Waiting for Spring

It's that time of year when the bees hunker down and wait for spring. I'm right there with them.

Until I became a beekeeper, I never really thought about what bees did in the winter. I guess I assumed they died out or went underground.

The fact is that they huddle together like penguins in Antarctica flexing their wing muscles to generate the heat needed to keep the colony alive. These bees can live up to six months and have more body fat that their summer sisters.

The winter crew lives off of the honey stored by the summer workforce, moving upward through the stores as the winter progresses. If all goes well, they will have exhausted their reserves about the time the first blossoms appear in the spring.

To give them a little nutritive cushion, I will add candyboards -- blocks of hard sugar -- to the hives between now and March. That will help the smaller colonies make it all the way to spring, hopefully.

Black Walnuts, Yum

Every fall, the half-dozen or so black walnut trees on our property pepper the yard with their billiard ball-sized progeny. After nearly twisting my ankle stepping on them repeatedly the first year we lived here, I vowed to do something with them to make the trees earn their keep.

I asked for a nut roller for Christmas, and the next year I started collecting black walnuts. The meat of black walnuts is loaded with beneficial compounds, which is benefit number one of black walnuts. 

Black walnuts make you earn those benefits, however. 

First there's the green (or black as it breaks down) outer hull to get through. This is guaranteed to stain your hands and clothing if you're not careful -- so wear gloves and maybe an apron. Definitely do not wear your Sunday best for this job.

I process my walnuts in a trashcan with some water and a paint/cement mixer to churn the nuts against each other to break down the outer part. Any hull-free nuts that float are duds -- minimal meat, mostly air pockets. Get rid of them.

The jet black liquid you get from processing the walnuts can be used to make a dye for natural fabrics. The result is a lovely light brown color. So, that's benefit number two of black walnuts.

After they dry in the sun for a while, I bag them up in a burlap sack so they continue to get air as they cure. In the shell, black walnuts will last for months to years. I'm just now processing the nuts I bagged up two years ago, and they're about 50/50 good vs duds that have gone bad over time. So maybe a smaller interval between harvest and finishing is better....

Before I get cracking, I soak my walnuts in water overnight -- a trick I learned from Feral Foraging on YouTube. I don't follow his entire formula, but the soaking definitely makes cracking these tough nuts considerably easier. Without the bath, they're much more likely to explode like a hand grenade when pressed.

It's tedious, time-consuming work. It's also mindless, which allows me to catch up on a Netflix show or listen to a podcast as I work my way through a mound of nuts. So far, I've produced about three quarts of nut meats, which I packaged for sale at our last farmers market. 

Sadly, I got no takers, but I love black walnuts and I'm sure plenty of other people out there do as well. They just don't know it yet.

Just for good measure, here's a bunch of recipes using black walnuts.

Late swarm

The other morning, Jen woke me with the magic words: "There's a swarm in the apple tree."

There *was* an swarm in the apple tree. It was a small swarm and, since the apple tree is also small, I was about to reach the swarm easily and collect it. 

This was the fourth or fifth swarm I have caught on my property this year. Only one turned up in my swarm traps and stuck around before this one. Unfortunately, that one has gone queenless and been merged with the old White hive that collapsed due to mites and hive beetles.

For this hive, I scooped them into a bucket, then collected the stragglers with my bee vacuum.

After that, they went into a five-frame nuc box that I had on hand from after bringing my friend Jodi's bees to my house a few weeks earlier. (Jodi's newly developed allergy precludes her from keep her bees at the moment.)

They're small, which means I'll have to feed them lots of sugar water to try to boost their population ahead of winter. They'll need as much nectar/sugar as possible to make it through to March or April. Fingers crossed.

Update 12/18: I eventually merged the swarm with the remains of one of the Crimora colonies that went queenless. They are thriving.

New Bee Yard is Open

I kicked off my new bee yard at Black Bear Composting in Crimora last week. The yard is positioned in a large field ringed by black cherry, black locust, and fall bloomers like wingstem. The field is also loaded with asters, clover, and other small flowers in addition to grass that gets mowed a couple times a year for hay. I'm very curious to see what the spring bloom is like out here.

The hives are two of five that I am fostering for Jodi Kitchens, a friend who developed an allergy and had to stop tending her bees several month ago. Next year, I'll use the yard to handle the overflow from my home apiary, which has room for 10 hives. I should have space in the new apiary for 6 to 8 hives.

Because they had been untouched for so long, they were a bit spicy when opened for inspections. The bigger of the two has is very strong, which means it is also packed with honey -- not always a good thing. I pulled some honey to give to Jodi and left the bees some empty frames to build out and fill when the fall bloom begins in earnest.

I also found the queen of the smaller hive! It's always exciting to find a queen. She was too quick for me to catch and mark, but I'll try again on Sunday when I revisit the yard to test for mites and make some other fixes (like giving the small hive (J5)) an inner cover. The small hive was expanded from three five-frame nuc's, so they're enjoying the opportunity to spread out a bit. I did shrink them down to two boxes just to keep them from having more space than they can defend from invaders.

I also witnessed something I've never seen before -- a nurse bee feeding a new bee as they struggled to emerge from her cell following pupation. I love to see new bees emerge and have seen many do so, but this was a first. Pretty cool.

Colony Collapse!

'Tis the season for hive disasters.

Two years ago, Yellow hive lost its queen in the middle of summer. It took them a month to produce a new queen, but by then it was too late to build the colony up enough to survive the winter.

This year, it's White hive's turn to go down the tubes. It startes with a sky-high varroa mite count in mid-July.  Within a week or so, the population crashed to a quarter of what it had been. 

The the small hive beetles moved in.

Small hive beetles are, as the name suggests, small black beetles that live inside the hive. The adults are pests that the bees can keep in check normally.

The real problem with hive beetles is their offspring, which hatch in the honecombs and then tear through the hive's food supply -- pollen and honey. In the process, they cover everything in "slime -- basically, honey and their leavings. And I mean everything.

The only solution was to dismantle White hive, freeze the frames to kill the mite larvae, then clean the frames. In between, I feed the larvae to our chickens and let the bees reclaim the undamaged honey. I'm planning to scrap off the comb and melt it with the rest of my beeswax from this year. 

In thr meantime, I have hit "reset" on White hive in hope of recovering them enough to make it through winter. Fingers crossed.

Mite Check

Summer is the time for mite checks.

The varroa destructor mite (quite a name!) is a tiny monster that infests beehives. It reproduces in the cells where young bees mature and emerges with them to do its dirty work. Male bees (drones) are its favorite hosts because they take 28 days to mature, as opposed to their sisters who take just 21 days.

Varroa mites are a problem for two reasons. The biggest issue is that they spread diseases that destroy a hive. The second reason is that they feed on the bees' fat bodies, which becomes a major issue if hives go into winter with a big mite load since bees rely in part on those reserves to make it through til spring.

So we don't like varroa mites.

There are several ways to test for them and to treat them. My preferred methods are alcohol wash to test and formic acid to treat. 

The alcohol wash does kill bees along with the mites, but a sample of 300 out of a hive of 30,000 is a small sacrifice that will be quickly replaced by new bees. Counting the mites that end up in the bottom of the alcohol cup gives you an estimate of the infestation: 3 mites per 300 bees equals 1 percent. The rule of thumb is anything about 3 percent is cause for alarm.

This year's early mite washes showed few mites. By the summer wash last week, the hives were definitely showing mites. Most were in the 1-2 percent range, but White Hive's infestation was out of control! In fact, it looks like most of the hive vamoosed when the mite load got too high, which is not uncommon. The bees that remain will have to be merged with another hive, it appears.

Treatment protocol calls for using formic acid patties placed across the hive frames. The patties off-gas, emitting formic acid, which kills the mites while mildly irritating the bees. White Hive's dose is 2 patties for 14 days. After that, I'll test again and see how things look.

White Hive has been one of my best hives for size and honey production, although both of those things appear to have slowed down possibly because their mite load. Hopefully, things will return to normal soon.

First Honey Sales of the Year

Honey sales season is finally here!

The first round of honey extraction is over and the results are gorgeous. The honey is a lovely golden color and tastes a bit like peaches on the back end. Yum!

I offered some honey at the Cville City Market on Saturday and had a few sales. But I saved most of the honey for the Archwood Green Barns farmers market in The Plains. The visitors to that market were big honey buyers back during the holiday market and were very eager for local honey ("local" being defined by me as "within your biome").

I held back some of the early honey for the holidays. I feel like Gollum with the One Ring when it comes to this beautiful product.