How to predict the honey flow

Posted on August 2, 2018 by Ron Miksha

Our friend Jacques, inspecting our hives a few years ago.

This post will be disappointing to anyone hoping for a quick and easy way to predict what the honey flow will bring. There is no substitute for experience. It may take years to gain the knowledge you’ll need because every season is different. You will eventually learn to read the tea leaves – but even then, the tea will often be murky.

Nevertheless, we have to be able to make plans. What’s an ‘average’ honey crop? How many supers do we need? When do we remove the last boxes before fall/winter? Although there can be wild fluctuations around the average, we gain some sense for what to expect. You don’t need to rely only on your own experiences- beekeepers are notoriously helpful and willing to share what they know. I’ve had commercial honey farms in six different areas over the years (Appalachian Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin, grasslands southern Saskatchewan, parkland central Saskatchewan, mountain foothills in Alberta) and I am very grateful for the advice which smarter and older beekeepers have given me. I would have never lived long enough to learn beekeeping in six vastly disparate geographies. I needed the help of locals.

However, for predicting the future, I’ve found a useful and unexpected tool. A hive scale. An average hive, sitting on an old fashioned platform scale, can tell you a lot. If you keep records of the daily change in weight, you will have real-time data to guide you. If you keep those records for a few years, you can spot trends which will help you predict your crops.

The scale hive can give you some interesting and useful information. What’s the most honey your colony might make in one day? In our area, it’s 35 pounds. That’s if you have enough boxes piled on the hive. When is the peak flow? For us, on average, it’s late July. What’s the longest dearth period in the summer? In Alberta, a mid-summer dearth is rare but we’ve had up to ten days of cold windy rainy weather when (according to the scale hive) the bees lost a pound a day. What’s the earliest date the bees had a substantial flow (gaining over ten pounds a day)? Here, it was June 22nd. What’s the most honey your hive might store in a year (my scale hive gained 441 pounds one year) and the least (13 pounds – a year with a severe drought). Those last two numbers help you know how many supers you’ll need and how much money to put away for a bad year.  Individual results may vary. That’s why you should consider setting up your own scale hive.

Last week, I wrote a short piece for the United Beekeepers of Alberta Council. (If you are an Alberta beekeeper – commercial, sideline, hobby – you may participate in this new organization!)  I am repeating my original article below. It will be most useful to beekeepers on the North American plains and prairies, but it illustrates how scale hive results can be useful for long-term planning and crop predictions.  Here’s the story from the UBAC Newsletter:

What to expect in August in Alberta, Canada

By late-July, you’ve harvested some honey. But you’re hoping for more. The first cut of hay has been baled, canola is fading, but you still expect more honey. It’s not yet August, so you’re probably right. How optimistic can you be?

Over the years, I’ve kept a few hives on scales, weighing colonies each evening for nine years. That was in the southern prairies. Meanwhile, a close friend kept a scale hive going in the parklands, at the northern edge of farming, for seventeen years. These are quite different areas, but there are some similarities in production. During June and September, the scale hives usually gained a little weight – on average, about 20 pounds in June; 10 in September. July was almost always the best month, but occasionally, in both locations, August produced the biggest part of the crop. Here’s a chart with the actual numbers, averaged over the years:

From these data, you might expect between two-thirds and three-quarters of your crop to arrive in July. Between the two locations, north and south, I have 26 years of records. Only three times was a bigger part of the crop gathered during August. You might extract most of your honey in August, but a lot of that was produced during July. Using a scale hive, you can actually tell when the bees gathered it – mostly, in July.

How you use this information depends on your management goals. If you don’t like to feed bees for winter, then you must start to reduce the number of honey boxes significantly in early August, forcing more honey into the brood nest and leaving more stores for winter. If you are concerned about wintering your hives on canola and/or fall honey and want to maximize your crop, then keep the supers piled on.

Of course, there’s only one place to put honey supers if you want the bees to fill them – and that’s not in a corner of the shed. If the flow ends on August 10th, as sometimes happens, it doesn’t take much energy to haul empties back to the shop. If the flow continues strongly, the extra space helps keep the brood nest open for the queen to lay late-summer eggs. That brood will become the bees you’ll see next April. Many Alberta beekeepers remember September 2007 when second-bloom alfalfa, good moisture, and hot weather gave an enormous late flow. We raced around in mid-September, sticking three completely empty drawn frames into the middle of each brood nest to give the queen room. Folks who wintered with plugged brood nests lost their bees.

Besides preventing a jammed brood nest during August, extra supers inspire the bees to collect more nectar. If honey supers are more than 80% full, bees slow down gathering, even if nectar is abundant. If you stack a bunch of empties on the hive, the bees keep working hard if the weather and flowers cooperate.

Dr Don Peer,
Nipawin beekeeper
(Photo: David Miksa)

One of the legendary beekeepers of western Canada, Don Peer, a Nipawin beekeeper with an entomology PhD, once told us at a bee meeting, “If I were king of the world, I’d make a law that every beekeeper had to own one more super for each hive of bees.”  Bees need comb space to hold wet nectar. Dr Peer was astonishingly successful. At first, he ran two-queen colonies from packages. According to Dr Eva Crane (from her book Making a Beeline), Don Peer’s hives made up to 40 pounds a day. I saw his outfit and stood on the back of a truck to reach the top supers. Such tall hives made him switch back to single-queen hives, but even then he stacked supers as high as he could reach. “Bees need space,” he said.

As August approaches, keep in mind that the bees might yet store a hundred pounds. If you are trying to maximize your honey crop, the hives still need three, four, or five medium supers. But watch the weather. When the flow ends, remove those boxes as quickly as you can and start your fall chores.

Posted in Beekeeping, Climate, Commercial Beekeeping, History, People | Tagged , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

What will August bring?

Posted on August 1, 2018 by Ron Miksha

A few minutes outside Calgary – canola is fading but sweet clover is still going strong with second-bloom alfalfa just starting. August might be good for the bees.

I had an email last week with a question about beekeeping. I couldn’t answer it. The reader asked, “What can I expect my bees to do in August?” It depends, of course, on where you are keeping bees. In the southern hemisphere, it’s mid-winter and your bees probably won’t do much. In North America, the answer is still not clear. If you keep bees somewhere along the east coast, from Newfoundland through Florida, bees often have an August dearth. You may have to feed them, depending on your exact location within that broad region. Similarly, from coastal British Columbia through southern California, a dearth may be on as most honey is produced in the spring and early summer. The heat and drought of August desiccates flowers. With nectar dearths bracketing the continent, many North American beekeepers think that honey takes an August hiatus everywhere. But no, not everywhere.

It might surprise some readers that most North American honey is made during July and August. Over two-thirds of the continent’s honey comes during those months from Iowa, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming and the three Canadian prairie provinces.  Most commercial beekeepers locate in those areas for the summer, but most hobbyists keep bees elsewhere.

Two-thirds of North America’s honey comes from the upper plains.

This points out how important it is to translate the videos, articles, and books you encounter into ideas that work for your own location. I think the best way to learn what August will bring is to get chummy with a good beekeeper in your area and listen to them. To do well at beekeeping, imitate their habits.

In time, as you learn to beekeep, you develop some experience. A repertoire of memories relevant to your seasons and your neighbourhood builds in your head.  But you need to be cautious. I’ve certainly failed massively by thinking – after five or six years – that I had things nicely figured out. I kept a commercial bee farm in an area where I made huge (300-pound average) crops six years in a row. The local old timers warned me that we would eventually have a dry year. We did. After thinking that I was the world’s smartest beekeeper, it didn’t rain for 14 months. I had no honey for two seasons. Suddenly, I became one of the world’s best educated beekeepers, if education is measured by experience.

It’s a truism of beekeeping that every year is different. But in general, with experience, you’ll learn what a normal year will bring you. Maybe your honey flow shuts off in mid-August due to drought or continues unabated until September’s first frost. Or maybe it does either, depending on the season’s weather. Perhaps, in your area, you will never, ever get any honey in August but will need to feed your bees until the flowers of autumn blossom.

I can’t tell you what to expect from your bees in August. If I had that sort of foresight, I would have bought Apple stock in 1980, when it was 25 cents a share. (I bought some beehives instead.) Tomorrow, I will write a bit more about predicting honey flows and I’ll describe an important predictive tool that very few beekeepers use.

Posted in Beekeeping | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Lighten up – it’s mid-week

Posted on July 25, 2018 by Ron Miksha

It’s Wednesday. We’re halfway through a July work week.  For those of you putting in hours while the rest of the world is at the cabin, this is for you.

I blundered across a cigarette commercial (please don’t smoke) from the ’60s. It features the Flintstones. We all know that high-caliber actors like Fred and Barney don’t come cheap, so the tobacco folks must have spent a fortune producing this ad for kids watching this popular children’s show.

This commercial made me wonder if I could find any honey advertisements that have appeared on television. But first, here are the Flintstones, lighting up, in 1961:

So, I dug around looking for honey commercials. Didn’t find much. That’s likely because there’s more money in smoke than in honey.

Here’s a honey ad from India:

That was pretty cool. Here’s another well-made commercial.  I saw it on YouTube but maybe it was on television, too. Not sure, though:

This one is a genuine TV commercial and rather funny:

There aren’t many honey commercials made for TV, but bees make some appearances in cereal and candy ads:

And then there are the non-honey commercials where honey has a starring roll:

Since we’re doing Honey Nut Cheerios commercials, here’s their first one, from 1979, when the cereal was invented:

Candy companies also got into the honey thing with this ’60s surfer dude:

Finally, one more cereal ad to get you dancing this morning:

 

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Honey, Humour, Outreach, Strange, Odd Stuff | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Prolonging the sweet taste

Posted on July 23, 2018 by Ron Miksha

Most nectar-supping insects land on a flower, take a bit of nectar, then fly off. But bees are different. They hang around the flower, sometimes gorging for ten seconds or more, if there’s enough nectar. Why the difference? Scientists think they have found the glue that keeps a bee stuck to a flower.

Insects (and people, too) are rewarded by their brains for discovering and devouring sugar. There’s a neuron for that – a biological wire that connects tongue and brain and shouts “Joy!”when sweetness hits the palate.

Humans experience satiation when we (for example) start munching a box of chocolates. The first chocolate is great, but by the time we finish all 24 in the box, we’ve had it. Our stomach might be able to hold another package or two, but our tongue and brain are hopefully telling us that we’ve had enough. However, if you were a social bee, you’d want to completely fill your honey tummy because you’re not just eating for yourself – it’s your duty to tank up with as much sweet stuff as you can hold and then pilot your blimp-body back to the hive.  [A honey bee weighs 90 mg (0.0002 lb) but her stomach can hold about 50 mg of nectar – that’s like a 200-pound person eating 110 pounds of chocolates.]

The point is, the bee has to keep loading up on nectar long after the delight is gone. With most other insects, that delight lasts a second or two. But a bee’s neurology has evolved to keep the bee eating. To do this, a neat trick is played on the bee’s taste sensors. First, she notices the sweetness. This attracts her to flowers with a high proportion of sugar (sucrose, fructose, glucose, and maltose) and makes her take that first big gulp. This is in response to a neuron (similar to our own) that says “Sweet”.  But then, a second neuron switches on and overrides the pleasure neuron. The second is an inhibitor neuron which quickly shuts itself off, allowing the first neuron  to take control again, giving the bee the taste of sweetness all over again, as if it were the first time she has tasted that flower’s nectar. The intermittent (burst) firing of the second neuron prevents the bee from experiencing sweetness satiation (adaptation). This research is captured in a paper called “Burst firing in bee gustatory neurons prevents adaptation” recently published in Current Biology. The researchers worked with bumblebees but I suspect that the system is similar in honey bees.

Posted in Bee Biology, Science | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

A Taste of Honey

Posted on July 17, 2018 by Ron Miksha

New honey, drawn on foundation.

I checked the bees this morning. They started as packages on foundation but are all grown up now and starting to fill honey supers. The main flow has been going well for a couple of weeks, though interrupted by a bit of cool weather and a wee spot of rain (we could use more). If this is a normal year, the main flow will continue into mid-August. We’ll see how normal this year turns out to be.

For me, this is ideal – two hives in the back yard, shade and a bench to perch upon while counting the number of bees that exit each hour.

So, here’s what’s happening in one of the supers. You can see that the bees have been reluctantly drawing comb, beginning right above the brood nest. They are not starting at the top and working down, but instead are beginning close to most of the bees who live below. Part of the reason is that our nights get pretty cool here in Calgary (high elevation and dry air) so the warmest part of the supers (at night) is the lowest part of the supers.

Look closely, you can see honey glistening in the cells at the bottom.

And here, I just couldn’t help it – I had to have a taste of honey. Reminds me of the Herb Albert song…

Posted in Beekeeping, Honey | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Don’t Step on a Bee Day

Posted on July 10, 2018 by Ron Miksha

squashed Benny

There’s a day for everything.

Today is Don’t Step on a Bee Day.

See if you can keep it up all week!

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Humour, Save the Bees | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Honey for the house

Posted on July 8, 2018 by Ron Miksha

We had a late spring. Our main flow hasn’t quite started. In another week, the bees will be gathering ten pounds of clover and alfalfa honey each day here in Calgary. There’s a nice flight today but five days ago, the high temperature was just 14 °C (57 °F).

We have two colonies in our backyard, installed as packages on April 27. Each hive was given 6 frames of drawn comb but everything else had to be drawn from foundation this spring. Turning foundation into comb slows bees down quite a lot, but each still drew out 14 deep frames in the past two months. Even though the weather was cool this spring and the colonies started as packages, they did well and even stored some miscellaneous spring honey.

We wanted some fresh honey for the house. So my son Daniel and I took two frames out of a second-storey brood chamber. The combs were freshly drawn this spring and have never housed brood, so the honey was quite nice, though more amber and more flavourful than I’m used to.

Here are our two backyard hives:

And this is what the honey combs looked like inside the hive:

There are a couple of reasons that you might pull one or two frames of honey from a hive. Besides collecting a few pounds of honey, it’s a way to sample some off-season honey, the sort you don’t get most of the year. Here in Alberta, our summer honey is graded ‘water-white’ and has a very, very mild flavour. For everyday use, I prefer it over medicinal honeys which are usually dark and sometimes taste earthy, murky, swampy, grubby, or resemble Buckley’s cough syrup. However, I sometimes delight in the earthy (a quarter-teaspoon at a time) and I’m always curious to taste an unusual honey flavour. Well, that’s the sort of honey that bees make from wildflowers in the spring here.

You rarely find such atypical honey in the marketplace in Calgary. Most beekeepers in western Canada leave spring honey for the bees. This is usually a good idea because we have a June gap – a dearth after the crocus, willow, and dandelion have finished but before the clovers have started blooming. However, what if your bees have plenty for themselves, but you’d like to have a little fresh, off-season honey? Say, honey from just a single frame or two? Do you set up an extractor and settling tank for five pounds of honey? You don’t have to. The rest of this blog post shows what we did here at our house, a little over a week ago.

We removed the hive cover and pulled a couple deep frames from the upper brood chamber. We avoided pollen and brood and withdrew frames that started this April as foundation.

Both frames looked like this a few weeks ago. Note that this is a solid one-piece frame. The ‘sheet of foundation’ is all plastic with a veneer of wax coating

Here’s the same frame as above, less than two months later. We brought it into our kitchen where we placed it on a shallow baking tray.

With a large serving spoon, we simply scraped the frame down to its plastic core. Everything we removed is pure beeswax and honey. The plastic core does not break or scratch off, just the honey comb gets scooped.  Also note that you don’t ever need to touch the honey. In fact, since it’s food, in our house, it’s forbidden to touch the honey during preparation.


Next stop, a honey bucket where the wax and honey are gently stirred, breaking up larger wax pieces.

Now we heat up the honey/wax mix. This melts the wax and brings it up to the top.  Here’s something really important. After you heat the honey/wax slurry, you must cool the mix very quickly. Our honey (in the picture below) is really hot (about 145 °F), but only for five minutes. Then we immersed it in ice-cold water. If you do this right (and work quickly) you will not burn the honey. However, if you give it heat (even low heat) for a long time (an hour or two) then it will taste like caramel popcorn without the popcorn. Do this step correctly and the wax and bees’ knees float to the top where they can be skimmed off.

If you look closely at the picture above, you can see the ice-water tub with the small (1-kg) container of honey/wax inside. Let it chill for an hour, replacing ice if needed. Atop the honey, a layer of wax forms. We are skimming off wax in the next picture. This is great wax, the kind you can use to make candles.

Here’s the wax. It weighed 140 grams (5 ounces).

Under the wax is gorgeous clean honey.  Although it’s not filtered, there is nothing visible floating in it except microscopic grains of pollen. (And air bubbles. We tested this honey with a refractometer and found it is only 14.2% moisture. That’s very thick honey. So thick that little air bubbles stay trapped, floating in the honey for days or weeks. The air was accidentally added by us when we stirred the honey and wax to homogenize it while heating.)

We ended up with about 3 kilos (7 pounds) which will last the four of us a week or two. (By the way, we harvested 140 grams of wax and 3000 grams of honey, roughly a 22-to-1 ratio. Extracting normally yields 60 times as much honey as beeswax.)

From beginning to end, this took an hour (not counting cooling time for the warm honey). That’s a ridiculous amount of time for a commercial beekeeper who used to extract a thousand pounds an hour, but that’s not the point. We had fun (you know the old saying, “The family that processes honey together stays together.”). We didn’t need an extractor, although for the main harvest in August, we will use one. An extractor is faster for anything over ten pounds – and the combs aren’t destroyed so the bees can use them again next year instead of drawing foundation again.

We ended up with delicious but unusual honey. It tastes like anise, or licorice, but I have no idea why. What was the dominant flower for this little treat? I’m so curious that I may send a sample for pollen analysis. If I do, I’ll let you know the suspected floral source.

Finally, after skimming off the wax, we filled several jars, including these:

Posted in Beekeeping, Honey, Tools and Gadgets | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Should you feed a tired bee?

Posted on July 5, 2018 by Ron Miksha

Feeding bumblebees that are resting in a garden has become a thing. I’ve seen some twitter tweets with concerned citizens gallantly virtue signalling their good deed – giving a bee a drink of sugar water. Here’s a sample:

You can find tweets and posts like this all over the place. Kindly folks want to help tired/sick bees. A bit of sugar water might indeed revive a hungry bee.  But should we?

Should you feed tired bees? Is that interfering with wildlife? Are you changing the evolved social fabric which will result in advantages to bees willing to hang out with humans? That’s how wolves became dogs. And, it’s the way Carniolan bees became docile – the strain was kept on porches and in gardens for centuries. Mean bees were destroyed and mellow ones thrived, creating gentle Carniolans through human selection.

Should you feed wild bumblebees?  Let’s ignore your inadvertent genetic manipulation and look at something more serious. What if the bee looks tired and hungry but is actually infested with viruses or parasites? Are you doing a favour if you help a sick bee return to her colony where she spreads her malady to all her friends?

Good or bad? I’m not sure, but I don’t like seeing any animal in distress. I might be tempted to whip out some highly processed white sugar, dissolve it in chlorinated tap water, and feed it to a suffering bee. But is it really the right thing to do?

 

 

Posted in Ecology, Save the Bees, Strange, Odd Stuff | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Smokers, beware: Playing with Fire

Posted on July 1, 2018 by Ron Miksha

Southern Alberta: This grass fire apparently started at the bee yard, then spread out in all directions. Three fire departments responded. The fire didn’t spread beyond the beekeeper’s property.

Today, I will end this mini-series of blog posts about smokers with some safety tips. Smokers can be dangerous and yada, yada, yada – some readers have already tuned out. But here’s the cost.  I know a South Dakota beekeeper who had to pay $250,000 when his bee crew’s smoker burned down a rancher’s winter hay. Meanwhile, a friend in southern Alberta was luckier when her smoker caused a 3-alarm grass fire (above and below). She was lucky because the firemen kept it confined to her own field.

I also had an apiary fire, likely caused by a bee smoker. In southern Saskatchewan, my helpers and I had just returned to the shop when a rancher called to tell us that there was a fire in the bee yard we had worked fifteen minutes earlier. We raced back and put it out. The fire hadn’t gone far as it was trapped between a summer-fallowed field (all dirt) and a paved road. It’s possible that someone tossed a cigarette as they drove past on the highway, but since we’d just been there, I figured we had caused the fire from sparks while smoking hives. We drove away without noticing the small fire. When we got back, four hives (out of thirty) had burned. So, yada, yada, yada, indeed.

You know that a combination of hot embers, dry grass, flammable wax, and wooden bee ware is dangerous. Here are some safety tips. Let me know if you have anything to add:

Light the smoker out of the wind, sheltering it so fire doesn’t escape. Some beekeepers light material in their hands, then push it into the smoker pot. That’s risky as the fire may escape. I always drop a burning match low into the smoker where it will light the material above it. I like to be in control.

Squirting gasoline into the smoker isn’t recommended. Your smoker will burn without the explosive thrill of a flare, though one of my brothers considered pyrotechnics a sport and relished in this smoker ignition method. Not a safety first idea.

Keep a fire extinguisher and jug of water handy. Know where the fire extinguisher is and know how to use it. If you have hired help, give them at least one fire drill where they run for the extinguisher and come back, ready to use it. Be sure they know where the pin is and where to squeeze to release.

Never dump ashes from a hot smoker in the bee yard. I’ve seen beekeepers do this just before driving off. They stomp the ashes into the ground first, of course, but that’s sometimes not enough to kill all the embers.  Instead, plug the smoke spout to stop its draft and set the smoker on its side, taking it with you while it’s still hot.

Watch out for sparks. If you keep bees in a dry climate area, grass and brush may catch fire really easily. If you ever use a smoker at night, you might be surprised to see how many sparks and embers come out of a smoker. You might not see them during the day, but they could be there. Sparks almost never cause trouble, but it only takes one to ruin your day.  Sparks usually happen if the smoker is too hot. To reduce flying sparks, add fuel to the smoker and tamp it down to filter the sparks.

If you use wood shavings, avoid sawdust and avoid tipping the smoker down into the hive where hot wood chips could fall out. Use paper or burlap atop the wood to prevent shavings from falling and to filter sparks.

You can control the smoker by standing it upright to create a draft, which keeps it burning more strongly, or laying the smoker on its side which reduces the draft and throttles the smoke. If it’s on its side for a long time, it will eventually go out but usually if its just for a few minutes, simply pump the bellows a few times, pointing the spout towards the sky and you will revive the smoker.

When you set the smoker aside between uses in the bee yard, don’t drop it (the lid might open and hot fuel could dump out) and don’t set it on the grass where a fire might start.

Smoke judiciously. You need only a small amount of smoke to control defensive bees. If you think you need lots, you are probably doing something wrong. (Moving too quickly, knocking equipment around, not showering often enough.)  As one noted beekeeper said, “you will end up breathing quit a bit of smoke.” That can’t be good for you or the bees.

As far as setting the smoker aside but keeping it handy for future use, you might place it inside a metal smoker box. Twenty years ago, I was gifted a metal tool box sold by Canadian Tire (a tools and and tires store). The box  has served me well. It’s exactly the right size to hold the smoker on its side (so there is no upward draft to cause flame). Fire can’t escape. The box won’t burn. I also use a wine bottle’s cork to seal the smoker when I’m finished for the day before putting the smoker into the metal box. I’ll end here with a few pictures of my smoker box.

Metal box, available at most general tools and supply shops.

Pick a size that holds your smoker with the bellows immobile.

I use a cork to prevent draft but many beekeepers use a wad of green grass.

For extra safety, you can light the smoker inside the metal box.

Posted in Beekeeping, Tools and Gadgets | Tagged , , , | 13 Comments

Smokers, beware: Bee Smoker 101

Posted on June 30, 2018 by Ron Miksha

If you’re somewhat new at beekeeping, you haven’t been using a smoker for long. You might not know some of the peculiarities of the hot little machine. I’ll give some basics here. Tomorrow, we’ll look at smoker safety, aka, how not to destroy your bee yard in a wall of fire.

Here’s my suggestion. Get a good smoker. Light it before you approach the bees. Be sure that there’s a hot fire in the smoke pot. Then stuff your smoker with fuel, almost smothering the fire. At this point, you should have white and gray smoke drifting from the smoker. Keep puffing vigorously, even if you think you’ve got the thing going well. If you see sparks or flame, that’s a bit of a faux pas in the beekeepers’ world so add more fuel as a filter to block those sparks. If you missed yesterday’s post, we mentioned types of smoker fuel. There’s a lot of choice.

A common mistake is to light the smoker, then ignore it while unloading your vehicle, carting stuff to the hives, and dressing up in your beesuit. By the time you open a hive, you discover that the smoker is no longer smoking. Even worse is having a feeble little bit of smoke that simply dies at the moment your hive is disassembled and the bees are growing cranky. Again, make a hot fire and add fresh fuel on top of the fire, forcing it to smolder and not burn too fast. Balance the heat, quality of smoke, and smolder longevity.

Before you open your hive, give its entrance(s) a soft whiffy puff of cool smoke. This should not take more than a few seconds. Your goal is not to inflate the size of the hive by vigorously pumping the bellows as if you are blowing up a balloon. Instead, a soft wisp of smoke, directed at the entrance and slightly into the hive is enough. Next, lift the lid and give the top bars a puff or two of cool white smoke. Don’t smoke down between the frames into the hive (it could injure brood) but across the top bars instead. Another ten seconds should be enough.

I’m giving my hive a bit of smoke across the top bars, not down into the hive.

You may now set the smoker aside, but keep it close at hand in case you find the bees becoming defensive. By the way, the smoker is hot and dangerous so ‘setting the smoker aside’ means placing it somewhere (on the lid of a nearby unopened hive, for example) where it is safe and not lying on its side in tall dry grass where it might start a fire.

Top of an unopened hive can be a safe space for your smokers.

In practice, another puff or two every three or four minutes is usually all you need, but that depends on the weather, hive strength, mood of the colony, and manipulations you are doing. With a few seasons of beekeeping, you begin to know when smoke is necessary. With experience, you will use less and less smoke – and may even become a smokerless beekeeper, though it’s a good practice to keep a lit smoker nearby. Just in case.

Although I’m extolling the virtues of smoke, there are several reasons to use smoke cautiously. It’s not healthy for you. Nor is it healthy for bees if their trachea get plugged with smoke soot. Too much smoke can literally drive bees out of a hive, into the grass where the queen might be injured or lost. Too much smoke can make the bees aggressive and confused. Too much smoke damages honey – beeswax is a fatty acid which absorbs odours. I once sampled comb honey which had a distinct bar-b-que flavour because the beekeeper used smoke to chase the bees out of her comb honey super.

There’s more that I could say, but a few days ago, I saw this video made by the University of Guelph. It does a better job showing smoker techniques than I can explain in words. The video features the Guelph’s apiary manager, Paul Kelly.  The photography is classy and the beekeeper walks you through handling a smoker.

The video is a bit dramatic. It shows much more smoke than I’d ever use, but I think that Paul Kelly is trying to emphasize that you need to be sure you have a good fire going so that it doesn’t quit while you are working.  By the way, he mentions that when you are finished, you can dump the smoker material on the ground. Don’t do this. I know beekeepers who have caused serious fires by dumping the hot ash, even though they think they have extinguished the fire on the ground. Kelly also mentions that care must be taken transporting a hot smoker in a vehicle, being careful that it doesn’t fall over. I have a trick that will help you with this. We’ll see it tomorrow when I end this little series on smokers by looking at smoker safety and mistakes that can cause big, big trouble for you.

 

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