The honeybee swarm season is upon us! Are you ready to catch bees to start or expand your own apiary? The Sodbuster Store has all of your swarm catching needs from swarm traps (with Layens frames) to swarm lures. Check out the offerings today and get your start by catching free bees!
When the overwhelming majority of beekeepers in the US use Langstroth hives, why would anyone choose, instead, to use a hive design that has less availability and fewer resources to help new keepers? In this video I compare the Langstroth and Layens hives and share why I prefer to use the latter.
When you purchase honey, you might be looking for a natural, healthful product. And choosing a product labeled as “organic” seems like a good way to ensure this. But for honey it’s not that simple.
In order for a product to truly be “organic” it must be free of chemical pesticides or herbicides. For honey this means that the keeper must ensure that any crops and flowers on which the bees forage (within about a 3 mile radius) are not chemically treated. That’s a tall order, if not impossible. This makes certification of US honey difficult and the USDA quit certifying US produced honey in 2016. Even before that, the standards were pretty vague.
While the USDA doesn’t certify domestic honey they will add certification, without verification, for foreign honey if the honey has been certified as “organic” by the source country. This is done no matter what standard (if any) was applied for the original country’s certification. So if you see honey labeled “USDA Organic” the only thing you can say for certain, about that honey, is that it came from outside of the US.
You might see small producers calling their honey organic, as some indication of how they keep their bees, but understand that there is no specific standard or certification behind that claim.
If you want to find the healthiest honey possible, for you, it’s best to find a beekeeper who keeps hives in your local area and sells “raw” (unpasteurized) honey. Pasteurization of honey does not make it safer, but only delays crystallization and kills beneficial enzymes.
Honeybee swarm season is upon us! If you wish to start keeping bees or grow your apiary, catching swarms is a low-cost way to populate your hives.
Recently I had an opportunity to remove a honey bee colony from a hollow pillar in front of a house. The process was documented in this video, including the use of my new bee vacuum, and the installation of the bees into a hive. I also check up to see how the bees are doing just over a week later.
When you might be short on extra hives to house bees, but need to split a colony, it’s possible to use multiple entrances of a horizontal hive to facilitate a split, housing both resulting colonies in the same hive. In these videos I prepare for the split by moving the colony to use the central hive entrance, then split it into two colonies, each residing in one end of the hive.
You might have heard me, or others, talk about “Langstroth”, “Layens” or even “Lazutin” beehive frames (or others, especially outside the US). But maybe you have no idea of the differences of these. In this video I explain and compare these three frame sizes, and explain how and why I decided to use Layens frames over the more popular Langstroth.
On March 20 I inspected the hives for the second time this year, specifically looking for brood. If the colonies aren’t starting to build up brood by now they will have trouble surviving into spring. The videos of these inspections, including some mishaps and surprises, are below:
Beehives produce multiple products besides honey, but getting a final product from what the bees make often requires some work. Beeswax is a valuable resource that must be separated from other materials within the comb. I am trying to do this, for the first time, and it’s taken a couple tries to get a product that’s worthwhile and ready for further refining. This video documents my attempt(s) and the outcome(s):
This time of year is critical for the beehives – if they’ve survived winter they’re going to increase their activity and start producing brood, but until flowers start blooming they won’t have much nectar to support them. I inspected the hives to find their status coming out of winter, and to see if they have enough food to get into spring. The inspections were recorded, but the microphone was muted. So the video has taken a different “cinematic” turn. I hope you enjoy this “silent movie” version of the first hive inspections of the year.
