We had a good honey flow during June and early July this year. The bees filled a number of honey supers as the clover came into bloom. Clover gives a very light-colored honey, which crystallizes very slowly.
Honeybees will travel up to 3 miles to find food. Bees that have reached the age of about 3 weeks old go out into the field and at this stage are called field bees. Usually they find food much closer to home. When the field bee collects nectar, they fill their honey stomach with as much as they can carry — about 25 percent of their body weight. Then they bring it back to the hive.
Upon arrival, they will do a little dance on the honeycomb, which is how they convey to their sisters where they, too, can fill up with nectar. As the bees do their dance, they share the food and indicate in which direction and how far away the food supply is. Soon her sisters will start to get excited, some following her and then taking off in the direction indicated. The more enthusiastically she dances, the more of her sisters will follow.
Remarkably, this dance, conveyed by an insect with a brain the size of a pin head, is accurate to within a few yards. Try giving someone directions to the supermarket and being that accurate. Once the dance is done, the bee will deposit its payload into one of the nearby open brood cells and will take off for more nectar. During the daytime the brood combs will fill up with nectar as thousands of field bees bring what they have collected back home on repeated trips.
A beekeeper can judge how strong the honey flow is by shaking a brood comb, as sometimes a few drops of nectar fall out, sometimes about a cupful will splash out.
In the meantime, house bees, which are younger worker bees that have not yet become field bees, will transfer the nectar from the brood combs to storage areas higher up the hive. Bees tend to store honey at the top of the hive and fill it from there downwards. At this point, it is still too dilute to prevent spoilage. The bees fan the combs all night, evaporating the water from the nectar.
In the late summer, when the bees are curing goldenrod honey, the bee yard is full of the heavy smell of bees evaporating the water from the nectar. Once the water content is down to about 19 percent, it is cured honey and the bees will seal the cells with white beeswax. Now it will never spoil. Honey has been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, left there for thousands of years and still good today.
I started to extract my bees’ honey last week and still have a few supers to do. We are now in between honey flows. The clover has finished, and goldenrod is yet to start. The bees are hanging around as though they are feeling sorry for themselves. But by about Aug. 17 the yard will be abuzz with activity again, as the honey flow starts like someone has flicked a switch. At this time in the summer, I often am removing honeybee hives from places where they are not so welcome. They love to build their hive in the empty spaces above soffits and other ornamental structures on houses.
In the last week or so I have done 3 removals in Sedgewick, Augusta and Ellsworth. Some colonies were big and some relatively small. The process starts with exposing the colony by removing boarding, siding, shingles, etc. This is the moment of truth when I — and the homeowner — see just how big the hive is. The wax combs will be covered with bees. Once exposed, I can use a special vacuum to suck the bees into a special bee hive. Then I cut away the colony, comb by comb. Each comb full of brood is cut to shape and fit into a wooden frame, where it is held in place with rubber bands. Combs full of honey tend to fall apart and usually are fed back to the bees when I get home.
One colony I relocated last week was very interesting to look at. It was only about the size of a basketball. As I exposed the comb, I took some photos of it. This hive looked like a giant bee. I can’t wait to see what it looks like in a few months.
Peter Cowin, aka The Bee Whisperer, is President of the Penobscot County Beekeepers Association. His activities include honey production, pollination services, beekeeping lessons, sales of bees and bee equipment and the removal of feral bee hives from homes and other structures. Check out “The Bee Whisperer” on Facebook, email petercowin@tds.net or call 207-299-6948.