The other day I received an email from a fellow named Timothy Sellers of the band Artichoke. He wanted to see if I might be interested in reviewing his bands album called “Bees”. I said sure. What could it hurt. He mailed off a CD for me to listen to. It must be said before my review that the last album or CD I have bought was Guns and Roses last recording, Chinese Democracy, a true stink festival of music that should not have seen the light of day. I fully expected “Bees” to be as good as that or any form of Christian Rock and Roll music used in those “hip” teen church services. It sounds like music but is just as bland and tasteless to the ears as a generic .25 cent can of fake Coke.
Arriving in the mail box a few days later I ripped off the mailing package and looked at the box. First impressions are important to me and it was nice to see a real CD in a case with nice graphics and not some hand scrawled note of “Listen To This” sticky noted to a generic Panasonic 750MB data cd. So far so good. Driving to the bee yard was a perfect time to listen to this album. How was it?
Pretty darned good. Instead of music engineered for a Raffi concert I heard real music with real love and heart packed into it. These guys were not just singing flim flam songs about bees with touchy feely vocals and healf hearted strumming of the guitar. They believed everything they were pouring out of the speakers. From listening to the lyrics you get the feeling that at least one of the band members has bees because their lyrics spoke truth to the biology and the behavior of Apis Mellifera.
This album is just fun to listen to, more so if you happen to bee a beekeeper and can understand the inside the hive humor. If I had to label them as sounding like another band it would be hard but for the sake of the review I would say a combination of The Violent Femmes, maybe a little They Might Be Giants, The Presidents of The United States, and a dash of Weezer or The Sex Pistols. Good fun music that is catchy and should be paid for with a modest payment to Amazon or using their website found at the link below.
I give them 4 jars of honey. Of note, 5 jars of honey equals something like the greatest song in the world and has never been acquired in human history.
Brushing away the bees for inspection.
By far, the bee brush is one of the most useful pieces of equipment a beekeeper can carry in their toolbox next to the hive tool. It’s sole purpose is to gently brush the bees off of the comb to better aid inspection or to remove frames for harvesting honey. When purchasing your equipment this is the one case where I recommend buying actual beekeeping equipment and not cheaping out with a horse brush or your Goody brush from high school when you had hair. The horse brush or hair brush’s bristle is much too stiff for the delicate work of sweeping away bees. To you the bristle may seem soft but to a bee it is like having a wired brush passed over your body at 100 mph.
A surgeon must have good implements and so should you. The bristle of your average bee brush is so soft it should feel like a silk leisure suit over your entire body. It will conform more to the shape of what you are sweeping providing less resistant or friction on the bodies of our little friends. This will result in calmer bees as their limbs and heads will not be ripped from their body.
The brush is good for inspections but when it comes to the honey harvest I like to move with a little more speed. The quicker I can get them off the comb the quicker I can let them settle back into their routine. So in addition to the bee brush I also carry the Stihl model BG “Big Gun” 55 Handheld Blower in my car.
The BG 55 At Work.
I am sure my old mentor would cringe if she saw me use this thing on the honeybees as it just seems to run counter to the bucolic quietness of harvesting honey on a late summer day. True. However I firmly believe I kill less honeybees in the process. Gale force winds may rip the roof off of your house but when directed right through the heart of a hive of bees it makes quick work of the evacuation process. As an added benefit usually no bees die in the process. They are simply blown out.
When I use a brush I have to lift each frame out. Every-time I do this there is a real chance that a few bees will be crushed in the process. The BG 55 eliminates this problem. After a good 30 second blow, I inspect the super. If I hear a few more bees, I BG 55 the hive for a few more seconds. I rarely have to do this more than twice.
The BG55 is not for everyone but consider it as an option.
P.S. Before you pull out the BG make sure you know where your queen is. I use a queen excluder and also verify there are no eggs being laid in the super I am extracting from.
A bee suit is to a beekeeper what a pressure suit is to an astronaut. OK, maybe not that dramatic but you get the point. Wearing a suit allows the hairless ape to work amongst thousands of bees with nary a sting. I have bought several suits in the past, each with their own merits.
The holy veil of Aquilonia
My first suit was actually a 35.00 dollar painter’s jump suit and I have to say it was probably the most durable of all of the suits I have bought. Not sure where it was made but its cotton was heavy enough to repel the golden hive army from attacking my soft parts. Of course I had to buy a veil to go along with it and making the two come together to provide a bee proof shield barrier was always a hassle. But this was my graduate school days when money was not always available for luxuries.
Where is that zipper lad?
Later when I landed my first job I swallowed hook line and sinker B.J. Sheriffs advertisements in the issues of Bee Culture. This was folly. The British made suit worked
great for two seasons and then zippers and threading began to slough off like parts on a Fiat. Maybe I bought the summer weave suit but the material felt thin and downright cheap. Like washing your T-shirt a thousand times with bleach. I never use it anymore except for a backup suit for when I bring a guest out. Don’t worry I give them my good suit and I wear the holy garments. One aspect I did like about the suit was how its veil situated on my head. It did not limit my view all that drastically or cause my head to overheat.
My current suit was purchased from Dadant. Bee Suit It has served me well for the last five years. I really like the wide hat brim. The mesh falling from its edges gives your head plenty of breathing space for when the honeybees are trying to sting through the mesh. It is made from a nice thick cotton which can be steamy in our Virginia summers but protects you well from the bees. The zippers feel much more sturdy compared to my B.J. Sheriff suit and most importantly the zipper connection between the suit and veil is almost hermetic.
Buying a bee suit maybe a life saving event for you especially if you are susceptible to bee venom reactions. I would always go for the heavier suit. Heavier suits usually are accompanied with sturdier assemblage in the form of solid zippers and teeth and better threading. However if on the other hand you overheat quickly than I would recommend the B.J. Sheriff suit and some needle and thread for when it begins to disintegrate.
jpbellavance
Beekeeping is not an inexpensive hobby by any means unless of course you want to do beekeeping using traditional means of practice. When I say “traditional” I mean “Little House on the Prairie” traditional. When Pa and Half-Pint would venture out into the great big woods and find a hive lodged in a tree hollow. Half-Pint would set fire to the tree while Pa cut it down with his double bladed axe like Paul Bunyan. Together they walked home with 180 pounds of comb on Pa’s back while Half-Pint lovingly looks up to Pa and says “I love you Paaaa!.” That worked during 1880’s but now a days there are not many wild hives in the woods due to the mites and as folksy as this sounds it is a lot of work.
Most modern day beekeepers like to do things efficiently with as little mess as possible so that our spouses won’t clobber us over the head with grief. This being said we arrive upon our most expensive purchase when it comes to being a hobbyist bee keeper. The extractor. Careful consideration must be given when searching for the right extractor. For my part, I made a poor choice. But knowing what I know now, I know what to look for the next time I buy a new one in 2024.
An extractor is an essential part of your operation. In days past people used to put the honey comb in cheese cloth and press it out the honey. This was effective however it made it hard practice beekeeping as you destroyed the essential structure of the hive. Using an extractor it is now easy to put frames into a rack and spin out the honey with little or any damage to the comb. Empty frames are then put back into the hive to be filled again thus restarting the cycle.
One sad fact about beekeeping is that it is a dying art. As it goes by the wayside, so do the manufactures of beekeeping related wares. As a result there are far less choices than there used to be. Doing a quick online search I only found 2 manufactures of extractors and that was King Honey and Maxant. The other extractors I see sold in most of the catalogs today are made by the Chinese and sold generically. Maybe making your own is not such a bad idea.
The Buckfast Honeybee
When I first ventured into solo beekeeping I used the same bee breed as my mentor, the standard Italian. Don’t get me wrong the Italian is a nice bee which I will go over in another article but I wanted to experiment and see what other choices there were for me. After doing a little research I arrived upon the Buckfast honey bee.
The Buckfast honey bee was developed by Brother Adam at Buckfast Abbey in the early 1900’s. During that time honey bees were going through
Brother Adam
a crisis as the tracheal mite “acarapis woodi” was wiping out many of the colonies, then called the “Isle of Wight” disease. The tracheal mite is a very tiny mite, about 80 microns large, that settles into the tracheal tubes of the bees and feeds off of their blood while the female lays eggs. The honey bee colony will become weakened by this pest and become more susceptible to other diseases.
After travelling over 100,000 miles around the world, Brother Adam was able to collect pure strains of other honeybees and over several years combine them into a breed of honeybee now known as the Buckfast Bee. The Buckfast Bee is known for many of its good traits including:
If one were to list a downside to them it is that they like to use propolis around their hive liberally. Propolis is a tree resin that honey bees use to to seal up the interior of their hive. Sometimes it can make opening the hive very difficult. I have broken a few frames and hive entrance spacers because of all of the sticky goo they placed around the hive.
Despite this I found the Buckfast bee to be the most hardy of all of the breeds I have worked with. In eastern Virginia we often have cold wet winters and the bees actually did very well for having such a lousy climate to live in. This year I will probably order three packages of this honey bee breed and see how they fare in the mountainous area surrounding Charlottesville.
As a side note to their hardiness. One year that I had the bees, for some reason the Buckfast swarmed late into the season. At the time I only had about three spare boxes with frames so I captured the swarm and placed them into a fourth hive next to the others. I gave them as much honey I had on hand and also fed them some concentrated sugar water of a 2 parts sugar to 1 part water. This did not amount to much and I figured they were going to die out in the winter. Every month or so during the winter I would go out to the bee yard and check on their status. I would place my ear next to the hive and tap a few times on the wood with my hand. Every time I did that I would hear a faint buzz from within. Come early Spring they were still alive and I was able to build them up again into a full fledged hive.
On another positive note concerning the Buckfast Bee. Because they are naturally resistant to the tracheal mite, you do not have to buy Menthol to treat them. The use of Menthol can only be applied during the early and late season and not soon before a honey extraction. Honey containing Menthol is not fit for human consumption when in honey. Treating mites is another article we will talk about later.
Links to breeders of Buckfast Honey Bees:
