A follow up from last week’s show, on this BubbaCast we discuss some of the more practical aspects of harvesting and processing honey for the hobbyist beekeeper.
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Music: Natalie Germann, Vicki Larnach
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Although I know it’s a fluke this early, but there is a nip of coolness in the air. What a welcome relief from the blistering heat we’ve had recently. I decided that it was a perfect day to look in on the girls. Today we’re beginning our fall preparations. Some of the hives look great, and some not so much so. My goal is to get them beefed up enough to get through the winter to next spring. I’ll be saving several frames of honey from this year to feed them if I need to early next spring.
Brooks 1
The last time I checked on this one, I thought it was a goner. No queen, and tons of drones. Multiple eggs sloppily laid – all pointed to a laying worker. To my astonishment, I opened the box this morning to find the number of workers increasing and a working queen laying out a pretty solid egg pattern. How that happened, I have no idea. None. I’m grateful, but perplexed. Added 1/2 a megabee patty and 1/2 gallon of syrup.
Brooks 2
Still a dead out.
Brooks 3
Brood in various stages, but didn’t see queen. Added 1/2 patty megabee and 1/2 gallon of syrup. I’d like to see this one put more stores on.
Brooks 4
Pretty good and perfectly staged for the fall honey flow. The top deep is full end to end with perfectly drawn, empty comb. Same regiment as the others with megabee and syrup. Saw some eggs in the top super, but nothing significant. Most of the action seems to be down below.
Brooks 5
One of the strongest hives. I saw several bees still working honey in the honey super I left on from the spring. Didn’t see a need to add any supplements at this time.
Nuc 1
Pretty much the same as last time. 3 strong frames of bees. I split the brood nest with a frame of freshly drawn comb from Brooks 4 in hopes that the queen would expand her laying. Same addition of megabee and syrup.
Brooks 6
Looks really good. Chuck full of bees and honey. Didn’t add any syrup, but they did get 1/2 a megabee patty.
Brooks 7 and 8
These are doing okay, but are going to need to beef up before winter. Each had 4-5 frames of bees and mediocre stores. Added syrup and megabee. These two may get combined – possibly with the Nuc thrown in too. Wintering Nucs can be challenging.
We’ve managed the mite levels pretty well this year, but I’m going to try using one of the essential oil based varroa treatments this fall to knock the mites down more than just using a powdered sugar program. Probably looking at apilife var.
Hey Folks –
Brian just checking in here. As always, I want to thank everyone for all the support you’ve given us. Everything from Christmas cards, to Facebook posts, to product orders. BubbaTanicals has become more than we ever thought it would. The core of our business is you, the customer – and we never for a moment let that slip from the front of our minds. Pinky swear.
And we’re not slowing down – We’ve got a few new soap recipes in the mix as well as a new product launch that I think is just freakin cool. Look for Lilac, Orange Patchouli, and Dragon’s Blood soap to be added to the website over the next few weeks. We’re also going to start doing printed soaps. That’s right. Printed soaps. How cool is that? We’re taking on a technology that will allow us to print whatever we want on a bar of soap! Lots of possibilities there. I’m really excited to say the least.
Also, the pricing structure is going to be changing on the website as well. The cost of the ingredients is going up, and that has to be reflected in the cost of the product. Sorry folks – thank our fractional reserve banking system for that. But we’re trying to do it so that we don’t screw you guys. So when the soap cost goes up, the shipping cost will go to a flat rate. What does that actually mean to you? Well, it obviously puts the onesie – twosie purchases out of the picture . But you make out pretty well on the larger buys where you make up the spread in the lower shipping cost. I’m hoping it will all average out and everyone stays happy.
Brick and mortar? Yep. You can now buy our soaps at the Cosmic ConeXion store in Kennesaw, GA (no website yet). We’re slowly looking to expand our offerings to retailers, so if you’re a retailer and want to sell good soap and no crap, give us a holler. We won’t take on more than we can handle (that darn customer service thing again), so there’s only a few slots depending on anticipated volume
Thanks again for stopping by and don’t be a stranger!
-Brian
Muscadines
Listener feedback show with some swanky new bumper music!.
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Music: The Rabbits, The Gruff
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So yeah guilty as charged. It’s been a while since I’ve had time to post a hive log, but I figure that since we’re about to roll into the fall busy season it’s a good time to pick up the torch.
Some background:
The Peachtree City yard is no more. There was only one hive there, and while it was pretty robust in terms of overall health, it was not productive at all – nothing in the super in the spring. I suspect that was largely due to another sizable bee yard being less than a mile away. So I moved it to the Brooks yard, which is actually at my house. I’m thinking that and the Woolsey yard will be the only ones going forward for the foreseeable future.
So without further delay –
Hive updates –
Brooks 1
Popped this one open and there were tons of drones – which generally means one of two things – a laying worker or a drone laying queen. I didn’t see the queen, but I did see eggs sloppily laid. I believe it to be a laying worker – indicating that the hive has been queenless for a while. In either case, the hive is doomed unless it’s requeened. Unfortunately, requeening a hive with a laying worker is difficult. There were two queen cells – one of which was capped, but under the premise of a laying worker and the time it takes a queen to hatch out, there is very little chance that those cells have fertilized eggs in them. My intention is to do a shook swarm and requeen it. The idea behind a shook swarm is that you take all the bees out to field a few hundred yards away and shake them off the field. The idea is that the laying worker is too heavy to fly back and she gets left out in the field. When the rest of the hive returns, a new queen cage is in there and hopefully they take to her.
Brooks 2
Dead out. This hive is toast and filled with wax moths. This was a hive that deaded out before and I restarted with a few frames from a nuc. It concerns me that it’s croaked twice so I suspect some kind of contamination in the wax or hardware. I don’t have enough bees to restart it right now and time is running out to get a new hive going and prepped for the fall. We’ll see. If I do get it going again, it will be on all new hardware and foundation – and will probably used only to combine with another smaller hive.
Brooks 3
Looks ok, but should be in much better shape. Found the queen, but she was very small and gimpy looking. Gonna requeen this one.
Brooks 4
This one looks good – solid brood nest with a good egg pattern. It’s a single deep, and it starting to get some honey in the super. Probably wouldn’t hurt to requeen this one before the fall honey flow to beef up production going into the fall. This one may be a candidate to combine with Brooks 3 later on.
Brooks 5
Solid colony – probably the best looking of the bunch. There were ants in the jar super which I moved out.
Brooks 6
This is the former PTC hive, and is doing better already – showing alot of honey storage in the 2nd deep and even some storage in the honey super. The only problem is that the foundation strips in the honey super have gotten all wonky since the spring so they were building comb all over the place. I pulled the super and am going to redo the foundation on the frames before putting it back on there.
Brooks 7
This one looks pretty good for a single deep started in late summer. There were about 5 solid frames of bees and a large consistently laid broodnest. With a little feeding, this one should beef up by the fall.
Brooks 8
Just about the same as Brooks 7, but with fewer bees. Gonna start feeding these to get them beefed up for the winter.
Nuc 1
This was a split from a colony that was requeened, and was later used (unsuccessfully) to bolster the population of Brooks 2. It’s presently got three frames of bees with a 2 frame broodnest so I think it’s recovering well.
Canning
Brian and Laura come back from vacation, take some feedback, talk about new critters, try to buy a truck, itch like the dickens, keep deer out of the garden, and do some irrigation.. redneck style.
Links:
Pearson’s Farm (formerly Big 6 Farm)
Richard Scarry
Rain Chains (Our Rain Chain)
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Music: James Larson, Gaia Consort
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Doing a Farmers Market
A long two-parter where we talk all about the ins and outs of selecting, preparing for, and participating in a local farmers market.
Links:
The City Chicken
Music: James Larson, Gaia Consort
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I guess that organic milk isn’t looking so expensive now is it?
More from the front lines..
From: The New York Times
In its first-ever ruling on genetically modified crops, the Supreme Court on Monday overturned a lower court’s ban on the planting of alfalfa seeds engineered to resist Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide.
The decision was a victory for Monsanto and others in the agricultural biotechnology industry, with potential implications for other cases, like one involving genetically engineered sugar beets.
But in practice the decision is not likely to measurably speed up the resumption of planting of the genetically engineered alfalfa.
A federal district judge in San Francisco had ruled in 2007 that the Agriculture Department had approved the genetically engineered alfalfa for commercial planting without adequately considering the possible environment impact, as required by federal law. The judge vacated approval, known as deregulation of the crop, and also imposed a nationwide ban on planting those seeds. The ban was later upheld on appeal.
But the Supreme Court, in a 7-to-1 decision, said the lower court judge had gone too far, ruling that the national ban prevented the Agriculture Department from considering a partial approval. That avenue, the court said, would have allowed some of the alfalfa to be grown under certain conditions; for example, isolating it from conventional alfalfa.