My sweet honey at C81

455 Bravo Uniform

455 Bravo Uniform

Final Approach
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455 Bravo Uniform
@Jim K - Did you ever get this kind of treatment when you recently landed at “rustic” Campbell field?

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It was a surprise from gentleman @Racerx Thank you sir!!

…I flew my mom up there to see my son who was doing a vintage show at the fairgrounds (shameless plug for PhartClothes.com). She saw it and asked if that was my relief jar :eek::D

Fairgrounds was nutso:
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My wife's family lives there, and we're going up to visit the weekend before Oshkosh next month. How's the ramp and fuel situation there? I think we're going to leave the Mooney there for the week and borrow/rent a car to drive up to OSH.

The only other time we've flown up to visit we've landed at UGN instead of C81, but C81 is a very short drive from her family.
 
Get fuel elsewhere. Even the locals admit it’s a goofy system.

Narrow runways. 9-27 is all asphalt and about 3000 ft. FBO is clean and comfortable (it’s nice). Be advised it’s not a locked up barbed wire field. No complaints.

And it came with a free jar of pee…

Seriously though, @Racerx if you would, give us a backstory on the honey. I have been thinking about bees the last few years.
 
That's awesome!

No I didn't get anything there but the heebie-jeebies, and the underside of my wings cleaned by the grass. #lowwingproblems
 
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Hrm, since I'm based off of a 2700' grass field I suppose the rwy size and grass won't bother me too much. We've driven out there before on the previous visit, and it seemed deserted so I understand the heebee jeebies. :)
 
455 Bravo Uniform said:
Get fuel elsewhere. Even the locals admit it’s a goofy system.

Narrow runways. 9-27 is all asphalt and about 3000 ft. FBO is clean and comfortable (it’s nice). Be advised it’s not a locked up barbed wire field. No complaints.

And it came with a free jar of pee…

Seriously though, @Racerx if you would, give us a backstory on the honey. I have been thinking about bees the last few years.
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40' is narrow? Oh, honey... :D
 
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@JimK didn't give me a heads up or he would have gotten some. I think they might have even mowed in the last month or so.

@455 Bravo Uniform -Told my sister and her friends about what the fair has going on so your son might have a few customers tomorrow. Enjoy the sweet stuff. Got a closet full of it with another harvest and 70 gallons expected.
 
Racerx said:
@JimK didn't give me a heads up or he would have gotten some. I think they might have even mowed in the last month or so.

@455 Bravo Uniform -Told my sister and her friends about what the fair has going on so your son might have a few customers tomorrow. Enjoy the sweet stuff. Got a closet full of it with another harvest and 70 gallons expected.
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how do you milk their little teats for honey?
 
eman1200 said:
how do you milk their little teats for honey?
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So...think of it like a backpack. Bees go out and collect nectar. Put it in their backpack which adds enzymes. Come back to the hive a put it in the cells. They let the nectar dry down. When they think the moisture content is right, they cap it. Cut the caps with a hot knife. Put the frames in a spinner. Honey drains down. Put a double sieve on a bucket to filter out any cappings. IMG_20220723_152614338.jpg
 
Racerx said:
So...think of it like a backpack. Bees go out and collect nectar. Put it in their backpack which adds enzymes. Come back to the hive a put it in the cells. They let the nectar dry down. When they think the moisture content is right, they cap it. Cut the caps with a hot knife. Put the frames in a spinner. Honey drains down. Put a double sieve on a bucket to filter out any cappings. View attachment 117931
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so.......no teats?
 
Backstory on the bees...

Basically I dislike a 12k property tax bill. 8k is more palatable. Even if it means a few hours of work doing hive inspections every week and a couple hundred bee stings throughout the year. If you have 200,000 sq ft of property in lake county you can apply for an agriculture exemption. I have 214,000 sq ft. My dad/neighbor has 212,000. If you have the exemption you can keep bees. If you have 1 hive for every .75 acres they tax the land value as farmland. Between the 2 properties I keep 20 full size hives and a couple nucleus colonies that are only 5 frames instead of 20 frames in the big ones. This means I've always got an extra queen or 2 around in case I need it. To keep the nucs small I'll rob the frames of brood and put them in a weaker full size hive.
 
eman1200 said:
so.......no teats?
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Stingers are not teats. Do not try to milk the bees for their honey.

The average worker bee live 8-12 weeks and will produce 1/12th of a TEASPOON during it's lifetime. The average hive during a good year might make 200 lbs of honey which is roughly 17 gallons. So that gives you an idea how many bees in a hive.
 
mark.staggs said:
My wife's family lives there, and we're going up to visit the weekend before Oshkosh next month. How's the ramp and fuel situation there? I think we're going to leave the Mooney there for the week and borrow/rent a car to drive up to OSH.

The only other time we've flown up to visit we've landed at UGN instead of C81, but C81 is a very short drive from her family.
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As @455 Bravo Uniform mentioned, there's fuel...but it's a stupidly wonky system. Kbuu usually has the cheapest fuel around, although 10c is usually pretty good too. There might be space to store it in the main fbo hangar. Might be able to call ahead and see if that's an option. As was mentioned it's not fenced or gated. But I've never heard of it being an issue. My dad had his first plane parked outside for years with no issue. I would bring your own ropes as I don't know the integrity of the ones there.
 
Love flying into C81. I never stay long enough.
 
Racerx said:
So...think of it like a backpack. Bees go out and collect nectar. Put it in their backpack which adds enzymes. Come back to the hive a put it in the cells. They let the nectar dry down. When they think the moisture content is right, they cap it. Cut the caps with a hot knife. Put the frames in a spinner. Honey drains down. Put a double sieve on a bucket to filter out any cappings. View attachment 117931
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Are these holes manmade or made by the bees? Do you reuse it?

So you still get stung wearing a bee suit? How do you know which bee is the queen? Pretty cool. I need to come visit.
 
mandm said:
Are these holes manmade or made by the bees? Do you reuse it?

So you still get stung wearing a bee suit? How do you know which bee is the queen? Pretty cool. I need to come visit.
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They do make an all plastic frame with cells already built out. Very expensive. They also make plastic frames with embossed hexagonal cells coated with beeswax. The bees build the cells out of that. I use wood frames with beeswax foundation that has the cell embossed in the wax. The plastic they don't always accept it if the wax coating is too thin and will build burr comb. Burr comb leads to drones (males). Male bees don't collect honey. They don't tend to the hive. Drone cells are much larger. Bees are haploid or diploid. Haploid are drones. Diploid are females or workers. The queen bee feels the cell size with her front legs and if it's too large, she won't fertilize the egg and it will be a drone. If it's the right size she'll turn the sperm faucet on and fertilize the egg and you'll have a worker.

Biologically speaking worker bees and queen bees are the same. However, worker bees were fed a different diet before they were hatched. When a hive senses they're queenless they'll look for fresh eggs between 1-3 days old. They'll build several of these cells out in the shape of a peanut giving the pupae more room to grow and feed it only royal jelly which is really just protein. Queens take 16 days to emerge. Workers 21. Drones 24. One queen per hive. On occasion the hive will run out of room and that's when they want to swarm. They'll build a bunch of queen cells. When the first hatches scout bees have already found a suitable home. So half the hive will leave with the old queen to where the scout bees decided. The old hive has the new queen and she will go and tear down all the other queen cells in the hive. She'll take her mating flights a week or so later. Then a week or so after that start laying herself. If you have bad weather during mating flights she won't get mated and will be a drone laying queen. If the bees don't have what they need to make a queen with eggs, you will get laying workers. But these will only be drones and the hive will be angry as hell. Laying workers are almost impossible to stop once they start and you're better off shaking the hive out. A good queen that has been properly bred could live up to 3 years. It's been claimed that one has lived up to 7 years. Workers are 8-12 weeks!

When bees eat honey, the secrete wax. Going away from plastic means they'll accept it and build it out and have a place to put the wax. If you really want to go crazy (which is what I've done)...when commercial beekeeping started they decided to make the cell size slightly larger than nature. Bigger bee means more honey right? Well up sizing the cell from the 4.9mm natural size to 5.3mm commercial size doesn't mean the bee will collect more. Because the body of the bee is larger their lifespan is about 4 weeks less. Like taking a person that should weigh 150lbs and you played God and now they're 250lbs. Plus each frame has 1400 more cells. So more bees that live longer if you go smaller. But the kicker is all commercial package bees that you buy when starting or if replacing from winter dead out are 5.3 mm. If you throw in 4.9mm foundation the bees can't build on it. So you need to regress them down and use 5.1mm foundation.

Once you remove the cappings you put the frames in a spinner. Flings the honey out of the cell. Cell stays intact unless you want to sell cut comb honey. But as long as you didn't damage the wax cells they'll re use it. I'll set everything out after harvest and the bees will clean up any residual honey in the spinner or the cappings and bring it back to their hive.

Still get stung through the suit. Even sometimes stung through the leather gloves.

First and third pictures are the same just zoomed in and took a screenshot of the queen. If you look at the top left of the frame of the first picture you can see a bee slightly larger and dark...thats a drone. The cells that are shiny are packed with nectar they're drying down. The cells not shiny most likely have freshly laid eggs. Eggs look like a tiny white speck. Second picture are a couple queen cells with capped worker brood around them.IMG_20210612_194913927.jpg images.jpeg Screenshot_20210612-204624.jpg
 
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eman1200 said:
I can't even look at the pics. bees freak me out. they're cute little things that freak me the eff out.
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A swarm from last memorial day. The scout bees were kind enough to find the empty hive I had left out. Didn't have to climb a tree to get it down. Done that a few times. The best part about swarms is the old queen is in there somewhere. You know she's healthy if she was so prolific they needed more space. Don't have to wait a month to find out if you've got a mated queen. IMG_20220530_162303797.jpg
 
I know know more about Bee and Egg production…based only on this forum…just amazing information in and thanks. Here’s to Ag exemptions…
 
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Racerx said:
A swarm from last memorial day. The scout bees were kind enough to find the empty hive I had left out. Didn't have to climb a tree to get it down. Done that a few times. The best part about swarms is the old queen is in there somewhere. You know she's healthy if she was so prolific they needed more space. Don't have to wait a month to find out if you've got a mated queen. View attachment 117963
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How long does it take to fill the honeycomb up with honey? Since bees die in 8-12 weeks, do you have dead bees everywhere on the ground? Do you go into the swarm to get the honey or do you wait until they go elsewhere?
 
mandm said:
How long does it take to fill the honeycomb up with honey? Since bees die in 8-12 weeks, do you have dead bees everywhere on the ground? Do you go into the swarm to get the honey or do you wait until they go elsewhere?
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Depends on time of year and if there's a nectar flow and what might be flowing. And if they've got to build the comb or if it's already built out. The standard used today is a 10 frame "deep". Frames are 9-5/8" tall. When theyre working on 8 of the 10 frames, add another deep. When they build that out you stack what they call "supers". Super frames range in size, but standard seems to be 6-5/8". The queen shouldn't lay in the supers. Some people put a queen excluder to prevent her from going up there, but i don't. The bees need about 80-120lbs of honey to make it through winter. The bottom 2 boxes stay on for the winter, and you keep the supers. I have one hive that filled a super in a week and a half. A super when full of honey will weigh about 50 pounds. Or a little more than 4 gallons of honey. A deep when full of honey will be about 65lbs. So yeah, it's a workout working 20 hives if I need to pull boxes to find evidence of a queen. I don't need to find the queen necessarily, just evidence of her that everything is good then on to the next.

The only time you'll see the dead bees is in the winter when its too cold for them to fly far to tidy up the hive or freeze on the return flight.

Once they decide to swarm there's no stopping it. You'll see lots of queen cells. Tearing them down won't help. Giving them more space won't help. They're gonna swarm. Once they swarm they usually cluster in a tree and you can trim the branches and shake them into a hive. The existing hive has 40-50% of the bees with a virgin queen. It takes about 3 weeks for the virgin queen to lay. Then another 3 weeks for the brood to hatch. Its a good idea to make sure they've got space, but they seem to consume honey faster than they bring nectar back where it isn't a problem. We call it honey bound where they've capped everything with honey and no place for the queen to lay. Usually try to swap frames out of the full hives and give it to the weaker ones. Redistribution. Apparently im a socialist. Had no idea.

One of the things I'll do to hopefully prevent swarming..if a hive makes it through winter and is looking strong. Once I know drones are flying, I'll take a frame or 2 of honey. Then find a couple frames with fresh eggs and brood of all stages. Then maybe an empty frame. They'll figure out there's no queen and build there own. It's whats call a nuc...or nucleus colony. And what I did to make it is called a split. A swarm is nature's way of making a split. If it's too cold for drones to fly, the queen won't get mated and she'll be a drone laying queen. There's only a 4-5 day window to get the queen bred. She only breeds once in her life. Which doesn't really bode well for the boys getting any.
 
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Pretty cool.

I read online that some beekeepers cut the wings of the queen to prevent her from leaving.

So the queen lays an eye in each honeycomb one by one? So those honeycombs serve two purposes? One for the baby bees to be born, then for honey? I imagine those are different cycles? How do you get only honey out if the same honeycomb is used for reproduction? I imagine that you need to separate bees eggs etc from the honey or is it all mixed together? Do you serve honey as it comes or how is it processed to the final product?
 
mandm said:
Pretty cool.

I read online that some beekeepers cut the wings of the queen to prevent her from leaving.

So the queen lays an eye in each honeycomb one by one? So those honeycombs serve two purposes? One for the baby bees to be born, then for honey? I imagine those are different cycles? How do you get only honey out if the same honeycomb is used for reproduction? I imagine that you need to separate bees eggs etc from the honey or is it all mixed together? Do you serve honey as it comes or how is it processed to the final product?
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Some people do clip a queens wings. I've never seen any benefit whatsoever. In fact it could injure her and the hive would see that and potentially kill her and supercede her.

Queens will lay in almost every cell available. Each frame has roughly 7000 cells with 3500 per side. Depending on the hives needs the bees will pack honey in, or the queen will lay. Usually you'll see honey on the outside edges and brood in the middle. The second deep box will be mostly brood until September and then they know it's time to pack the honey away for winter and the queen will stop laying almost entirely by mid October. The winter bees then cluster and live much longer than during the flow season

I had one hive last year that had the queen laying quite a bit in the super. I left that super on. But on occasion there might be a couple cells that have brood in them. Uncap the same way with a hot knife and it gets filtered out. Typically the super boxes are the only boxes that get harvested and you try to prevent the queen from laying up there. Either with a queen excluder which is a divider with slits wide enough for the workers to pass through but the queen is too big. Or by making sure she's got room to lay in the bottom 2 boxes.

As far as getting stung with the suit...if it's a little chilly the bees will land on you and stay on you because you're warm and no intent to sting you. Other times they do want to sting you. They don't get under the suit usually, but sting you through it. You can usually tell when a hive is angry either because it's late in the day or possibly queenless. They put their rears in the air. Then sometimes you can smell their alarm pheromone, smells like banana. Then you gotta be a little more careful.
 
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Bees are awesome. Been doing it for years, have no idea what I'm doing. For the most part, I leave them alone and they do pretty well.
 
The stings... normally they'll warn before stinging, because they die after stinging something. They'll either do what RacerX says with the butt in the air while buzzing their wings, or they'll fly around and bump into you.
I've been pretty lucky recently, my hives have been pretty mellow. More interested in getting work done that getting all ****y. No need to smoke them, just be gentle with them.

Finding the unmarked queen can be difficult sometime because they don't like to sit still or be in the open. I tend to not open my hives too much as I don't want to accidentally squish the queen and set the hive back making a new one. I'm still eating the honey from 2 years ago, and give a lot away. Been thinking of making my own wax frames by making a latex mold off of an existing frame. If you have to buy all the stuff, it tends to get a little expensive.
 
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