Dealing with Harvesting Headaches (137)

Episode 137 – Dealing With Harvesting Headaches (137)

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Kim Flottum: Jim, have you harvested any honey yet this year? It's heading into, "Well, the days are getting shorter," time of year.

Jim Tew: [chuckles] Thanks for bumping me there, Kim, but I've got good intentions. I've had good intentions for a long time. I've got some honey and no, I haven't harvested it yet. Where are you going with this, Kim?

Kim: That makes both of us. Hi, I'm Kim Flottum.

Jim: I'm Jim Tew.

Kim: I think today, it sounds like both Jim and I need to talk about general topic of harvesting. When's it ready? How do you get it off? Where do you put it? What do you do next? All of those sorts of things. If you haven't harvested a honey crop yet, this is your first year, or you've been working with somebody else and they've come over to help you every year and now you're by yourself, there's some things you're going to want to think about, I think, because everybody listening to this probably has been through this type of session at least once.

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Introduction: You are listening to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the folks behind Beekeeping Today Podcast. Each week on Honey Bee Obscura, hosts Kim Flottum and Jim Tew, explore the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honey bees in today's world. Get ready for an engaging discussion to delight and inform all beekeepers. If you're a long-timer or just starting out, sit back and enjoy the next several minutes as Kim and Jim explore all things honey bees.

Jim: Kim, I got to tell you straight up. It's Friday afternoon and for some reason, Friday afternoon is just not honey removal, extracting time, is it? Is that a Monday morning job? I don't know.

Kim: Friday harvesting means a weekend extracting.

Jim: It does.

Kim: If you want to leave it set, where do you leave it set? You got a place to put it and where you can keep it. I don't. I can put it in my garage, I can put a cover on the bottom, a cover on the top, and keep the lights off and it'll be okay until Monday, I suppose, but not much more.

Jim: It'll be fine until Monday, but no, I probably won't go out this afternoon. It's already late in the day. I tell you this though, Kim, when I do go out, this is that time of the year. I have been casual all season long. A light veil, quick look, bees are happy, things are in bloom, everything's right in the yard. Not now, boy. Those colonies are full strength, that flows ebbed, bees are defensive. If I ever have gloves on, it's right now. If I ever have a full suit on, it's right now because the bees can really get worked up when I start trying to relieve them of their valued honey crop. Do you bundle up or do you just go like it's springtime?

Kim: I bundle up. I don't own a full bee suit anymore. I gave it away. I just have a jacket, but a jacket and a good pair of jeans and rubber bands around my cuff and sleeve works pretty good for this. Now, here's the question. When I harvest, that's how I dress. I got as much protection on as I can get, but before that, I'm going out there and looking in those boxes and see if I got anything worth talking about. That means taking the top off, probably adding some smoke, taking the undercover off, taking a look down, and what do I see?

Now, if I've got eight frames, I've got an eight-frame medium, all my honey supers are eight-frame mediums, if I've got eight frames and I can't even see between them because of the amount of comb that the bees have pulled out from each side of every frame, I can pretty well guess that the box below it's going to be the same way, right?

Jim: I think you can guess that. I would guess that.

Kim: If my top box is as full as it can get, here comes the next question. Do I get it off the hive and maybe the one below it now or do I just add another box because they're still bringing something in?

Jim: That's not my question. That's your question. You got your setup, you got a place to put that honey, or how long will it sit before you do what? Are you going to strike more than one time? I'd like to do all this at one time. It's a sticky situation. I don't want to make it sound worse than it is, but it's a sticky situation. Once I start extracting, I want to go straight through, get it over with, and then get that cleaned up and put it away. I sometimes have help, like grandkids. If you want a mess expanded, just have kids running through the area and tracking all over the shop area and you can take a small mess, make it a real big one.

Trying to give a honest answer, if I took a top off and there's a full super and I'm prepared to extract, I'd go ahead and take it. Now, I've written articles and other places, the devil's always in the details. How am I going to get those bees out? Well, then that's almost a different topic. Blow them out, take out individual frames, brush them off. It's tedious, but I got to get the bees out, but then what do I do? You're right. We had a really good rainstorm last night, and it's not a typical dry summer so far. You really stepped on the nerve when you said, "What are you going to do?" because normally, the grass is dead and I'm worried about starting a fire with my smoker. Not this year. Everything's still lush and green.

I would probably lean toward, still putting some empty equipment back on there just in case this flow drags on longer than it normally does.

Kim: Listening to you that suddenly became crystal clear for two reasons is to not harvest what's there and add an empty super. One of the reasons I want to do that is because I don't have an extraction setup. I don't extract my honey. What we do here in our bee yard is when we finally decide to take a box off, we'll take it off, we blow the bees out, we put it just on a piece of newspaper on the top and the bottom and get it into the back of my car. If there's a second box, same thing, back of my car, and then we go visit a friend of mine who has a permanent honey house. It's set up to extract 365 days a year, but I can only do it once because he's extracting his honey and he didn't want to get mixed up with mine.

I got to make a date with him. "Okay, I'm going to bring my honey over Thursday." He'll say, "Okay, I'll be ready for you." If I've made that kind of a commitment, then Thursday, I have to go. Today, I'm going to put an empty box on because I may not be, like you said, it's green and lush and everything's blooming. Everything is blooming yet just about. I may make another super honey rather than pull it off and hope that I did it right at the right time. That make sense?

Jim: It does make sense as much as any of this can. We don't know ever in any season what's coming. Most of the time, it's hot and dry. I know my friends in Alabama, and parts of Tennessee have already extracted. They've already anguished through all this and it's just hot as blazes in part of the country right now. They're not having this same conversation the way you and I are and probably would not mind having this conversation, but I don't have a friend like that. When you were talking and saying you've got this friend, I just hate people like you. I've got another friend of mine who's got a neighbor who's a snow-blowing crazy guy and comes over and cleans off my neighbor's driveway during the winter.

I love my neighbors, but why don't I have neighbors like that? Why don't I have beekeeper friends with regular setups because when I take my honey off, it's all mine and I've got to set up here in my shop, get extractor out. I've had the frustration of having a really nice lab when I worked at Ohio State and all the processing equipment, and now I'm just mild-mannered Clark Kent. I've just got a little 10-frame radio. It does have a motor on it, but I have a small extracting operation, a hot knife. It's really pretty simple. I've got to get all that out, get it all set up, and figure out some way to keep the extractor from wobbling around.

I want to do all that at one time. I don't want to go back multiple times, and I don't want to get that equipment out again, that extracting equipment out again. Is that easy or what is that? Is it realistic for someone our age?

Kim: I think the way you set this up for yourself is you've got two choices. I extract now and I'm done and they make more honey and I can share it with other bees or they'll have a lot going into winter or I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait. At the last moment, you harvest when you know how much you can leave and then you get it. The thing about that is, that's two things, it gives you another week or 10 days to get your honey house ready.

Jim: Yes, it does.

Kim: [chuckles] You got a little bit of time there. The other thing that this does for you is that now that I've been in here looking, when I'm looking and I make a decision, "No, I'm not going to remove this," the other thing that I'm doing is I'm taking a Varroa sample. I'm looking for small hive beetle, I'm looking for wax moth larvae. Is any of those things such a big problem? Then I have to deal with them now rather than wait another couple of weeks. They may make my decision for me, those pests.

Jim: Yes, good point. I want to hold that thought. I want us to hear from our sponsor and then when you get back, I want to ask you if you're not making winter preparations as you take off honey, so you're combining seasons. Here's a word from our sponsor.

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Jim: Kim, so when you're taking honey off, as we were discussing just a bit ago, we're always making decisions about winter, aren't we? How much honey to take, how much honey to leave, how much more honey will they make? I need about 65 pounds of honey on my colony here in the Midwest to get through an average winter. Where are we on that? You're actually blending the seasons, aren't we? We're starting the earliest winter preparation at the same time that we're finishing the spring season nectar flows.

Kim: It's a good point. Hadn't thought about it like that, but for me, I think that opens up all of my options doing it the way I'm doing it now. I can't think of another way. You either wait until the end or you do it now. If you have to treat, if you have to move frames, if you have to do whatever, you can do that now. I don't know if you call this winter prep, but if I take boxes off--

Jim: No, it's not winter prep. If you got winter on your mind, you're thinking, "Do I dare take this or will they need this?" I need this to go on this other colony that has these pests you described a bit ago. This is the moment when you decide how to dispense the honey around your apiary.

Kim: Here's a question for you. You got a couple of years doing this under your belt, how many times have you guessed wrong?

Jim: [laughs] That's not a question, that's an insult. There's a difference. Oh, how many times have I guessed wrong? To a greater or lesser extent, I probably guessed wrong every year, Kim. Since Varroa in '84 here in Ohio, it's really been tricky every year. What's the effect of Varroa going to be? How effective was my control procedures? I got to tell you, I guess wrong fairly commonly.

Kim: That makes me feel better because I do, too. Like you said, it's always a guessing game. I tend to hedge towards leaving too much on, making sure that I've done a Varroa treatment because I'm not going to harvest the honey that I'm leaving on that's their winter feed and beginning to look seriously at what am I going to do the rest of this late summer-fall so that when December gets here, I don't know if you want to call it climate change or whatever you want to call it, but if this winter is as cold as this summer has been hot, we're in for a cold winter. I'm hedging towards that right now, thinking that way.

Jim: I completely agree with you on leaving. If I ask myself, "Should I take this or not?" If I have to ask that question then I don't take it. That doesn't mean it's right for the listeners to do that. That's just my estimating procedure. If I wonder, I really don't know, if I have any feeling then I'll leave it there. I'm not in this for honey production, I'm not in it to make money. We probably just offended all those people who are, and they would have to make their decisions differently. I used to do that, but right now, I'm doing it just because I enjoy beekeeping and I want to do it and I don't want to buy any more packages than I need to, so I would tend to leave more honey and then next year if it's not used, I can still use that to go with packages or the bees that I'm splitting or trying to grow then.

Kim: There's a couple of things to think about here. The people who know or at least some of the people who know about Varroa control are telling me, telling us, telling the world that it's August, you got to get rid of Varroa. If I'm leaving stuff on now, it's late July and I leave it on for two more weeks, have I waited too long?

Jim: Oh, that's an excellent question, Kim. Just excellent. Speaking of blending whirls, blending spring seasons, and early winter prep, how do you blend Varroa controlled with honey stores' allocation? Good point. Since you brought it up, you go with it now. You open this can of worms.

Kim: Most years I tend to not remove very much and I tend to do it early. It's not because of Varroa, it's because I learned bees in Wisconsin, and August in Wisconsin can be a miserable month sometime. My memory jerks me a little bit and says, "You could have snow next month and then what are going to do?" Ever worked bees in the snow?

Jim: I have not truly worked bees in the snow. No, I've checked bees, looked and done those kind of things in the snow, but I've never worked bees. That would be a miserable job with bees flying, falling off, chilling, freezing. No, I haven't done it, so you can have that one. I'll give you that one.

Kim: I've had to do it once with inches of snow and once with a dusting of snow but the temperature was about the same both times. You're right, it's not pretty, it's not fun, and the bees don't like you very much when you're done. I hedge towards that, A, early so that we don't get trapped by early season winter, early because I want to get a Varroa control on and early because I want to make sure that the bees that I'm harvesting the honey from have enough 65, 70 pounds to get through to next May. Late July, early August, that's my window. Late July, early August. Make it when to harvest, when to treat and what to do next.

Jim: I'm actually more confused now than I was when we started, Kim [laughter] to tell you the honest truth here. I'm looking for a light at the end of the tunnel. I was thinking while you were talking, think about my Canadian friends and the season they work with, and then think about my friends in Alabama, North Florida who are already off to other things. Now, this season is so far behind them, so it's a moving target, isn't it? How much to take off, how much to leave? Kim, we don't have time and we've talked about robbing before, but when I go out here right now, robbings going to be an issue.

Even though there's still some things in bloom, I'm going to get these nosing around then I'm going to have defensive bees because I've got to work in and around that behavior that bees have to rob each other when there's times of dearth. Add that to the slurry of mix. See if you agree with this, you've said that about this time of the year that you go out and I have agreed and you take off the crop that you're comfortable taking off, anything we're uncomfortable about, you and I agreed that we leave it. Then after we get that all off and out of the way and got our extracting area set up, then all that takes place there.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, so to speak, now we've got the honey off the bees so we can then implement our midsummer early fall Varroa control program. You do that before the fall flow starts, during, after or do you have another opinion on that?

Kim: The exception of this here you made the comment earlier that I'm used to doing this kind of work and the grass is dead and the leaves are beginning to turn and it's looking like fall. This year, none of that's happening. It's warm, it's wet, it's slush. I got things blooming now that normally quit end of June, and it is the end of July. These are things that aren't photo periodic, they're just, I got water, I got light, I'm going to grow kind of plants. The rules have changed this year.

Jim: I'm stumbling because I agree with you. I don't want to make this year something special, I'm not going to make a mark on the wall, but can I get back to you on all of this and just tell you maybe in some future segment what's back there right now? I know there's a couple of full deeps on some of the colonies I've got. Let me see how I'm going to handle this, but right now I'm planning to get it off, get it extracted, leave an abundance on there, see what's inside the colonies down in the brood nest, I've not been there now in several weeks and make the decisions I've got to make on what to do in this interval all the time working in and around bees robbing each other. Is that a synopsis you can live with?

Kim: That's a good synopsis. I think you just simplified what I just had to say but I think we're both on the same page here.

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Jim: I think we're on the same page. We're trying to justify, but we haven't taken our honey off.

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Jim: I'm done, Kim.

Kim: I'll let later this fall, early winter how it went, all right?

Jim: All right. I'm going to hold you to that because that'll be a-- when it's cold and rainy outside, it'll be good to reminisce on when we'd be complaining about how hot and wet and how much nectar flow we had going on, it'll be a good memory.

Kim: Stay cool out there.

Jim: I'm doing my best. All the best tell you.

Kim: Take care.

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