Draper's Bee Blog

I have been busy doing the yearly inventory the past couple of weeks as well as getting the 2012 price sheets and delivery schedules made up. So much to do this time of year.

It certainly doesn’t feel like Christmas here with the warmer weather and tons of rain and it is definitely going to be a very muddy Christmas! But even with the mud and gloomy weather I am looking forward to spending time with my oldest daughter who is home from college.

I hope everyone that reads this has a Blessed Christmas…and yes I said Christmas not Holiday…a big to all those people who don’t want to offend someone by saying Christmas. Ho, Ho, Ho – Merry Christmas!

Wow…I didn’t realize how long it has been since I posted anything…guess I was even busier than I thought I was.

We finally finished extracting and it was a pitiful year, we only averaged around 50 pounds per hive. We left a lot of honey on the hives as many of them were very strong and looked like they needed it. Hopefully they all make it through the winter, although that’s not likely, but we would love to have a year were we only lose a few hives and not like 100 of them like the last couple of years.

We have been working on bottling honey to replace inventory that was nearly depleted. My hands are getting some nice calluses too from putting lids on the jars, since we have been putting an average of around a ton of honey all into jars with every batch we bottle. We have sold out of chunk and cut comb honeys as well as Tulip Poplar, and some sizes of Tupelo. None of which will be back in stock until late spring or early summer if at all, depending on production. We are even running low on beeswax. Demand for the bee products is either increasing or the supply just isn’t there…I would say both.

I have started doing inventory and it isn’t any fun. I wish everything was computerized so I didn’t have to go out in the cold warehouse and count everything 1…2…3…4…5…6…etc. I have been doing the inventory by myself for 25 years now.

My daughter had something amazing happen. She is in college and is a member of a church group that wants to go to New York City on a missions trip to help the needy. It is sponsored by a national group and costs a substantial amount of money per student to cover hotel, travel and food expenses. Well she was having a hard time raising enough to go and was feeling depressed about. She finally posted on FaceBook what she was doing just a few days before the money was due. Well her prayers were answered when a long time friend of mine saw her post and offered to pay for the entire thing. What a blessing it was and she is so excited to go…I guess God really wanted her to go. She is one of the most giving, loving people I know and I’m sure she will be able to help someone in need to feel a little better around Christmas. I’m proud of you girl!

Starting today we are accepting orders for package bees and queens for the 2012 season. You can either have the bees shipped to you or you can pick them up at our location. The tentative pickup days are; Saturday, April 21st or Saturday, May 5th, these dates may change due to weather conditions or other factors beyond our control. I will post related information on the package bee page and here when I receive it.

We finally were able to get out and pull the honey off the hives. It only took us four days to get it all done and we worked in all kinds of temperatures in those four days. The first day we pulled was cold and most of the bees were down which made it easy to pull the honey supers
off the top. The second day was cool and windy and the bees were really grumpy. The third and fourth days it was almost too warm to be comfortable in our bee suits…but we got through it. This year there were four of us working; Bill, Allen, Collin (my son) and myself and once the four of us got into the “grove” things went very smoothly. We did see 3 bears in a corn field only a stone’s throw from the last site we pulled honey from…hope they stay away from the hives!

Al has started extracting our stuff today, so in a couple of weeks we will have some numbers. Some of the hives did very well but because we started nearly half of our hives with packages this spring we expect the per hive average to be down from last year…we will see.

We have been working on extracting a lot of local beekeepers honey also. Some have done exceptionally well and others not so good, just like every year.

I think it won’t be long and we will all be paying to send and receive emails. I got an email yesterday from the people that host our website saying that they will no longer be supporting email directly from our website, because the cost of upgrading their system was too great, but I have to wonder if the FCC isn’t trying to push all the little email servers out so they can collect money from the larger providers…guess we will see. Come to find out to keep our @draperbee.com email addresses we have to pay a yearly subscription…nice…NOT! So rather then wait for the service to expire I spent today setting up our new emails with Google. Good news we get to keep all of our @draperbee.com emails, bad news is that it is a hugh pain in the butt! I had to make so many changes that it took our website offline for a few hours today but I think everything is up and working now. I still need to tweek some of the setting but so far so good. To make matters worse we lost phones and the internet for a couple of hours this afternoon for some reason too…when it rains is pours!

And here today was a beautiful day and we wanted to head out and pull some honey…didn’t happen. This has to be the latest we have had to pull honey. I am afraid now that a lot of the honey will be crystallized when we try to extract it…hopefully I’m wrong. Maybe tomorrow we will get to pull at least a couple of sites.

The last couple of weeks have been a little rough. Our driver had an accident last week on the way home from making deliveries. The van got totalled and he broke his leg. This is the second roll over we have had in less than 2 years. The first being with a load of bees in the van, fortunately this time he was empty. Bill is picking up the replacement van today…I guess it is a green one.

I didn’t have much time to post anything last week, partly due to the van wreck, but mainly because of a 720 piece comb honey order I had to cut. I spent many hours getting it ready. I will have all of the comb honey used up by the end of the week.

We still haven’t pulled honey off of the hives yet as our truck is having problems and no one can figure out what is wrong…when it rains it pours and yeah we have had plenty of rain too. Hoping next week will be a winner!

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!

Today I have decided to clean both of our observation hives. The last fall cleaning is always the worst! It seems that the bees collect so much nectar from the Goldenrod that they go into a super wax production mode and because they don’t need to build all that much comb this time of year they deposit it all over the glass…some of it is even full of honey.

I start out by taking the top part of the hive outside to open it up. Keep in mind that it’s never a good idea to open one of these up inside…lol. Once I have them outside and using as little smoke as possible I open the door and look for the queen. I like to capture her and place her in a queen cage for safe keeping. I would hate to injury her while removing and manipulating the frames. I was lucky this time and she was on the open side but if by chance she is on the other side you will have to remove some frames to get to her…”bee” careful!

I carefully remove one frame at a time, starting from the top and working down, with as many bees as possible clinging to the frame and place them in a 5 frame nuc box. You could also use an empty hive body for this. I place the queen cage right on the top so the bees know she is still around.

There are always some rebel bees that feel they need to stay and protect the honey that is dripping down the glass.

I have found the easiest way to deal with the rebels is to brush them off with a bee brush on to a piece of cardboard and then shake them off on to the nuc box. It’s a good idea to use your smoker while doing this as they usually aren’t too excited about being brushed.

It’s finally time to start cleaning off all of that wax and honey. Like I had mentioned before the fall requires more cleaning than any other time of year and in fact there normally is nowhere near this amount of wax on the glass. Our main observation hive has only been cleaned out 3 times this year and our second observation hive only twice. The honey and wax will not be wasted. I start by scraping the bulk of it off with a hive tool and placing it into a pail to be taken to the honey house to be processed.

After getting the bulk of the wax off I switch to a razor-blade scraper which gets nearly all of the wax off and this would be good enough in most cases but I like to get everything cleaned up to where it almost looks new. So after getting it scraped off I hose the hive down with hot water.

I then dry the hive off and clean the glass with some foaming glass cleaner. Looks so much better now!

Once the hive is all cleaned up it’s time to put the girls back in to their clean abode. I did scrape off the edges of the frames before putting them back in the hive. I like to start with the bottom frame and put them back in the same order as they were before being removed.

With all of the frames back in place it’s time to release the queen. Just pull the cork and let her out on the face of one of the frames.

After carefully closing the door to the observation hive I needed to take care of the remaining work force still in the nuc box. I just took them close to the hive entrance and shook them out on to the ground. They started heading up the wall to get back inside immediately so I had to get the observation hive back inside and open it up so they could get back in.

I set the hive back on the base and opened the sliding door and in comes a wave of bees anxious to get back to work. The whole cleaning took me about 1 hour per hive. I shouldn’t have to get into the hives again until spring now.

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.