SPRING DO COMETH!

* This article first appeared in the February 2023 issue of Bee Culture Magazine. *

Last weekend marked the return of daylight savings time and with that comes an array of sensory cues that inform us spring is on the way. My idle mind truly knows not what it wants during the cold, dreary days of winter, so I long for extended daylight, warmer temps, buds opening, and the familiar trill of Red-winged Blackbirds, kon-ka-reeeee! As the bees resume daily flights, we embark on another season of beekeeping, making our rounds to the apiaries, assessing winter losses, and preparing for early spring splits.

The method outlined below allows us to make nucleus colonies from overwintered stock while most beekeepers in my region are still coming out of their winter slumber. By implementing a version of the double screen bottom board, we are able to begin working the bees in late March once lows stop dipping below 32° F and drones are abundant.

Our colonies are overwintered in ten frame deeps with a medium super on top. This setup permits us to fill the medium with frames of honey in the fall, providing ample stores during the winter. The medium also acts as a buffer for the queen to begin laying in come spring. They are stacked one colony over the other, in customized brood chambers. Our brood chambers feature a deep hive body that is screwed into a double screen bottom board. The bottom board is the same footprint as the hive body with four (4) evenly spaced, double screen ventilation ports cut out. We run these bottoms all year long as the ventilation ports allow warm air to be exchanged amongst the two colonies during winter and assists with thermoregulation in the summer.

WORKING TOWARDS AN INCREASE

The first step in the spring is to move the top story colonies to another apiary so that we can begin working the colonies underneath. Some of you are familiar with the term “equalizing” and it is the first step of your spring management plan. Equalizing is exactly how it sounds, the act of boosting weaker colonies with frames of brood from stronger colonies, making all the hives in the apiary equal. We equalize after we have taken the first round of splits from our colonies. As you will see below, these first splits are not as invasive as a full-on hive inspection that would accompany equalization. Our temps are still unstable this time of year, so we try to refrain from busting up the brood nest too much for a few more weeks.

We begin by removing the telescoping cover and flipping it upside down to provide a suitable area to stack the medium super. There is no reason to remove the inner cover as this will likely trigger a defensive response from the colony. We have found that in early spring, the queen is typically in the medium super and is already laying it up. For the time being, we remove the medium, set it aside, and begin going through the brood chamber underneath.

We bring with us an extra telescoping cover that is also flipped upside down and an empty deep to stack on it. We begin by going through a couple frames inside the brood nest, assessing the colony’s strength, and checking the queen’s viability. All of our queens are marked; therefore, we give a quick look for the queen before shaking the adhering bees back into the colony. If located, the queen is caged and set aside while we conduct our manipulations. These quick frame audits usually give us a pretty good idea about the overall strength of the colony. If we encounter a weaker hive, one that is not yet worthy of being split, we close it up and give them another couple of weeks before re-assessing.

We then begin dividing the parent colony with the desired split. We remove a frame of resources (honey/nectar & pollen), a frame of mostly sealed brood, two frames of various stages of egg and larva, and give them to the split. While doing this we are also looking for larva that has just emerged and is suitable for notching. When notching, we take the flat end of our hive tool and push it through the wax, searing the bottom edge of the cells containing the chosen larva. After making contact with the plastic foundation, we push the hive tool down at an angle, crimping the wax underneath. This extra space allows the bees to draw out appropriately sized queen cells in older combs. Because of their rigidity, older combs present problems in frame-based queen rearing as the workers aren’t able to construct suitable sized cells because old wax isn’t as pliable as freshly drawn.

The transferred frames are grouped together and positioned in the middle of the split. We finish the split by filling the rest of the hive body with drawn frames on each side of the brood nest. The parent colony receives the same treatment. With the prolificness of spring as their guiding light, the bees in the parent colony quickly begin working the empty combs and recover from the split in about a week’s time. When managed throughout the season, this early division of strong, overwintered colonies also reduces swarming in our production hives.

The medium super is placed back on top of the parent colony, the queen is released (if caged), and a queen excluder is placed on top. The split is then placed on top of the queen excluder with the inner and telescoping covers on top. The hive is left alone for the next 24 hours during which time the bees will divide themselves accordingly with whatever number of bees are needed to cover and care for the developing brood within the split.

THE DEVIL IS IN THOSE FINE DETAILS

The next day we return to the apiary with our customized brood chambers. We remove the telescoping and inner covers and then simply transfer the frames over from the split. Once complete, the empty deep and queen excluder is removed, and the new colony set in its place with the entrance facing the opposite direction. The double screen bottom inhibits pheromone exchange from the parent colony; therefore, the bees in the split quickly realize that they are without a queen and begin queen rearing procedures. Although being situated in the same apiary can result in some minor drifting, the new entrance is unfamiliar to the bees and cuts down on the number of bees that will return to the queen right colony below.

A week later we return to the apiary to inspect each of the splits, making sure that they are in the process of rearing a queen. The bees typically use the notched frames that were provided; however, some colonies can also be overly ambitious and draw a dozen or more cells. We cull all but three of the best-looking cells per split, ideally with each cell located on a different frame. These separate cells are beneficial if you encounter a split that didn’t begin rearing a queen. When that occurs, you just transfer one of the extra cell frames to the split in need. Once queen rearing is confirmed, the colonies are left alone for three weeks to allow ample time for the queens to develop, emerge, mate, return, and commence laying.

Without the abundance of natural predators this time of the year, most nuptial flights are successful. As the season progresses on into the summer months, rate of return increasingly drops. At the three-week mark, final inspections are performed on the splits. If during this inspection you find a queenless colony, simply transfer another notched frame of appropriately aged larva over to this hive and begin the queen rearing process again.

The splits that have a mated queen are now officially a colony and are transported to a different apiary to build up over the next several weeks of prime weather and bloom. If the weather cooperates, our early spring split procedure takes about 6 weeks from the time of split until customer pick-up. This period allows ample time for all of the biological processes mentioned above as well as an additional 2-3 weeks of laying time for the queen.

Varietal - the Spice of Hive

* This article first appeared in the September 2022 issue of Bee Culture Magazine. *

“Too many bee-keepers fail to realize that the selling of a crop is fully as important as its production. The business part of bee-keeping has been sadly neglected. No set rule can be given as to how a man shall dispose of his crop, but it does seem like very poor business management to send away a crop of honey to some commission merchant, and then sit around all winter when good wages might be made selling honey direct to consumers, or to retail dealers.”

W.Z. Hutchinson

Advanced Bee Culture (1905)

One of the more fruitful approaches that we have taken with our honey production is offering varietals. Since our farm employs only myself and wife Ella, we must obtain the highest return on investment (ROI) possible to compensate for the long, hot days spent in the outyards in addition to the toll that all of the heavy lifting takes on our backs. Many of you are likely in a similar situation, launching your beekeeping enterprise while still working an off-farm job, and paying for your startup with revenue generated from the latter. Since the first several years of any agricultural enterprise typically operates in the red, as you scrape together the funds to purchase equipment and supplies, you are likely not in a position to take on a crew of workers. Although it is more labor intensive, the demand for varietal honey is most certainly there and commands a premium price. Saaaawwweeeeeett right?

Varietal is a term that is typically found within the wine trade and refers to a wine comprised of a single, known grape variety. As it pertains to honey production, varietal can refer to the specific location where the honey was harvested from or if harvested from a predominantly seeded agricultural area where the producer is certain of the crop being grown, can refer to the plant nectar that the honey is comprised of. To complicate that matter further, the same plant nectars can differ annually by region depending upon the areas’ temperatures and rainfall amount.

For us, varietal pertains to our apiary locations and the seasons in which it is harvested. Since each location is in a different region with their own variety of “wild” plants growing seasonally, we cannot decisively identify all of the floral sources that our bees visit and hoard within their hives. This variety of plant nectars result in a subtle nuance of colors and unique flavors in the honeys that we harvest from our different beeyards. The additional effort that is needed to offer varietal honey doesn’t just stop with the seasonal collection of supers from multiple apiaries, but also extends throughout the process of extraction and jarring. The harvested supers are stored, extracted, and jarred separately by location and season. Over the years, we have come to expect certain types of honey from certain apiaries and our customers will often request specific varietals based upon the season and apiary location.

The Proof Is in the Honey

Some of you might have lost interest as soon as I mentioned performing multiple harvests per season, but it is quite rewarding when you do a side-by-side comparison and tasting of the finished product. Additionally, you get to revel in all of the positive feedback that your customers voluntarily shower you with. Growing up in a household that never purchased honey, I was surprised by the volume of positive feedback that we received immediately after we began offering our honey for sale. When lifelong connoisseurs of the sweet nectar started weighing in, stating things like “your honey is pure ambrosia”, it was clear that we must be doing something right, as the majority of all the other commercially available honey is highly adulterated, consisting of non-descript colors and flavors that consumers have grown accustomed to. When you offer a genuine, raw and minimally processed product, folks take notice to its quality and are obliged to shell out more for your craft.

The distinct colors, viscosity, flavors, and aroma of varietal honeys all come down to where our bees forage. In the United States, there are over three hundred different types of honey that originate from different floral sources. Some varietals even smell of the floral source to which they derived from. Their color spectrums can range from nearly clear to a dark brown, and flavors can vary from delectably mild to distinctively bold. As a general rule, the lighter-colored a honey is the milder in flavor it will be. As you approach the darker-colored varietals, you will start to notice a more robust zest on the tongue.

Honey is commercially produced in every state, with certain types of honey deriving from specific floral sources that only grow in certain regions. Clover honey, the most widely harvested varietal in the US, has a pleasing, mild taste and varies in color from nearly clear to amber depending upon the source of clover. Wildflower honey, another common varietal, is a broad term describing honey from miscellaneous and undefined floral sources. Some of the other widespread floral sources that comprise the bulk of the honey crop harvested during the spring and summer months are hard maples, numerous fruit trees and shrubs, dandelions, basswood, buckwheat, and alfalfa. Fall flows are not guaranteed and when they do occur, are highly prized by the beekeeper as they help to lessen the burden of fall feeding. During bumper years, however, the industrious beekeeper can reap one last harvest of her crop which results in a distinct honey deriving from our native aster and goldenrod families of flowers.

Another varietal that has received a lot of buzz in recent years although not in the typical sense that honey is used is Manuka honey harvested in New Zealand. This particular honey’s antibacterial properties are potent enough for it to be considered as an effective wound dressing. To pick at the scab a little further, there are a number of acids that are present within honey such as formic, citric, and gluconic. Gluconic is the dominant acid and is produced by the action of bee enzymes on some of the glucose molecules within the honey. The acidity boosts the antibacterial properties of honey, as most bacteria thrive in neutral conditions. Hydrogen peroxide is also produced by the production of gluconic acid, further inhibiting the growth of bacteria.

Honey Prices & Consumption on the Rise

In recent months, reports of honey shortages worldwide in conjunction with the ongoing efforts of the American Honey Producers Association (AHPA), have resulted in a gradual rise in domestic honey prices. Thanks to the AHPA, the testing of imported honey is now mandated and has directly impacted the volume of questionable “honey” that is now being imported into the U.S. Less honey means higher price yields for reputable honey producers here in the states who no longer need to compete with so much of the illegal dumping of questionable honey from Argentina, Brazil, India, Ukraine, and Vietnam.

In early 2020, the price paid to U.S. honey producers ranged from $1.50 – $1.80 per pound, but over the last several months has risen to the $2.30 – $2.50 mark on average. These prices are representative of wholesale, bulk or barrel prices which doesn’t incur the additional expense of individual jars, labels, and marketing to retail outlets. Our current wholesale pricing for a one pound (16 oz.), shelf ready jar of varietal honey is $13. The shops that we supply retail our honey for $18 - $20 a jar and their customers anxiously await its return each season. Despite increasing our production incrementally each season, we can never produce enough honey to meet the customer demand.

If that weren’t good enough news, the National Honey Board Consumer Attitudes & Usage Study for 2021 reported significant upticks in honey usage over the past year. Data from the study cited multiple reasons as to why consumers selected honey as their most preferred sweetener. Some of the participants reasons for consuming honey included that it was ‘natural’, ‘good for the environment’, ‘organic’, ‘a source of antioxidants’, and ‘flavorful’. This growing demand for honey in the United States was further confirmed by data taken from the USDA Sugar and Sweeteners Outlook which reported that 571 million pounds of honey was consumed in 2020, a rise of about 8 percent from the previous year.

Great Honey. Greater Cause.

* This article first appeared in the April 2022 issue of Bee Culture Magazine. *

I am a beekeeper, albeit unintentionally. My introduction to apis mellifera is likely similar to that of others born before 1990. During those what seemed like endless, summer days of my youth, it was commonplace to step on a honey bee while running barefoot through your yard. As the helpless, forager bee cast her tiny sting into the underside of my foot, I never would have imagined that roughly thirty years later, I would choose to get stung on a routine basis. Not just stung, I mean STUNG! Right between the eyes kind of stung!

I recall honey bees engorging on the small, white flowers that grew in everyone’s yard. Back then, the Midwest, and a lot of the US was covered in white clover and with the clover, came the bees. But alas, this was a period considered by many to be the “hay day” of commercial beekeeping. Modern-day beekeeping has evolved into a constant toggle between strategy and defense when combating the multitude of evils that await every altruistic forager who dares to leave the hive.

Climate change, broadscale pesticide applications in agriculture, a booming lawn care industry, and rapid declines in natural habitat and forage, currently present severe challenges for the hive organism, and anyone that dares to don a bee suit in 2022. Lest we forget our nemesis, V. destructor!

The long and (the) short of it is this. Pollinators are declining rapidly and forgive me for the overused analogy, but it certainly will take a village of like-minded, unrelenting, forward-thinking individuals to get us out of the red so to speak for the countless checks that we have written at the earth’s expense.

Backgrounds & Beginning with Honey Bees

My entry into beekeeping came after we purchased our farm in February 2017. The farm, located roughly 40 minutes from our primary residence in the suburbs, had been abandoned for the better part of 18 years and contained an heirloom pear orchard. At that time, our primary focus, and still part of our core ethos today was in land restoration and wildlife conservation. Our goals early on were to remove the unsightly, overgrowth of invasives that were choking out the native plants and propagate perennial, food producing shrubs and trees. Ultimately, we hoped to not only re-establish the natives, and develop a functioning, perennial food system, but also provide a welcoming sanctuary for ourselves and the diverse fauna that call this farm home.

Already having an orchard that was producing on site, it seemed fitting to find a local beekeeper and offer up some acreage for them to place hives on in exchange for their mentorship and helping us manage our hives. We found that beekeeper, er... should I say bee-haver and I soon discovered that his definition of beekeeping and mine differed drastically. Ella and I both have backgrounds in biology, and in another life, were quite successful in our work with reptiles and amphibians. Our specific area(s) of focus were with the true, Giant African Bullfrog (P. adspersus) or Pyxie frog as they are commonly referred to and the ever popular, Bearded Dragon lizard (P. vitticeps) to which we played an instrumental role in developing a genetically sound example of a newfound, dominant trait. But I digress.

Through his “mentoring” I learned quickly that his method of keeping bees involved letting them collect as much honey as they could collect throughout the beekeeping season, harvest the entire crop at summers end, and then leave the bees to their own avail in the fall. The following spring, he would head down south, buy more package bees, and repeat the process. Needless to say, nothing felt good about that, not to mention that he was also putting high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) feed on his colonies all season long, thus the bulk of his “honey” crop that he was selling to local retail shops was mostly evaporated and capped HFCS. I would learn that this is an all-too-common practice in the honey industry and one that we vowed to shy away from at all costs with our operation.

What I haven’t touched on yet is that during this time, I completely absorbed myself in everything that is the European honey bee. Honey bee biology, breeding honey bees, queen rearing techniques, making colony increases, honey production, wax rendering, EVERYTHING!! I scoured literature from the 1800’s, sourced publications from overseas, listened to beekeeping podcasts, watched You-Tube videos, etc. After taking in so much information from so many different sources, I quickly realized the relevance of the common beekeeping quote, “Ask 10 beekeepers the same question, get 12 different answers.”

So, now with several thousands of dollars in empty bee equipment and the knowledge that we should have possessed prior to ever purchasing our first bottom board, we started over. We spent the first couple of years amassing queen bees from some of the nation’s top queen producers hailing from climates colder than ours. We knew that in order to have a sustainable apiary, we were going to have to start with exemplary genetics and then slowly impart the traits that were of the utmost importance to us. There is a lot of credence in Aesop’s tortoise. Slow and steady DOES win the race!

So, tortoise we did! Slowly but surely, year after year, we were seeing higher success rates of over wintering colonies and stronger queens coming into each spring. I find myself every year telling Ella, “These are the healthiest bees we’ve ever had!” I know that as beekeepers, we are getting better at our craft as our management techniques, and knowledge base evolves, but I can’t assume all of the credit for having better bees’ season after season. The bees do the bulk of the heavy lifting in our operation, and we are merely there to maintain the beeyards, address problems that arise, and apply treatments as needed.

Those Fluttering Embers of Orange & Black

Shortly after we began clearing out the invasive species that riddled the acreage, something magical happened. Tall, fragrant, rose-colored flowers began to pop up in several of the patches that had been cleared. Not having the taller brush and various sized tree saplings to compete with, the flowers were now able to reach up into the sky and grab the precious solar rays that they so desperately needed. As spring waned to summer, the patches began to hum with life from within.

We worked the sultry, days of summer away and soon were greeted by a frequent visitor to the farm. Around mid-July, we started to see in excess these fluttering embers of orange and black, dancing about the sky. The embers were Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) and like the honey bees of my youth, I too recalled seeing them regularly growing up, but not as much today. A connection perhaps?

The days in the Farmer’s Almanac stacked and by the end of August, there were so many monarchs on the farm, that we were dodging them as we mowed. They frequented the patches of flowers that now broadcasted a constant waft of floral sweetness throughout the sun-beaten fields. One day, as I was cutting along the edge of one of the patches, I saw the most intricately striped, yellow and black caterpillar crawling along the edge of one of the flowers large, waxy leaves. A closer inspection revealed that the caterpillar was munching on the leaf like a diligent farmer harvesting his crop. Left to right, right to left, I watched in disbelief as the cat (butterfly talk for caterpillar) consumed almost the entire leaf in just a few minutes time! Reveling in what I had just witnessed, I decided that it was time to research this flower and see what kind of ecosystem I had unfolding in front of my eyes.

My research quickly yielded that the “flowers” in question, that now grew prolifically in several patches on our farm, was the Common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca L.) plant, the primary host plant to the monarch butterfly here in the Midwest. The tiger striped caterpillar was the monarch’s larval form, and due to a consistent decline in Common milkweed nationwide, the monarch is in serious trouble.

Fate & Honey

We never envisioned ourselves being beekeepers and were as equally blindsided by the impact that monarchs have had on our lives. Fate certainly has a peculiar way of showing itself and when it does, I tend to lean into the momentum. Countless Google searches kept bringing us back to Dr. Orley “Chip” Taylor and the revolutionary work that he and his team were doing at Monarch Watch. Prior to founding Monarch Watch in 1992, Chip ran several colonies of bees himself, and spent twenty-two years working for the Department of Agriculture with “killer bees” in Central and South America.

Monarch Watch is a nonprofit education, conservation, and research program based at the University of Kansas, that focuses on the monarch butterfly, its habitat, and the spectacular fall migration. Their popular, tagging program was launched during their first year, and has turned in to the cornerstone of their operation.

The Monarch Watch Tagging Program is a large-scale, community science project that was initiated to help understand the dynamics of the monarch's spectacular, fall migration through mark and recapture. The tagging process helps to answer questions about the origins of monarchs that reach Mexico, the timing and pace of the migration, mortality during the migration, and changes in their geographic distribution. The tagging process involves applying a pressure-sensitive, adhesive tag with a unique code, to the underside of the monarch’s wing. These lightweight, all-weather tags were designed by Monarch Watch specifically for tagging purposes and do not harm them nor interfere with their flight.

Each fall, more than a quarter of a million tags are distributed by Monarch Watch to thousands of volunteers across North America who tag monarchs as they migrate through their area. These "community scientists" capture monarchs throughout the migration season, record the tag code and date, butterfly’s gender, and geographic location, then apply the tag and release them. At the end of the tagging season, this data is submitted to Monarch Watch and added to their extensive database to be used in further research.

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When it came time to harvest our first crops of honey, we decided to piggyback on the nation-wide platform that honey bees were receiving, to try and spread some additional awareness about the not-so-known decline in monarch populations and the milkweed plants that are needed to support them. Being a smaller operation, we can afford to do some of the more labor-intensive things that the larger producers don’t do.

So, we set out to do smaller, seasonal harvests that would mimic the monarch’s life cycle here in the Midwest. Sure, it was an unorthodox approach to traditional honey design and packaging, but any concerns that we had were quickly quelled. The seasonal, 3-part series has been an absolute scream with our audience and the packaging won a Graphic Design USA title in 2019, the first year that it was put into production.

Part of our mission is giving back to and supporting organizations whom we believe strongly in. A portion of all proceeds from the sale of our monarch themed, raw honey is donated annually to Monarch Watch. In addition, we also partnered with them to help spread awareness about the importance of planting milkweed within our local communities. Our “Plant Milkweed Support Monarchs” statement tee’s have been equally successful and has helped generate some additional revenue for Monarch Watch that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to contribute because of our limited honey production.