early spring bee check

2012 has been unusually warm and we've even had some rain.  The pond looks like an oval again instead of 2 ponds.

I check the 3 west hives.  2 are doing fine, 1 seemed to be dwindling, they had honey so I moved frames of it closer to where the bees were clustered.  I didn't see a queen or brood in this one.  The other 2 had brood.

This week the highs are only in the 50's, so not much flying for a while.

bees

Checked 3 of the big hives since we had some rain lately and the temp was down to 76.  (Although the 72 percent humidity didn't help.)  All had brood and stores.  Not sure yet if we'll get to harvest any for ourselves.  Hope for more rain and lots of nectar producing flowers.  The swarm hive had left after the comb collapse which killed their queen.  So I took some of their old comb and put it into one of the big hives for safe keeping.

Hot bees!

It's been going up in 110's lately here.  Last night the hived swarm (of N weeks) had tons of bees bearding for the first time ever.  Gobs of bees outside the hive.  No fighting, so I knew it wasn't being robbed.  So this morning, while it was a mere 80 degrees, I went out to see what was going on.  (forgot to paste this paragraph earlier!)

Several of their combs had collapsed.  It was sad.  Empty frames with large combs falling over.  I had a spare deep box ready and ran into the house and found a whole bag of good rubber bands.  First I put the still standing  combs in the spare deep and set it aside.  Then I did what I've read about for cutouts.  I picked up the fallen comb (which is covered in bees of course) and set it gently on a flat surface inside a frame.  Then I wrapped lots of rubber bands on it to hold it in place.  I did this for the 3 fallen combs that were mostly brood.   I put those back in the bottom deep with a bunch of empty frames.  I put the bits of comb that had mostly nectar on top of the inner cover, covered by an empty deep then the outer cover for the bees to regain their nectar.  (Honey is too heavy to hold in with rubber bands, it just squishes and leaks everywhere.

so now they have 2 deeps, perhaps a wee bit prematurely, and an empty deep over the inner cover.  Shouldn't have problems keeping the brood warm, but might have issues keeping them cool.   I can only hope the queen survived the ordeal
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Click on the pictures to see them bigger.

Also checked on the big hive that hadn't worked on more than 2 frames in the 3rd deep.  They had some open brood, and I saw an empty queen cell.  They also have several empty frames in the lower deeps.  I'll just watch and wait on that one.  Might feed it later to get some comb drawn, and not pull "honey" from it, of course.

Update: Saturday July 16.  They are doing well, connecting comb, drawing new comb and they have lots of queen cells a few of which are capped.  Guess the old queen didn't make it through the collapse.  

Bee check

The hived swarm:  7 frames drawn, full of brood mostly with nectar and pollen around.  Will add second deep when at least 8 frames are full.
First to the west: Only the 2 frames drawn in the upper (3rd) deep..  Should do a more thorough check.
Second to the west: Top deep FULL of bees, all but 2 combs drawn and filling with nectar, only partially capped.
Last to the west (aka Lloyd's hive from last spring)  Top (3rd) deep full of bees, all but a few drawn, some capped brood including drones.  Saw a drone emerge.  (This is good because the observation hive's new queen will need drones out there when she goes on her mating flight.)
East hive: Top deep full of bees, drawn comb nectar, not yet capped.

All that took about 15 minutes.

quick bee check

The hived swarm (5 weeks) has 6 full combs now.  The nuc from last year is FULL of bees.  I checked them only because sometimes they seem less enthusiastic than the others.  I saw lots of capped brood and some open and closed them back up.

Saw the first graduating class on the swarm hive do their orientation flights.  :)

Waiting for the glass for the observation hive.  Need to drill a hole in the wall by Thursday, hopefully so I can install bees this weekend.

It's DRY.  The bees go out early and late, but I haven't figured out where.  It's getting dry enough now that I don't know if the sweet clover is producing nectar.  They're heading SW, so their hard to track.

Squash bug's final act.

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This morning I used duct tape to pick off as many squash bug eggs and nymphs as I could find. Felt like sisyphus.

Making Butter

We got a gallon of raw cream the other day to make butter so I thought I'd document my procedure.  I use a Bosch Universal mixer with the whips.  Put 1 quart of cream in the mixer.  It can be cold still, in fact, if it's too warm the butter will melt and be harder to separate from the "buttermilk" (not the same thing that you buy at the store.)  Most folks say to warm the cream, but with the Bosch it isn't necessary. I do let it set out for 5-10 minutes.

  If you put more than a quart of cream in at a time, when the butter separates it'll slosh around so much you'll have a big mess to clean up later.  So I did the gallon in 4 batches.  Cream is usually about half butter, so we get about 4 pounds of butter from a gallon of cream.  

So, you just let the mixer run on "1" for several minutes.  It passes through all the yummy whip cream stages.

At some point the butter will separate from the buttermilk. At this point, turn the machine off and just flip it to "1" briefly a couple times to get the butter into bigger clumps.

The picture below is how it should look when you're ready to pour off the buttermilk.  Pour it through a strainer and keep the buttermilk for pancakes or something.  Don't try to get the butter out yet though.  Next we want to wash the milk out of the butter.

To wash the butter I add cold water to the mixing bowl to about the same level as it was with the buttermilk, then pulse the machine several times. Our well water is cold enough, but if yours isn't, add some ice.  Then drain, then repeat.  I do this only 2 times and that seems to get the butter fairly clean.

Okay, now put all the butter in the strainer, then dump it all into a big bowl.  Don't try hard to get all the butter out of the mixer because the butter will help the next batch separate faster.  Now is the time to put the next quart of cream into the mixer and turn it on.  It will separate about the time you're done washing this batch.

The next goal is to get as much water out of the butter as possible.  I just tilt a bowl and smash the butter up against the high side.  The water will run down and you can dump it out occasionally.

Next, I put the butter on some wax paper and shape it into a long piece roughly the size of the usual butter sticks.

Then just wrap it up and throw it in the freezer.  If you're going to leave it in the fridge for a really long time rather than the freezer, you need to do a really good job of getting the buttermilk out and maybe even add salt.  I do neither, so I keep it in the freezer till we're ready to use it.