Draper's Bee Blog

We had a frost this week and it finished off the Goldenrod and Bamboo bloom. The bees still have the Aster to work on but it seems they prefer flying around the buildings looking for free helpings of honey.

We have been doing some custom extracting jobs for local beekeepers this week and so far everything that has come in has been Goldenrod honey. We are hoping to start pulling some honey off of our own hives starting this next week sometime.

I have been working on cutting comb honey for a large order for the last few days. As fast as we are going through the comb honey I expect we will be sold out sometime in November. So, if anyone wants some awesome cut comb or chunk honey you had better order soon!

I haven’t had time to even think about posting anything here this week until just now – 4:11 pm 09/15/11. I am the only one here this week as everyone else is on vacation. I have been putting in at least 10 hours straight every day this week. I will say this; it is good to be busy as a bee as the days just fly by! I know it is honey harvesting time when I start getting more custom printed label orders than normal ~ I have printed over 10,000 labels so far this week!

The bees have been hard at work on the bamboo, goldenrod and asters. However this cold front we have going through our area is going to put a damper on the honey flow for a few days. Hopefully we will see some warmer days again to get that nectar flowing again.

I have a big tour bus stopping in on Saturday with 38 people expecting a lecture and tour so I ask that any of my normal Saturday customers to please stay home this Saturday…lol…I’m not sure I can handle the big tour and lots of customers at the same time all by myself. I normally don’t do tours on Saturdays however it was the only time they could come. I’m sure it will be fun but I may turn the phones off while they are here so if you want to get a hold of me on Saturday you had better call on Friday…lol.

This is the perfect time to break out the honey and try something new.  You can watch a video on how to use honey by clicking here.

The smell of Goldenrod honey is in the air at our place. Every day on my way to and from work I can smell the sweet smell of Goldenrod in our home beesite as I pass by…it’s a sign that fall will soon be upon us and that we will turning on the extractors soon.

We were fortunate that we didn’t get hit my Irene and we feel for all of those that did. I’m certain many beekeepers along the east coast lost their hives to the hurricane, although I doubt we will see much about that in the news. We feel bad for the beekeepers but even worse for the poor bees!

I will be out of the office tomorrow and Friday as I will be helping my daughter move in to her dorm at college. I’m having a hard time believing how very fast the years “buzzed” by (ha, ha beekeeping reference), the next thing you know I’m just going to be an old drone bee

One of our observation hives swarmed on Thursday and landed in a Honeysuckle Bush.

We did collect it and shook them into an empty log that had bees in it last year. I had put a piece of plywood on top of the log to keep the rain out so I drilled a hole out and put a sugar feeder jar on it. Hopefully the bees can build up with the help of the sugar syrup and maybe even get some honey and make it through the winter.

I had a large tour group in this morning of kids and parents and I just wanted to thank the parents for all of the exceptionally well behaved kids and a good job to the kids, as that makes giving the tour a pleasure instead of a “chore”!

It’s been another busy week…which is great!

Today I finally got around to doing some work on the observation hive. I found and marked the queen and then removed 2 frames of sealed brood to stop them from swarming. I took those frames of brood and added them to our queen bank hive and put 2 new foundation frames in their place. In just a few hours they already have some comb built up. I will probably end up having to take some more brood out sometime this fall so we can keep this awesome queen! It was hard cleaning the glass off as there were thousands of bees all over it. I had to smoke them continuously as I scraped the beeswax off the glass. The amazing thing is I only wore an open veil and I didn’t get stung once – nice bees!

We have bottled honey everyday this week, all but today’s run contained at least 2,000 pounds of honey per day into various containers. Todays’ run was just a batch of Blueberry and Raspberry flavored honey packed into 1 lb. jars. It sure smelled like berries in the honey house while I was doing it! When I got finished with that I came into the office to cover for Bill while he went to the Post Office and as soon as I sat down I noticed that we had a customer…see picture below.

I stepped outside to invite her in to take a tour but she must have had other plans.

I’ve been on the road the last couple of days. Yesterday I had to drive to Waverly, NY to drop off a load of beeswax and pick up some empty bottles and today to Geneva, NY to get 4 drums of Orange Blossom honey. I rather enjoyed the trips as it has been years since I have been able to go to either place. The traffic and road construction were a “downer” but I took my wife with me on today’s trip and we stopped for lunch on the way back. It was a buffet lunch so we stuffed ourselves…no dinner required tonight….uhhhhhhhh.

We bottled all of the Basswood honey into jars on Thursday and before I left this morning I helped get most of a tank of Clover honey bottled. It’s good to see that we are able to replenish a lot of our inventory that was getting rather low. We also bottled some of that Alfalfa we got in right out of the drum and into some jars in a nice creamy form. It is such a nice, smooth honey and we have some people that like it that way. We don’t have this honey advertised on our website but you can order some by calling us. It is available in 1 lb., 2 lb. and 5 lb. jars – it is priced the same as the regular Alfalfa honey.

We have had some rain and things are starting to perk back up around here. It seems cooler today at 84 degrees as compared to the 90′s and 100′s we have had. The bees look good but whether or not we are going to be able to say this year was a good production year…remains to be seen. Normally the Goldenrod and Aster are big sources of nectar for the bees in the late summer and fall but with all the hot weather the plants are stunted to say the least. We are keeping our fingers crossed that we will have some extra honey to pull off this fall.

I have had a busy day today! Lots of people in and for a while I didn’t think I was going to get to bottling the Basswood, but I finally got a break and got it done. Below is a 1 lb. jar being filled and let me mention that it isn’t easy to fill a jar and take a picture at the same time.

Below is a row of jars filled with some of the purest Basswood I have tasted in a long time. Next steps…put the lids and shrink bands on, label the jars, place on pallet, load into van and deliver to customer in Pomona, NY.

We extracted the first honey of 2011 today and it was nearly pure Basswood…unfortunately we are only going to end up with a couple of tons all together. That may seem like a lot of honey but there is a big demand for the Basswood and we have none in stock so I’m sure it will go quickly. We plan on putting all of it into containers and not offering 5 gallon bulk pails – sorry to anyone that wanted some in bulk! We are going to pack some in gallons which is only slightly more expensive than the 5 gallon pails per pound. I have to bottle a few jars in the morning for an order that has to go out…when I do I will take a couple of pictures and post them. Also tomorrow I will be putting the Basswood back up on the website…so get ready to place your orders!