Is your honey crystallized? Here is the crystallized honey fix

Honey crystals. This year's honey crystallized fairly quickly.

Raw, unfiltered honey will often crystallize. Certain honeys such as canola and dandelion will crystallize faster due to their higher glucose content as opposed to acacia, sage, tupelo, and black locust. Honey that is stored in cooler locations will crystallize faster than honey kept at room temperatures. Professor Elton J. Dyce discovered that honey crystallizes the fastest at 55F (12.7C). Unfiltered honey will crystallize faster than filtered honey, because filtration removes the "starter" crystals.

Personally, I prefer not to re-liquefy honey once it is crystallized. Crystallized honey, also known as creamed honey, is not as messy as liquid honey. It does not leave messy drips and trails when you use it in your tea, and it spreads nicely on your biscuits. It also retains all of its original awesome flavor. Do you like your honey crystallized or liquid? Leave me a note in the comments section.

Still, I often get asked how to re-liquefy the honey. Here are the basic steps (for the YouTube video click here):

The crystallized honey fix: place the honey in a pot of warm water

• Heat a pot of water to 150F (65C). 
• Remove the pot from the heat in so that you don't accidentally scorch the honey in the process
• Place the crystallized honey in the pot

It took us almost an hour to re-liquefy our jar of honey.

Finally, we color graded our honey. I want to mention the awesome post called "Honey colours" by Jeanette Jeffrey. In it, she provides a very easy to use grading scale. Here is our honey (Basswood) by the scale.

Looks like our Basswood honey is between Extra White and White

Did you ever try color grading your honey? What were your results? Leave me a note in the comments section.

How to maximize your honey production while minimizing swarming (Part II)

One of my single deep beehives, opened on Oct 20, 2013. Lots of healthy honey bees.

Last week, I summarized “A year’s work in an out-apiary; or, An average of 114 ½ pounds of honey per colony in a poor season, and how it was done” by G. M. Doolittle and promised to explain how I use his method in my apiary.

I want to point out that G. M. Doolittle ran his hives for section honey. Section honey has its own set of challenges, namely:

• You must crowd the bees as you want each section completely drawn (front and back, top to bottom and side to side). Undrawn or partially drawn sections are not marketable. G. M. Doolittle uses them as “bait” sections in the following year.
• You must use a queen excluder as sections with whiter cappings (and whiter honey) command a premium

The color of the cappings and partially uncapped frames (as long as the frame is about 75% capped or you have a good refractometer) are not such crucial issues anymore. However, G. M. Doolittle did not have to deal with small hive beetles (SHB) or varroa mites.

So, without any further ado, here is my schedule for year 2014. G. M. Doolittle’s flows are very similar to the flows in my area and therefore I can use the calendar dates that he provides for manipulations. Still, I will keep an eye on when a flow starts and ends and modify the schedule accordingly. For those of you further south and north, I have included the flows, so you can map them to yours. My comments are below the manipulations in italics.

Date	Flow	Manipulations and Comments
April 14		Doolittle: Take hives out, clean the bottom boards This part of Doolittle’s management part is largely obsolete with the majority of beekeepers in the USA keeping their bee hives outside all winter long. The obvious exception would be Canadian beekeepers that routinely winter their hives inside temperature controlled buildings due to the long Canadian winter. Although you might be tempted to remove the hive wrap and insulation at this point, I usually remove them in the beginning or middle of May depending on the long range weather forecast.
April 24	Elm, soft maple Dandelion: Apr 28	Doolittle: Make sure each hive has at least 20 pounds in honey stores by adding 1, 2 or 3 combs of honey at 7 pounds each. The honey should be put right next to the brood nest.  Note that this is done 26 days before fruit tree bloom and 53 days before the main flow (basswood and white clover). It takes approximately 42 days (+/-7 days) to produce a forager bee from an egg. The brood that is produced in the next 11 days is going to produce the forager bees working the main flow. Therefore, it is crucial that brood rearing goes on “swimmingly” during this period. This is one of the reasons why I don’t remove the hive wraps and insulation until later. I don’t want to chill my main flow foragers. The elm and soft maple are primarily pollen flows that the honey bees use to rear brood. However, the honey bees may not be able to make the most of those flows due to inclement weather and cold snaps. If this is the case, you might want to add a pollen patty on the top of the brood nest to make sure that the honey bees are able to raise healthy foragers for the main flow.   Another possible sticking point when implementing this plan is that any newcomer to this management technique will lack “reserve combs” with which to supplement the honey stores in the spring. Feeding 1:1 sugar syrup to the honey bees is an alternative solution. The drawback, again, is the weather in early spring. Here in NW Ohio, the average daytime high for April is 62F with lows of 40F. The honey bees stop taking syrup when its temperature falls below 50F. To make sure the honey bees take the syrup, you might want to feed smaller amounts in a Ziploc baggie feeder (or frame feeder) positioned right above the brood nest (next to it in the case of a frame feeder).
May 20	Fruit tree bloom	Doolittle: Clip the queens. Equalize the brood, in order to make sure there are multiple strong colonies at the beginning of the clover flow.  Add a story with 2 bait combs to all the strong bee hives.   Doolittle’s reasoning for clipping the queens is that it will delay the swarm for several days until he is able to perform his “shook swarming”. I haven’t been able to find a good description on how to clip queens, so I haven’t practiced it. Let me know in the comments or send me an e-mail if clip your queens or have a good source. The links for both are on the bottom of this blog post. I have also pulled the honey from the bottom chamber into the 2nd deep.
June 16	White clover: May 23; Black locust is done   Basswood flow begins in approx. 10 more days	Doolittle: Mow the grass in the apiary. Prepare hives for filling sections by removing the 2nd story and putting on 1 “bait” section super and one section super filled with foundation above a queen excluder. “Shake swarm” the honey colonies and take all the brood out.   While I use queen excluders in my apiary, I do not use them in my honey colonies. I do not believe them to be as critical for extracted honey production as they are for comb honey.   Doolittle also takes out all the brood when he “shake swarms” his honey bee colonies. However, the white clover and the basswood flows are usually done within a month of that manipulation. In addition, his next flow of any importance is the buckwheat flow and it does not start until middle of August. If your main flow is longer in duration or you have a mid-summer flow instead of a dearth, you might want to change this manipulation to a variation of a cut-down split where you take away the queen and all open brood. After the flow, you can re-combine the two hives if you don’t want to increase the number of colonies. In this way, you will avoid the month and a half gap in raising foragers in the middle of the summer.
June 26	Basswood: July 6	Doolittle: Making increases (nucs)   For the past 4 years, I had very good results raising queens (fall queens) after the main flow. In reality, I start mine on the 4th of July as it is easy to remember. This year, I experimented with raising my own queens using the cut cell method and mating them into small nucs (in past years, I did splits and let each split raise their own queen). While I plan to make some changes in the way I set up the nucs for next year, I am going to stick to this timeline for now.
July 10		Doolittle: Make sure nucs are queen-right; add queens if necessary
July 24		Doolittle: Taking off surplus; preparing for buckwheat flow   Usually this timeline works well with my schedule, but this year was the exception. I believe the cold and wet summer caused a delay in the capping of the supers. The majority of the supers were not capped until well into September / the beginning of October. And yes, those stores were sitting uncapped since July. Did you notice if the honey bees took longer to cap? Leave me a note in the comments. This is also the time when you want to test for varroa and treat if necessary. In this way you will reduce the varroa mite pressure on the honey bees reared in the the next couple of months. These are the so-called "winter bees" or "fat bees" and they are crucial for your colony's winter survival. I usually don't need to treat, because I usually introduce a queen cell into my honey colonies after the main flow, causing a brood break. A brood break is an effective varroa management tool, especially for treatment-free bees.
Sept 8		Doolittle: Harvest using bee escapes / porter escapes It is a good idea to also use this visit in order to make sure your hives have a good wintering weight. This is about a month and a half before the first hard frost in my area and after the goldenrod flow. Check out my post Fall inspections: Do I need to feed and how much? for more details.
Oct 10		Doolittle: Install winter bottom boards and mouse guards on the hives Since I don't overwinter my hives in a cellar but outdoors, this is around the time I insulate/wrap my hives for winter.
Nov 23		Doolittle: Temperatures are around freezing, it is time to put the bees back in the cellar.

How to maximize your honey production while minimizing swarming

October is here and in McClure, OH that means that my winter preparation is winding down as my honey bees and I are enjoying our last couple weeks of nice weather. The bee hives that needed winter stores have all been fed. The honey bees have propolized the interior of the hives. They have already organized their stores and brood for best wintering. I am working on cutting insulation for the bee hives and pouring candy boards for my nucs. My honey bee season is almost over and while it is still fresh in my mind, I start penciling out my plan for next year.

My invaluable helper is Gilbert M. Doolittle and his book “A year’s work in an out-apiary; or, An average of 114 ½ pounds of honey per colony in a poor season, and how it was done”. You can find the most recent edition on Amazon by clicking here. The book was originally published in 1906. Its fifth edition (published in 1922) as “Management of out-apiaries” is available as an e-book here.

Even though this beekeeping book was published more than 100 years ago, the techniques described are very relevant to modern beekeeping. So let’s not delay any longer and dive right into the details.

Summary of A year’s work in an out-apiary

The book is only 60 pages long and is divided in 12 chapters (one for each visit in the out-apiary for the year):

• Chapter I: An average of 114 ½ pounds of section honey per colony in poor season, and how it was done. On April 14, 10 days before elm and maple bloom, G. M. Doolittle levels the hive stands, takes the honey bees out from their cellar (his bees are wintered indoors in a single hive body) and sets them out on a new/clean bottom board.

• Chapter II. April 24, the elm and soft maples are in bloom. G. M. Doolittle checks the available honey stores of each colony. He supplements any colony that has less than 20 lbs. of honey with capped honey frames. He adds those frames on the outside of the brood nest. His honey bees are still in a single hive body. He enlarges the entrances appropriately for the strength of each beehive and makes sure that the brood is in good condition. He supersedes his queens after the harvest, so if he finds any queens need to be replaced early in the spring, he just combines the hive with another with a good queen. How do you handle underperforming queens in the early spring? Re-queen or combine? Leave me a note in the comments below!

• Chapter III: Bloom time. The thirds visit is almost a month later on May 20th, during apple and fruit tree bloom. During this visit, G. M. Doolittle finds and clips all queens. He also equalizes the brood among his hives by taking brood off the hives with more than seven frames of brood and adding those frames to the bee hives that have 6 or less frames.  In addition, he supers all the hives that have 7 frames of brood. He takes the 2 outer honey combs from the brood nest and exchanges them with 2 empty combs from the super. The first super is all drawn, filled with more or less empty comb. He installs it above a queen excluder. The colonies that have 7 frames of brood and a super are his honey producing colonies. The weak colonies are his increase colonies. At this visit, he also fully opens the entrances on all but the weakest colonies. Do you keep any colonies back to serve as increase colonies or do you order packages? G. M. Doolittle uses 1/5 of his existing colonies as increase colonies. What percentage of your total bee hives are your increase colonies?

• Chapter IV: How to control swarms when running for comb honey. It is June 16 and the white clover has just started blooming (black locust is done). Time to mow the bee yard as tall grasses at the bee hive entrance will slow foragers down and reduce the honey crop. This is also the visit in which G. M. Doolittle treats his honey colonies with “shook swarming”. In essence, he prepares a new box for the brood nest with 1 empty comb in the middle, surrounded by the honey comb from the super. This new box is placed on the hive stand. Then he adds the queen excluder and above it he puts a super with bait (half-drawn) sections and above that a super of sections in foundation. Finally, he shakes all the bees in front of this new brood box. He puts the brood over a queen excluder on top of one of the weaker colonies. Have you tried the shook swarm method of swarm prevention? I have tried something similar, but not exactly as described by G. M. Doolittle. What is your favorite method of swarm prevention? Leave me a note in the comment section below!

• Chapter V: A simple and reliable plan for making increase. It is June 26. On the previous visit, G. M. Doolittle had found some swarm cells in a hive that he wants to breed from. He uses those cells (they are ripe) and the brood he removed on the previous visit to make nucs. He also shakes (shook swarm) the colonies that were weak on his prior visit.

• Chapter VI: How to save unnecessary lifting in taking off filled supers of honey. It is July 10. Basswood bloom has begun on July 6. G. M. Doolittle brings extra queens in case the mating failed in the increase colonies he made on the prior visit. He checks the supers and takes off the capped ones. He uses a wheelbarrow to minimize the lifting of full supers. He also adds an empty super to all colonies from which he removes one.  He puts supers on the week colonies that had brood combs added to them on the prior visits. He uses one of his queens in an introductory cage to re-queen one of the increase colonies. He also makes sure the grass and weeds are not blocking the entrances to his bee hives. He believes a tangled entrance can lead to as much as 1/3 of the possible honey crop being lost. Do you mow around your bee hives? Do you believe it is necessary?

• Chapter VII: Taking off the surplus, what to do with the unfinished sections, preparation for the buckwheat flow. It is now July 24 and the basswood bloom is all done. G. M. Doolittle brings another load of supers to the apiary in preparation for the buckwheat flow. Again, he takes any completed or more than 2/3 completed section honey supers and replaces them with empty ones. His philosophy is to always have an empty super available at all times for the bees. On this visit, he also replaces any queen that hasn’t been performing up to par with a ripe queen cell that he brought with him. He also replaces any queen that is 2 years old. When do you replace your queens? I usually replace mine after the main flow with a ripe queen cell. This gives my colonies a much needed brood break which helps control varroa buildup.

• Chapter VIII: Progress in the supers. It is August 18 and the buckwheat is in full bloom. G. M. Doolittle uses this visit to check progress in the supers from the buckwheat flow.

• Chapter IX: A simple way to put on escapes without lifting. It is September 8 and the end of G. M. Doolittle’s bee season. The goal of this visit is to put bee escapes on all the colonies in order to be able to remove the supers. He uses a wooden wedge to lift the supers and slide the escape board beneath them without ever having to remove them from the hives.

• Chapter X: Taking off the honey and storing it at the out-yard. Two to four days later, on a cool day (to prevent robbing) G. M. Doolittle retrieves the supers. He always keeps them covered with a robber cloth in order to prevent robbing. He weighs the hives and makes sure they have a minimum of 25 pounds of stores. He adds full combs to those bee hives that have less. Remember, he overwinters his hives in a basement is single hive configuration.

• Chapter XI. October 10. He installs the winter bottom boards and mouse guards on his hives.

• Chapter XII: Closing words, further suggestions to the plans given in the preceding chapters. It is November 23 and with temperatures just above freezing, it is time to set the bees back in the cellar.

The above summary does a very poor job of describing what a treasure G. M. Doolittle's book is. Every time I re-read this book, I find new ideas to implement in my apiary. I believe every serious beekeeper should become familiar with this work!

So how does this tie into increasing your honey production today? G. M. Doolittle gives you a pretty good plan to manage hives at the serious sideliner or even the smaller commercial level. His plan is a good blueprint to follow if you want to learn how to manage your bees by the yard and not by the hive. He manages to accomplish all his buildup, swarm control and winter prep in just 12 separate visits.

Do you use a system that is similar to G. M. Doolittle’s method? Do you use a completely different method? Please leave me note in the comments section about which method you’ve been using so far.

This blog post is getting quite long, so I will continue next week with some pointers on how to use G. M. Doolittle’s management principles in your own bee yard. I will also publish my management schedule, which is based on G. M. Doolittle’s plan. I will post the second part of this post on Sunday, October 20, 2013. Check back on Monday to read it or click here to get it delivered directly to your inbox! 