The Buzz Newsletter

September 2005

 

 

Page 9

The Beeyard Report -- September

Working with bees can be a humbling experience. About the time you think you know what you are doing, the bees teach you a lesson. The last couple of years I had started to regard myself as the king of comb honey. The reality is that Peter Coyle is undoubtedly the king. I would probably have trouble making it as the crown prince.

My only advice for producing comb honey is to find a good yard. I usually have good success choosing the colonies to do it. This year, I did not. It was blow to my ego. I like to do sections on single story colonies with new queens. The flow started really early this year. The singles weren’t ready so I put most of the cut comb boxes on the over wintered doubles. This was after they had filled the first honey super. We only run eight frames in the regular honey supers so the bees are usually drawing a little wax when I put the comb honey boxes on. I had nine colonies in my favorite yard with comb honey boxes. Out of those nine, there were only two that actually did any comb honey. Adam started moving the boxes around and we finally got them filled up after I got out of the picture.

It has been the honey flow of a lifetime for us. As I write this, we are working on barrel #102. We had to borrow a forklift so we could stack the barrels. There wasn’t any room left in the warehouse. I’m not real sure how I am going to get them unstacked in the dead of winter but I guess I’ll deal with that problem when the time comes.

Anthony had to go back to school August 17th. He was disappointed that he wasn’t around to put the lid on Barrel #100. #99 was about half full when he left. He wanted Alex and Adam to go get some more honey but they got rained out. It left him a little short of his goal. To put this in perspective, we only had 20 barrels of our honey extracted when he left for school last year.

We have continued to have trouble with our new extractor. When I say new, keep in mind that it’s three years old. I wrote last month that we were having trouble with the speed control. It turned out that the speed control wasn’t the source of the problem. There was a bad bearing on the bottom of the reel that was putting too much drag on the motor. It took a couple of conversations with the metal plant before we figured this out. I replaced the bearing and everything worked fine. When Anthony was on his last barrel, the speed control started to blow fuses again. This time both the bearing at the bottom of the reel and the pillow block at the top were really stiff. All the while, my old extractor (circa 1982), with the homemade drive system, has not missed a beat.

The last of our queens went off to South Carolina today. I’ve been surprised that we have gotten a number of calls from the East Coast. This is not a big revenue stream for us but a lot of little streams can make a river. I also like the flexibility it gives us in maintaining our colony numbers.

I have been exploring an export possibility as a possible outlet for some of my honey. The thing I found amazing was that it costs more to get honey from Lynnville to Chicago than it does to get it from Chicago to Hong Kong. When I was checking on freight rates, one of the people I talked to was Chinese lady. She told me that the Chinese people love honey but they know that Chinese honey is not pure. This seems to me the ultimate irony since Chinese honey is flooding into the US and driving down the price.

I am not very optimistic that I am going to get the job done but it would feel really good to send some the other way.

Submitted by Phil Ebert