Hey everybody and welcome back to He Works Hard for the Honey and welcome to Spring 2018! For those of you who have been with us since the beginning, welcome back! And those who are just joining us, welcome! I’m Chris, and last year we started documenting the journey of me (and my wife in tow), a new beekeeper, keeping two beehives in our backyard.
It’s been an amazing process so far. Though today I am writing to tell you some bad news, unfortunately. As many of you remember, we lost Hive 1 during the fall (look for either a blog post or vlog about the resulting swarm and the conditions that caused that). Unfortunately we lost Hive 2 over the winter as well. I said last year that it's not the cold it's the condensation that’ll kill ya’. And unfortunately that seems to be what happened.
As a part of winterizing the hive, I had some material at the bottom of the hive to insulate and block some of the airflow through the hive. They do need some airflow, and unfortunately, it appears that was where we ran into trouble.
Bees are amazing. They can keep a hive this size at a core temperature between 85 and 95 degrees. For conditions of 30 below, up to 140 degrees, they can either cool the hive or, in the winter, they huddle and use the honey they've made all year to stay warm. It’s like a lot of people working out in one room and heats the hive up. They all band together around the queen to keep her healthy. The problem is that this creates a great deal of condensation.
I want to say it was about a month ago, we had a day where it was 60 degrees. I came running to the back yard after work, because at that temperature they should have been doing some exercise flights and starting to scope out the area for potential food sources and I saw nothing! So I waited a little bit and still didn’t see anything. I started pulling the roof off and the first thing I saw was this mold here and kinda new that we were in trouble. What happened was the condensation pooled on the roof and dripped back on the bees. They can heat themselves in the cold, but they can’t deal with the water on them. Now, after the bees have died, there is all this water and condensation in there, what we ended up with is a great deal of mold, as you can see, all around on the caps of the honey.
So I’ve done a great deal of research online and have talked to some other beekeepers, and the good news is that we can still use the honey, not necessarily for human consumption though. This is a brood super anyway, so we wouldn’t use this honey necessarily to sell or eat, but we can, when we get our new bees in May or June, use these as resources for them. Once we have some live colony in here, we can mix these frames in and what will happen is the bees fanning it will actually get rid of the mold. And we’ll be able to start two new colonies from the same apiary that we got the very healthy colony that was hive 2 last year.
We are on the waiting list with them now. Swan’s Honey up in Albion, Maine is the apiary we use. I highly suggest them. We had a really terrific product last year, as many of you remember. (Those who don't remember and are interested can look back.
When we get these hives we are actually going to be able to sort of distribute these honey frames, that also have pollen in them around the five frame super that we are going to be getting, which is really going to set us ahead from where we were last year. So unfortunate as it is that we lost hive 2, we’re going to be able to sort of roll over a lot of the work that happened last year and set these hives up for a fairly early harvest. My wife has been working on lip balms, sugar scrubs and candles this winter. We hope to have a sample out to some of you in the near future. And I look forward to some more blogs and vlogs before our new colonies show up.
For those of you who are new, it makes me a better beekeeper when you ask questions. I am happy to share the knowledge I have from the classes I’ve taken and it's actually the best case scenario that when I don’t know, I go and I find out. That makes me better at what I do here, which, unfortunately, it seems I need right now. And that’s it, I look forward to your questions and you feedback and we look forward to spring. Thanks!
~Chris, The Boxing Beekeeper