Portage River Farm

We have actually had bees back on the farm since our package of replacement bees arrived a month ago. The problem is that they have been utterly neglected as we focused all of our attention on the chickens. In the last week, I finally managed to devote a few hours to getting them a little better situated for the summer nectar gathering season.

The bees had been installed in a single deep brood chamber by a friend while I was working in Mexico. The brood box has space for ten frames of comb. We provided them with four frames that were already full of honey from last year's bees to carry them over until the major nectar flows began.

The bees and their new queen settled in and began raising new brood to increase their numbers for foraging the summer nectar. They also began flying all around the farms in the area collecting nectar and pollen. All of this they crammed into the six remaining frames of comb.

The danger of letting bees get too crowded is that they will decide that they don't have enough room. In that case they will create a new queen and swarm out of the hive in search of a bigger place to live. They naturally do this anyway as their way of reproducing and spreading but the tight living conditions makes it more likely. We would have been left with a largely empty hive and our $65 worth of bees would have lived for the season in the wild and then perished in the cold of next winter.

Having these dangers in mind, I called up a beekeeping acquaintance in the area and arranged to purchase some sheets of foundation from him. The box that I needed to use to expand the hive was still full of honey from last year and had old, dark combs that needed to be replaced. A few evenings ago I uncapped the old combs, spun the honey out using our centrifugal extractor, removed the old wax comb and put the new foundation in the frames. In the fading twilight, I placed the newly prepared second brood chamber onto the hive thus doubling the space available to the bees.

In a few days I will need to suit up and have a look at how things are going in the hive. With a new package of bees, there is no way to know the quality of the queen without doing a close inspection inside the hive to see what she is doing. Hopefully I will find that she has moved up into the second chamber and is busily laying eggs in a nice concentrated pattern on the new comb. The new brood will greatly increase the size of the hive and their honey gathering capacity.

Having finally completed the task of setting up the new box on the hive, I headed back inside to clean up the sticky mess I had made. I filtered and bottled the honey. Some of it was sold recently to friends at work which marked the first time we had received any money for something produced on the farm. The $12 wasn't much, but it's a beginning!

The remaining task on my plate is to melt down the old wax from the combs that I removed. I can either sell it back to the beekeeping supply store for use in manufacturing new foundation or I can keep it around the house for some other use. Of course, before I had a chance to do anything with it our dog managed to steal and eat one of the honey-sweet combs and get sick all over the house!