooler than yesterday and the wax is melting before it did yesterday.
12:30 drips are coming through and most of the wax is melted! Looks like success is close.

Big Balls o Wax

The wax melting experiment didn't work. But I was gone all Sunday when it was out so I don't know if it was because my setup didn't work or it didn't get enough sun to heat up correctly. Thursday I think will be the next try. I will drive the truck to the top of the parking garage and put the pot in the bed. It should be nice and sunny and I can check on it during the day. We'll see what happens.

Wax Melting

Well I'm finally getting around to dealing with the wax cappings from honey extracting day. I looked at several web sites on solar melting and it all seems to be about the same - rinse and dry the wax, make little balls and put it on paper towels over a plastic container of water, put the whole thing in a box that has been painted black and has a glass cover, and put that entire thing in the sun. The sun should heat the box and wax hot enough to melt and as the wax passes through the paper towel it gets all the gunk filtered out, eventually solidifying again at the bottom of the container. Then at the end of the day we pop the wax out and voila! clean beeswax ready for some other task.

In the true spirit of beekeeping, where you ask anyone their opinion and it will usually end with "but you can do it anyway you want" I am doing it differently. I don't have a glass covered box handy, but I do have a nice black canning pot in which I make my jams. (Oh man we made some really good sour cherry jam this year!). And I have a plexiglass sheet that I can use as a cover. Hopefully it is close enough to actual glass to work. I am going to give it a go tomorrow and/or Sunday.

Invasion!

My hives have all been free of disease and pests until now. Last Saturday I found Small Hive Beetles in the hive at my in-laws house. Such a drag. But at least I only saw 4 or 5. The problem with the Small Hive Beetle is that its larva stage are little worms that will eat their way through the brood comb leaving a mess of the place and causing any honey in it to ferment. They are from Africa, I think, so there are no natural predators here. The most you can do is try to keep them at bay so they don't kill the hive.

So to do that I found trap plans on various web sites that use thin CD cases with a soy powder bait. There are a few varieties if you Google for them, some say to use roach poison and some say to use boric acid powder to kill the beetles. Yeah, I'm not going to put any kind of poison in my hives. And I have a ton of Megabee in the freezer still so I am using it for bait and tried coating the CD case with vegetable oil to try and trap them. Hopefully that works well or well enough. Since there were only a few beetles hopefully I have time to experiment a bit before they take over. I did squish one with my hive tool so I'm already down one! Wish me luck.

Honey Extracting

I was on vacation the last couple of weeks. The weekend before we finally got the reward for all this time and effort, OK mostly the bees time and effort. I went out and the girls had finally finished capping off the honey so I snagged the super, brushed all the bees off each frame, brushed all the bees off each frame, and brushed all the bees off each frame (they really didn't want to go and when they finally did they came back quickly). Then I put the super with the brushed off frames in the back of the truck and drove over the hill and then stupidly went to pick some berries. When I came back 20 minutes later there was a swarm of a couple thousand bees buzzing around the truck. I didn't think they would find the honey that far away that fast but an important lesson was learned; if I have more than one task do them all first and THEN do the honey harvest. So I grabbed the other bee suit out of the trailer, put it on, jumped in the truck and took off down the road as fast as I could. Luckily the truck windows were closed so there weren't that many in the truck. When I got to the paved road most of the bees had been lost so I got out took the suit off and got the last few bees out of the truck. One bad decision can really screw up a day - no potato or garlic harvest, only a few berries picked.

That Sunday I called my buddy Tom and my wife and I drove over to get his extractor and other equipment. My sister-in-law came over with extra bottles. The first time with the uncapping knife I dug into the comb pretty deep. Most of the others I actually did pretty well. Then I loaded up 3 frames into the extractor and fired it up. Since it was my first time I didn't know how fast to turn it up and how fast to let it go. I guess I might have done it a bit too fast because we had a blowout! On one frame a big section of comb broke loose from the frame and wires in the foundation that are there to support it. Bummer! I uncapped another and put it in and started it slower. We saw a bit of honey was on the side of the extractor but nothing was coming out the bottom. So I uncapped 3 more and started them going. Finally honey came out. Man that was so exciting! The next thing was we had two sieves to get the wax out. It took forever for it to start going through the first sieve and then it seemed like even longer to start through the second one. Finally all 8 frames were done. It was quite the experience. 2.5 gallons of honey from this one hive! Then we had to clean up everything. There was probably at least 2-3 cups of honey stuck on the sides of the extractor, maybe more. It is a big, heavy stainless steel tank and cleaning it and everything else for 8 frames of honey is not very time effective. Next year when I have 3 hives of honey to extract (hopefully) it will be more efficient. Pictures coming soon...

Beautiful Honey

Thursday I had the day off work and took a drive out to the mountain to check the bees, see how the one honey super was coming along, and do some other work; mowing, pick wild black raspberries, etc. I ended up working Memorial Day weekend and it was my last chance to use the saved holiday. Yikes! It hit 100 degrees in Washington! Perfect weather to pull on a thick denim bee suit! The talk around here is that it has been so hot and dry the nectar flow has all but stopped and while my girls are putting the honey away slower than a month ago there still seems to be some coming in. The honey super on Hive 1 is beautiful, almost white comb and a light colored honey. I wish I had a picture but it was so hot I was minimizing the time in the suite and I still had to mow inside the electric fence. I guess the next step is figuring out how to get the bees out of honey super and then extracting it. I hear that is a messy, sticky, good time!

I also made a couple of nuc bodies. Nothing fancy but I figure I can make them (without counting my time) for about 2/3 the price of ordering them and save all the shipping costs. Plus I buy a 1 x 10 and rip it down to medium body size so I used the ripped pieces to make shims or other things. And that is my with my typical screwing up measurements that make a piece of 1 x 10 into a piece of firewood. Measure twice, cut once. Or as I do it - measure twice, cut once, wonder why the pieces don't fit together correctly, realize my mistake, measure twice again, and cut again. Good thing I don't do this kind of stuff for a living. This time I lucked out on my mistake in that I was cutting the side for a hive body, but when I cut it too short I could still use it for a nuc side, so I only wasted a couple inches of wood. No fancy dove tails, but they are cheap and this can be an expensive hobby if you do more than a couple of colonies. Check out the jig I made to help me at Ed's Experiments and Stuff. Now I can always cut the long sides of the hive bodies correctly!

Liquid Gold

A few week back Hive 2 seemed to be queenless - there was no brood, only a few capped brood, and no queen found. Then I had a couple bad weeks at work, a good trip to West Virginia to see my in-law's family, and so on the drive to the mountain today I was wondering if there would be a point in getting a new queen or I should just merge Hive 2 to Hive 1. Well there weren't many bees coming out of the hive, which just added to my worry. And when I get up to it I see some guard bees wrestling another bee to keep it out. I was too late to get the video! Darn! So now I am thinking, great robber bees. The hive must be dying. Seeing that I decide to do Hive 1 first so that the bees will be a little disorganized from the inspection so they would be less likely to start robbing Hive 2.

I don't know about other folks around but it seems like it has been a pretty crappy honey year. During the big nectar flow of spring there were so many cool to cold days followed by rain, then a hot day or two, repeating the cycle again and again. I put a honey super on Hive 1 a few weeks back but they have been so slow to build any wax my hopes for honey this year have gotten slimmer and slimmer. I cracked the top and pulled the outside frame. Yeah, still not much wax against the outside but the inside of the frame was about 2/3 drawn. I pulled the next frame and it was pretty well drawn out and had a bit of honey but nothing to write home about. But, the two inside frames looked pretty good. They were totally drawn out and starting to get pretty heavy with honey. Nothing capped yet, but pretty heavy. Sweet! So I threw on a queen excluder, put the honey super back on and sealed it up. Check out how pretty this new wax with shiny honey in it is.

On to Hive 2. I popped the cover and low and behold there are quite a few bees! Hmm. So I start pulling frames. Lo and behold capped pupa! And larva! Was it a fluke? I pulled a couple more, each more full of larva and pupa than the other. Well this is just weird! I pulled that box off and looked at the one below. Again more larva! I'm not sure where this queen came from but there is certainly one there. Whew! Since I thought this hive was going to be dying out I didn't bother bringing another box, plus it is probably too late to super now anyway although I could probably get some wax drawn for next year. I will have to think about that for next time I head out.