I really didn’t intend to get into bee keeping! My husband, Josh, is the one who studied up on bees, built his own hive and truly has a passion for them. I always say that he’s at least 50% hippie and he likes having this eco-friendly hobby.
Top Bar Bee Hive
Josh built his first hive in 2015, it was a top-bar hive which means that the bees build their honey comb on bars that span the hive box.
After he built this hive, he bought the bees from a local honey bee farm called Bee Weaver. Josh bought a “nuc”, a partially developed colony with an established queen and usually includes some comb built up.
Another option is to buy a package of bees, these can come via mail. The package contains worker bees then a queen needs to be introduced to form a colony. Interestingly, a queen must be introduced slowly so that the colony can get used to her scent and not think of her an an intruder. The queen comes in a candy cage, by the time the worker bees eat through the candy, they have had enough time to get used to their queen and accept her as part of their hive.
The bees we purchased were Italian and bread to be more docile. Our kids were even able to go right up to our hive and check them out! Possibly future bee keepers?
Unfortunately with this hive, a piece of honeycomb broke off one of the bars and blocked the entrance opening, causing his hive to die. 🙁
Langstroth Bee Hive
Not to be discouraged, Josh’s started a new hive, this time he went with a Langstroth hive. This hive works well, it is setup with a brood box on the bottom. There workers create honey comb and this is where the queen lives. She spends her days making baby bees (brood) in each of the tiny comb openings. There is a mesh top, or queen excluder, for the brood box. This keeps the queen in the lower area of the hive. Then another box, a super, sits on top of the brood box. Worker bees also make honeycomb in the super but since the queen can’t enter, the comb contains just honey and no brood.
In this hive setup, the bees are making their honey comb on plastic frames that fit inside the boxes. Bees have this amazing ability to know when honey is at the perfect moisture content, once it’s ready, the bees build a cap to close up each cell of the honeycomb. The honey can ferment if it is harvested too soon. When harvesting honey from this hive, the frames from the super are removed and the honeycomb is scraped off and then filtered for use.
The Langstroth hive that Josh bought was made by Paradise Honey and is called a Bee Box, they can be found here. The Bee Box hive is made of food grade, extra hardened, expanded polystyrene. It comes ready to paint. You can see that our youngest got to help pick the bright color!
Flow Frame Bee Hive
Josh then learned about a hive system call a Flow Hive, found on Amazon here (https://amzn.to/2Kps9yt). These are Langstroth hives except that the super is equipped with a mechanism to drain the honey from the frames without having to remove the frame or the honeycomb. These hives are not cheap but Josh found a scratch & dent hive and transferred his bees to his new Flow Hive.
Another option would be to add the Flow Hive Super (https://amzn.to/2NPye9A) to the brood box that he already had.
Six months after setting up his Flow Hive, Josh was checking it to see if the honeycomb was ready for harvest. He was stung and unfortunately had a fairly severe reaction. He won a ride in an ambulance and a doctor’s recommendation that he no longer work with our hive.
So, long story short, this is how I became (or I am learning to become) a bee keeper. We decided to go ahead and keep our hive for now and I am learning how to care for it. I got to start our with the fun part and harvest honey!
Honey Harvest
There are lots of videos on the specifics of extracting honey from a Flow Hive. In summary, it’s as simple as inserting a metal tool into the box to open up the comb. This allows the honey to drain out through a spout and into my drink dispenser turned honey collector.
Here is an up close photo of the honey flowing out of one of the frames. I could have removed honey from all 7 frames at once but since I was just figuring this out, I started with one frame.
After harvesting all the frames, I ended up with a little more than 2-1/2 gallons of honey. There is still honey remaining in the brood box which is enough for the bees to use during the winter.
As you can see, I am not fully equipped with my own gear. I used my husband’s jacket, gloves and veil. I did get one sting in my leg which was’t too bad. Having the bees buzz right up to me takes a little getting used to. I think a suit my size is in order. Since we don’t have to remove frames, this harvest method is much calmer and less disruptive to the hive. When it comes time to take the super off of the brood box for inspection, the bees will not like that nearly as much.
Bottling the Honey
There were a few bees in the honey. They could no longer fly because their wings were wet, so I fished them out and put them outside. Once dry they could return to the hive. It worked well to set up my beverage dispenser over a pitcher that had a fine mesh strainer on top.
I made sure to test the moisture content of the honey. I wanted to make sure it was less than 20% moisture, so that it was safe for long term storage. We measured 18% moisture with our refractometer, purchased on Amazon at this link.
Finally I poured my honey into some pretty bottles and added fun labels with our name on them. I was able to design these on the Avery website and had them shipped to me. These will make great holiday gifts for our teachers, neighbors and friends! I will be sure to update this post as I continue to delve into this new bee keeping adventure!
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