Honey Terrior

Eating most honey is just plain yummy but my mission is to turn you into honey connoisseurs!

Honey, like wine, has terrior.  There are lots of formal definitions of this but really they mean it has a sense of place. Honey also tastes like a terrior at a specific time too. Stick with me here. Different wild flower honeys taste different depending on where they were made but also when.

Spring honey is always the lightest of the year no matter where you harvest in the northern hemisphere.  Fall honey is the darkest.

Here's how you can taste honey.  Put a small amount in your mouth - half a teaspoon or so. Roll it around in your mouth so it reaches your body temperature. Slowly, slowly swallow it. Breath in through your nose and out your mouth.

Spring or summer wildflower honey is the one you want for toast or in tea. Try it drizzled over goat cheese or fruit. Generally this honey is floral and sweet. Our honey also has a strong after taste of Black Locust.

Fall wild flower honey is darker and bolder. This is the honey you to bake with as its assertive flavor will stand up to other flavors. Try this in apple pie or in a honey cake. Our fall honey has a strong maple like flavor and an earthy finish.

Varietal honey is honey that is made from a single type of flower like Orange Blossom or Blueberry. This is challenging to make as a beekeeper and often commands higher prices as well. Aside from taste, some varietal honeys will crystallize at different rates and may have different antibacterial properties.

If you are interested in a formal honey tasting, let me know. I have led them at the Millbury Public Library in the past. If you are not local to me, I would recommend Red Bee. Marina sells a mini honey tasting kit.

Give Bees a Chance...

Give Bees a Chance.  That's what is on the back of the colorful shirts you can see here at the most recent outdoor meeting of the Worcester County Beekeepers Meeting. This one was in Sutton and it was a nice hot day with clear weather.

Ken Warchol, Bee Inspector and fabulous teacher is showing how to do an assessment for mites.  This isn't for the faint of heart or the casual beekeeper, this is serious science. The idea is that you should test to determine if you you need to treat for mites by sampling about 150 bees from a hive. Ken demonstrated the sampling in a lovely and elegant fashion. Ken scoops just the right number of bees into alcohol and the rest remain undisturbed.

Me, well, lovely and elegant my sampling is not. I shake a frame of bees, nurse bees specifically, into a wash tub and scoop them with a measuring cup.  One cup of bees is about 150.  I knew you'd want to know.

After you have soaked the bees in the alcohol, you strain out the bees and pour the liquid through a coffee filter. Then you count. I love data!

Look closely at the filter. Really closely... there are three mites on the paper. You should treat if you have more than eight or nine mites. This sample is post treatment.  If you treat early in the year, you should retest. 

So how did my bees do? Our girls were fine. We had a good but not crazy high mite load in August so I treated. I did treat all three hives even though it might not have been necessary to treat the split hive (Cerulean's hive). They haven't really had enough time to get high mite levels. Nonetheless, I treated all the hives since they are in close proximity to the other hives.

Treating for mites can take many forms. We use formic acid and this is normally found in a hive but in low levels. We want to blast those nasty mites away from the bees. Blast we did and there are two potential consequence to this treatment in addition to fewer mites. First, and I quote here, the queen will have a  renewed  vigor in laying. That is exactly what happened in two hives. The queens are laying like crazy.

And second, you can lose a queen. That is exactly what is happening in one hive. The queen didn't die from the treatment but it messed with her something fierce. Her laying pattern is terrible and there aren't many larvae. It isn't a laying worker, it is a queen but a bad one. And the workers know it.  They are ready to toss her to the curb. The new queen should be out in the next week and I already have a great name for her. Just wait!

Finally, thank you to everyone who has purchased honey, hand cream, beeswax, and honey sticks. This helps to support the bees. We are not sold out, but there isn't much summer honey at the moment in our store. If you want some, drop me a line. Fall honey, hopefully, will be on the way in another month.

In my next post, I will give you some of my favorite uses of honey.  And it isn't just eating.

Honey!

We extracted honey over the weekend. There are lots of bears, glass jars and a few big jugs.

 We love the  new extractor. It is shiny and works hard but is gentle to the wax on the frames. 

I've had a lot of folks ask how we get the honey out. I use a heated knife most of the time and cut the caps off. This wax is the cleanest wax in the hive and I use it in hand cream and lip balm.

 Once the caps are off, the frame goes in the extractor. Then it goes for a spin, flinging the honey off the frame.   

 Sometimes the knife misses a few cells and we have to use scraper. This does the trick but it tends to leave a lot of damage on the frame that the bees have to repair. And it is more time consuming. 

 Finally the honey comes out of the extractor. While we don't filter our honey as that requires heating, we do strain it so that any stray bits of wax or bee wings are not in the honey. Fine particles of wax and pollen do make it into the honey. If you get the honey super fresh, you can find a whitish foam on the top. That is the wax and bubbles. 

 This is a light amber honey that captures some beautiful floral notes. It has the same strong black locust finish that is characteristic of our honey.  You can taste the summer sun in every drop.  This honey is ideal for toast, sore throats, and drizzling over fruit. For those of you who have a preference for a darker fall honey, we do intend to harvest again this fall.

Due to some increases in costs this year, our price have gone up a bit, but we have a limited number of larger containers that will provide the high-use customer with a lower per pound price.

1 lb bear or glass - $8

2 lb jars $15

5 lb jar only $35

New Toys

We got a new extractor yesterday since our old one had a broken handle and often felt like it was going to shake apart on us. The new one from Maxant made right here in Massachusetts is a real thing of beauty. Nicely constructed and comes in a nice big box.

So for those of you who are interested in honey, we plan to extract honey in August when we return from vacation and kids are home from camps.

And in case you were wondering, on a rainy summer day, a box is still the perfect toy.

All hail the new queen

Now that isn't much to see, but that is the new queen. I've never used this kind of queen cage before but it works in a similar way to the wooden ones. I am holding the sugar plug that the bees will eat out to release her. 

I put her on top of bees I stole from Serendipity. More on that in a minute. I put in three frames of brood and the nurse bees. Since we were down a hive, I had a few frames of honey and pollen already so she is starting with quite a nice stash of resources.

We've been debating on what to call her. My daughter says Blue. My son says name her after an Amazon queen. What do you say?

Serendipity has been a busy girl. There is a LOT of brood in her hive and she's laying in both the top and bottom supers in good quantity. I am concerned that there is a bit of patchiness to her pattern and that could mean that the bees are going to supercede her. I did find a supercedure cell but it was dry. I also found a ton of queen cups or "we are thinking we might swarm but we aren't sure" cells along the bottom. These bees are really going strong and they are not sure where to go.

Taking the frames of bees and brood should give them more room for babies and over the next few weeks they can make a decision about their queen.

Sunshine is doing nicely. She is laying in her usual upside down pattern typical of her and her mother. If this pattern plays out as in the past, we only have a few more weeks of this craziness.

Go bees!

It's that time of year...

If you are a beekeeper, it is time to record bee losses at beeinformed.org. This is a quick survey about the number, location, and state of the hives you had in the fall and still have now. This survey is not a true scientific survey but gives a us a good picture of the state of the health of our bee populations in the US. At their website, you can see the results of previous year's surveys.

Record Losses

This year is shaping up to be a record year of bee loss in this region. Many beekeepers have lost significant numbers of hives this winter and large numbers just in the last month. It may not be just here in New England either. Every spring, beekeepers in the US participate in a survey of hive loss and I am set to add my numbers April 1.

I am happy to report that our bees are doing fine. Both hives looked excellent yesterday. I am a bit concerned about the amount of poop on the outside of one of the hives. That this the brown splotches you see in the picture above. I am going to seek advice on some essential oils to feed them to help them deal with some gut parasites that might be bothering them.

They were also bringing in pollen. In the picture above you can see yellow pollen and that is probably from some early willows and skunk cabbage. The honey comb is what I supplemented them with - honey that was stored in the hive we combined. The white in the lower left is a sugar patty. Getting nervous after hearing about starving bees, I panicked and added sugar just in case. This is like going to the drive thru - it will keep you going for a short time, but lacks nutrients. So as soon as night time temps get a bit warmer, I will start feeding them some honey.

One thing that really made me happy was the temperament of both hives. They were calm and didn't bother much with me. I did veil because bees in the chill air can be unpredictable, but they were both really calm and focus. That is a good sign that the queens are in good condition and brood rearing is going well.

Go bees!