Winter buzzing of the bees

Honey bees are insects. They do not hibernate in the winter but, they do go dormant in the cold weather. When our temps begin to lower the bees' internal metabolism slows down. When the temps go lower than 45'F their flight muscles move so slowly they cannot fly. The bees spend all their time and energy staying warm. They form a small ball about the size of a melon and use their kinetic energy to keep the center of the ball at or about 93'F. The outer layer of bees will expend their heat and move toward the center while those toward the center work their way to the outside.

During this time they must eat very small amounts of honey to stay alive and produce heat. Honey bees are VERY fastidious, for this reason they do not defecate inside their hive. During the cold days they will hold their waste and wait for a warmer sunny day to fly away from the colony and clean their gullets. In Northern climes beekeepers are concerned with the possibility of their colonies contracting dysentery due to the long periods of time with below freezing temps.

Our weather here in North Carolina brings us periodic relief to cold temperatures during the winter months. Christmas weekend we had 6'+ inches of snow fall here in Granville County but, today the temps at 53'F+ and the forecast is for temps above 65'F for tomorrow.

The video was taken this morning as the temp was reading 51'F. The bees are flying away from the hive, clearing their gullets, exercising their muscles and removing any trash from the hive. In January, they might even venture out and find a wee-bit of the black pollen from the red oak.

BEEKEEPERS: I have one question for you.

Do you "take" all the honey off your hives for packaging and feed your bees HFCS(high fructose corn syrup) or sugar syrup or do you leave honey on hives for your bees to eat?

As you plan your spring garden think of the honey bees.

As you plan your spring garden think of the honey bees.

Warm & cuddly: The winter "bee ball" keeps honey bees warm through cold North Carolina months.

Warm & cuddly: The winter "bee ball" keeps honey bees warm through cold North Carolina months.

We all learned together...

On Monday I was invited to spend the morning at the St. James Day School in Raleigh.
I spent part of my morning teaching 48 young students about honey bee, the food cycle and caring for God's creation. By the feedback, we all learned together.

Interesting facts about the honey bee

*Bees have a body temperature of 92-93 degrees Fahrenheit in their nest, no matter what the outside temperature is.

*A honeybee would have to fly about 55,000 miles to bring in enough nectar to make one pound of honey.

*It would take a honeybee approximately 1,600 round trips (hive to flower and back to hive again) in order to produce one ounce of honey.

*Honeybees will fly as far as 8 miles from their nest in search of food, at speeds of up to 15 miles per hour.

*The brain of a worker honeybee is about one cubic millimeter, approximately the size of the head of a pin.

*Honeybees’ wings stroke 11,400 times per minute and cause a buzzing noise.

*A honeybee would have to visit 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey.

*A honeybee worker visits more than 2,000 flowers on a busy day.

*The average honeybee worker makes 1/12 teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.

*Honeybees are the only insects that produce food for humans.

*Queen bees will lay as many as 2,000 eggs on a good day, an average of one every 45 seconds.

*Honey has been used for thousand of years as a dressing to help heal wounds.

*In ancient Egypt, people valued honey so highly that it was often used to pay debts.

*In ancient Greece, people offered honey as a tribute to the gods and to spirits of the dead.

*When the first European settlers arrived in North America, they used honey to make cement and furniture polish and to preserve fruits.

*On a hot summer day, the worker bees keep the hive cool inside by fanning their wings.

*The cells of a honeycomb tilt slightly upward so the honey won't spill out.

*At the turn on the 20th century there were more than 5 million bee hives in the USA, by 2006 that number had fallen to less than 2.5 million.

*Almond pollination creates an almond crop that adds over 1.5 billion dollars of revenue to California. It takes 2 million hives of honey bees to pollinate this crop annually.

*There can be as many as 60,000 bees in a colony during the nectar harvest.

*Flower nectar is 80% water, while cured honey must have a water content of less than 18.6% water to stop fermentation.

*Honey bees have over 60 scent receptors in the antennae and more in their feet.

More little buzzers...

My assistant/associate/friend Kevin is holding a cage full of bees removed from the ceiling. He is holding about eight lbs of honey bees. How did the bees get in the cage? Bee removal secret.
This is honey comb in its natural state. The bees tend to draw comb about this long and this deep. In a wall it can look more like sheets of comb flowing down the wall. In the hollow of a tree, it can take on a more rounded shape.

This is a ceiling cavity after we have removed the bees and the comb. It is almost the same size as a man made wooden bee hive. The outside edge extends out into the soffit or roof edge of the building. We scrape away all the wax and paint the interior to cover the smell of bees wax. The cavity is then filled with insulation. Later, we will work on the outside trim board to discourage bees coming inside in the future.

Second colony of little buzzers

We removed the bees from colony number one this morning and moved on to locate the next. This photo shows the second colony in the ceiling of the same room. The darker comb is actually left over from a colony that did not survive. This colony is probably a swarm colony from the "mother" colony in the building. We will probably locate it very soon.

I found the little buzzers...

My company has been hired by a church in Franklin County to remove several colonies of bees living in the building.
After several hours of checking walls and ceilings, we found one of the colonies. We opened a small hole in the ceiling to begin removal. Tomorrow, we will take the ceiling down in this room and remove the bees and the comb.

Oh, the sweet, sticky, gooey mess of honey

Most of the week has been cloudy and rainy. From Tuesday night until early this morning we have had three inches of rain. My construction project for this week was outside, so I decided to rob a few bees. One of my hives sits on my front porch and is out of the rain. I took three supers and extracted honey this morning. The photo is a great look at raw honey. Just out of the comb and still full of wax, pollen, bee wings, sand and grit. After filtering through a mesh screen it will be bottled and ready for the Wake Forest Farmer's Market on Saturday. Come out and join us in Wake Forest from 8am til noon!

The Celebration Continues...a side note.

Smooching honeybees....nothing like a little kiss from the one you love.

Here in the Chalmers family, not only do we love each other, but we really LOVE the honeybees...

How sweet the sting...

One of the traits of the Africanized Honey Bee(AHB) is its aggressive behavior. The slightest noise or justling can cause a stinging frenzy. Huge numbers of AHBs will react to the attack/sting phermone in the air and sting anything and everything within as much as 1/2 mile around the hive. A news report from Mexico will give you insight into the character of this "freak" of nature.

At this time N.C. has been able to keep the african apis DNA at bay. If we are not vigilant, that could easily change. The NCDA and research at NCSU are two of the tools being used to unravel this threat to apis mellifera. Should the AHB species invade the gentle hardworking honey bee of N.C., it would drastically alter the apiary hobby and business climate of the state. There would be hundreds maybe even thousands of hobby bee keepers that would abandon the art of bee keeping. This would reduce the number of bees pollinating in this state by hundreds of millions of visits to flowering plants. At some point, this could influence the quality of fruits and vegetables we consume.

Haagen Dazs does the bees...

Let me tell you this. The honey bee population of USAmerica is sick.
Without honey bees our vegetable and fruit outlook gets very slim.
You will have mushrooms, bananas, potatoes and tomatoes. Those four species self pollinate or are pollinated by the bumble bee. That means, that if your want to eat more than these four things plus grain, you better start praying for the bees and supporting your local bee keeper by buying local sustainable honey and hive products.

I also want you to load your freezer with Haagen-Dazs ice cream. This producer of premium ice cream understands that with no honey bees, they will be out of business. They know that if fresh strawberries are $10.00/lb wholesale, no one could afford a pint of there treat. As a responsible corporate partner, they have donated $250,000.00 to honey bee research. They have promised more and are encouraging more companies to do the same. Visit their website and send them a thank you. You also need to check out there new campaign because, Haagen-Dazs loves the honey bees.

Busy for a Friday...

Off to teach an American Government class today and then on to check on several construction projects. The weather has been temperate for January thus, it has been great to be outside. For those who love honey, I am working hard to planning for the spring honey flow. If all goes well, we should have an additional half a million bees flying before April.

Tupelo Honey

If you have never consumed this nectar straight from the throne of God, you do not know what you are missing. If you happen to live in the Triangle and are interested...I have about 40lbs on hand at the moment. Van Morrison knew what he was talking about regarding passion and honey.

Mystery and Progress

Thursday evening I returned home from a long and hot day to find my mailbox and post destroyed. Being in a rural area this is common. Farmers pulling wide and large machinery would not notice hitting a wood post. It would shatter by momentum of mass alone. A state contractor was mowing the shoulder on Thursday afternoon, an "accident" could have taken place with the large mowing arm. The last possibility would be a wayward auto. Here, the ingestion of "demon rum" would be needed as we live on a very straight road just after a four- way-flashing-light intersection. If it was a car or pickup, they have a ding in the paint this morning.

Saturday morning I was up and out early to purchase the needed materials for new mailbox and post. The "local" bigbox is about nine miles down the road in Henderson. I was in and out in ten minutes and my pocket was $91.00 lighter. I hate paying $91.00 dollars when I make a mistake, it hurts worse when there is an unknown reason for my spending. The new post will be bright safety red with a black jumbo size mailbox. The brass address numbers from the previous post survived. If you are ever in the area, sitting at the intersection of Salem and Huntsboro Rd, turn north, we are the driveway with the bright red mailbox post with the big black mailbox. Drop by for a visit, we will add some water to the soup;)

Just for your information. Kiddliwink Apiary will be selling honey, bees wax candles and honey based soap at the Wake Forest, NC Farmers Market starting Saturday, August 18. Come join us, get a sample and support local sustainable farms.

(HT: To Shelley for getting us in the farmers market)

Liquid Gold

Saturday was extracting day. Early in the morning I went out to check my stores. It was eight supers with over 400lbs of spring honey. I knew it would take lots of work and most of the day to move the honey from the comb to storage buckets in my kitchen. The eight supers were stacked on each other to form a tower that was almost six feet high. I rocked the super tower to check the weight and decided it would be to much to move by dolly. We moved them one box at a time into the kitchen. I then removed the wax cappings with a special electric knife and placed the frames in the extractor; a quick spin and the liquid gold flew into the barrel, down the sides to the convex bottom. From there a "gate" on the front of the barrel is opened and the honey flows into a mesh strainer lined with cheese cloth. This straining will remove any bits of dirt, pollen, or bee parts left behind. The strained honey is stored in a five gallon bucket until needed for jarring. The process was repeated again and again until I worked through all the supers. My wife Shelley worked along with me as we processed the honey from comb to people food.

Along the way, you get honey on your hands and on the floor and on the work surfaces. As we would finish with a super, we would clean a bit and move on. At this time Kiddliwink Apiary is a micro-company, so we use the equipment that is on hand. That means we have an old two frame hand crank extractor, an ancient electric capping knife and the rest of the processing utensils come from our kitchen. For all of these reasons it takes a bit of time. By 4:30pm I was almost finished.

I stepped out on our back porch to move the last two supers. I removed a cover, pushed back a plastic bag and saw hundreds of bees. Several hundred bees had found an opening after I had tilted the super stack earlier in the day. I now had two supers with 60-70lbs of honey and two hundred or more bees in my house. I had visions of bees flying all over and the family being stung. I went to my bee equipment, grabbed my smoker, filled it with wood chips and started a good fire. I closed the smoker and puffed the bellows until I had good rich smoke pouring out. I was going to smoke the bees in the top box down to the bottom, grab the top super, extract it and do the same for the remaining box. There were two problems with my plan: 1. The smoker would fill the house with rich wood smoke. 2. The last box would hold ALL the bees, still in the house.

I then called for Shelley to find a spray water bottle and a fly swatter. I sprayed the bees as they climbed to the top and Shelley swatted them. I did NOT want to hurt these girls, but I had no options. Shelley was a trooper. She entered the fight wearing a light summer dress and a pair of flip-flops. I would squirt and she would swat. After a 10 minute fight I grabbed the top box and moved to the kitchen. Shelley stayed behind and continued the fight. After it was all said and done, many of the bees ended up "escaping" and we worked to shoo them outside. By 6pm we were finished with the "hard" work. Gravity and time would complete the straining. At this time we have five gallons still straining from the extractor. We could "rush" this along by heating the honey, rendering it thinner...it would strain faster, but it changes the flavor and kills many of the natural nutrients and immune builders in the honey.

All that to say this, Kiddliwink Apiary now has spring honey in a limited supply. If you are in the Triangle call us at 919-690-8487. If you are in another part of the world, leave a comment.
Pricing is very simple, $12US per quart, $7US per pint and $4US per 1/2 pint + shipping and handling.

FOLLOW-UP: Our first sell of the season was yesterday, July 25. A friend purchased 1/2 gallon of spring honey.

Extractors, grease and blackberries.

Now that I have over 350 lbs of honey collected, it needs to move from the honey comb to a jar for sale and consumption. Beekeepers use centrifugal force to remove the honey from the wax comb.

The "gadget" used looks and works like this. Mine has been sitting for a while and was filthy! I removed the hand crank and pinion gear and loaded the barrel and cages into the truck and headed to town to a car wash. I plugged about $4.00 worth of quarters into the hopper and sprayed with every cleaning agent available. As I was returning home, I spotted the Lyon Farms produce stand with a big sign..."Blackberries". I then knew what would be the best part of Saturday night's supper. I picked three over flowing pints of huge, ripe, succulent NC blackberries and headed on home.

I unloaded the extractor and rinsed it thoroughly with fresh well water. I scrubbed any stubborn spots with an organic cleaner. I then rinsed the entire barrel and cages in white vinegar, and rinsed once again with lots of fresh water. I then let the whole contraption air dry and then began reassembly. Each moving part was rubbed with a very light coat of food grade clear grease and each bolt was torqued to tightness. By the time I finished all this, I knew there would be no honey in jars this day. I then moved on to plans for supper as my wife was out of town until early evening.

Chicken was on the menu. I cut four pounds of chicken tenderloins in half. Thinly sliced a medium Vidalia Onion and gathered a generous hand full of fresh basil, oregano and cilantro from the herb collection that grows on our window sills. I also passed by the fridge and grabbed a bottle of teriyaki sauce. I placed a layer of chicken in the bottom of a dutch oven, seasoned with sea salt and fresh cracked black pepper, sprinkled on 1/3 of the chiffonade of fresh herbs.
I repeated the process until I had about 31/2 layers. I then added 3/4 cup of teriyaki to the dutch oven. I cooked the chicken until it was 150 degrees internal. Served over steamed broccoli it is a quick and awesome meal. Next time, I will steam rice to add to the bottom of each bowl at serving.

The dessert was blackberry cobbler. I wanted a quick and easy cobbler without having to make a crust. I looked through several cookbooks and at FoodTV, but did not find a recipe I liked. As usual, when faced with this, I decided to "wing it". The crowd thought what I came up with was great and I plan on a serving for supper/snack when I finish this post. The recipe follows.

Jimmy's Quick and Dirty Dump Fruit Cobbler.

2.5 cups All purpose flour
3 cups Sugar
2.5 tsp Baking Powder
1.5 tsp Salt
3 Tbsp Cornstarch and enough water to make a slurry
1 tsp Pure vanilla or one vanilla bean split and scraped
3 Tbsp Fresh lime juice
1 cup Butter
1 cup Water
Approx 2 cups Buttermilk
1.5 qrts Blackberries or other fresh fruit.


Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.

Place butter in 3-4 qrt dutch oven or baking dish. Set in oven until butter melts and slightly browns. Watch CAREFULLY as butter will burn easily. Remove from oven and set aside.

Place water and 2 cups sugar into microwave safe bowl or large measuring cup. Heat until sugar dissolves and syrup boils, stirring occasionally. BE CAREFUL!! Pour HOT syrup over fruit and allow to macerate. After about 10 mins add lime juice and cornstarch slurry, mix.

Combine flour, remaining sugar, baking soda and salt in a mixing bowl. Add one cup buttermilk and vanilla..mix. Add enough butter milk until you have a thick batter...about like a cake batter. It may take more than two cups buttermilk.

Pour batter into buttered pan. Spread to fill entire pan. Dump fruit and syrup mixture on top and spread. Place in oven. Bake covered 35 mins. Uncover and cook until crust is golden brown. Remove from oven and let rest for 10-15 mins before service.


I could not wait until I finished the post. As I was writing about the butter in the oven my lovely wife delivered a supper size serving to me at my computer. Life is so good!!

Harvest time

Last Friday I went to Durham to help my father harvest a small honey crop. As we worked we inspected the hives. Looking in a new hive I could not find the queen, nor could I find the evidence of a queen. If you cannot find the lady, usually, you can see her work. New eggs, larvae or capped brood will testify to her presence and hard work. Nothing was there, there was plenty of pollen, some new honey , but no brood. I was concerned that this new hive was queenless. We completed our harvest on another hive and ended the day. We called a queen breeder in the area and ordered two queens.

Saturday morning I made my way to Orange County and Busy Bee Apiary to transport my ladys.
I drove back to my father's home and we opened up the new hive to add a new queen. We found a frame full of young larvae. In my haste on Friday I had neglected to move the frames into sunlight for a better look. The shade had caused me to overlook the eggs in the bottom of many cells. I may not have seen the queen, but I know had evidence she was around. I now had an extra queen. My father and I drove to my bee yard, took a frame of brood from three hives, two frames of honey from another two and dropped the queen in with bees. The nuc is sitting on my porch, I'll open it up this coming Saturday to take a look. While we were in my yard I decided to harvest my honey. After heavy lifting it appears I have around 300lbs of honey to bottle and label over the next few days.

We then took the extra queen to the farm of Mr. Philip Barker. He is the last of many here in N.C. Mr Barker is the last African-American dairy farmer here in the state. It is a monicure I am sure he would be proud was not his. It is important for all of us to keep and protect the family farmer. White, black, yellow, red, we must have farmers and their families farming for future generations. Mr Barker is now trying his hand at bees. I am attempting to teach him what little I know. He had a hive with a very weak queen. The hive now has a new, young and hopefully hard working queen to produce for Mr Barker.

By next week at this time, I hope we have bottles full of beautiful honey. The photo is just one view of the great work our bees have produced this spring.

Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz goes the bees, hopefully

These ladies are hard at work. They are gathering pollen and nectar to take back to the colony for food. While they gather, they spread pollen from one blossom or bloom to another. This work is very important as the pollen they spread will produce fruits and vegetables for your plate. This spring we have a mystery going on with the bees. Colony Collapse Disorder could effect the quality and abundance of food crops this summer. Without the diligent work of these ladies, your diet will consist of grain and water. Read this and pray for the honey bees.