Flow Hive Honey Harvest is in!

The Beeza 2018 raw flow hive honey harvest is in and we couldn’t keep its goodness to ourselves! Be sure to visit us online at www.beezahoney.com to order yours before it's gone!

Since starting the honey enterprise five years ago, we have learned a ton at Beeza Honey! Our first product was Crème honey because we knew we could increase the shelf life of our raw honey by turning it into a smooth and spreadable crème.

Unexposed to air and temperature fluctuations, liquid honey is VERY stable; it doesn’t spoil even after thousands of years. We can't use honey without exposing it to the air and home temperatures naturally fluctuate. The common solution to extend the shelf life for most store-bought honey is to micro-filter and heat it, but that also dulls the flavor and damages its beneficial properties.

Our raw liquid honey is drawn from Flow Hives which in our tests has a longer shelf life than honey extracted from combs. If you keep our squeeze bottle sealed when you aren’t using it, and store it at room temperature out of direct sunlight, you should be able to enjoy this amazing product before it picks up moisture and ferments (which is called mead), or dries out and crystallizes into large crunchy crystals.

Let us know what you think; we think it's worth buzzing about!

Holiday Rush

The Beeza Honey team is hard at work fulfilling Christmas orders;  our supply of 2017 honey is getting low, so get your Christmas order in now.  The elves are ready!

Why is honeycomb hexagonal?

The perfect hexagonal shape of honeycomb cells — once thought to be an incredible feat of math-savvy insects has now been explained by simple mechanics.  Scientists have marveled at the angular perfection of honeycomb for centuries, but none have been able to clearly describe how it forms. Engineers in the U.K. and China have taken a step forward by showing that the cells actually start off as circles — molded by the shape of a bee's body and then flow into a hexagonal pattern seconds later.

Using a honeycomb grown at a research facility in Beijing, the researchers were able to carefully ward off the bees and photograph the bare honeycomb seconds after formation, providing the first clear evidence that cells naturally start as circles. They then observed honeybees heating the wax after the initial cell formation — a phenomenon identified in previous studies, but never analyzed in close detail — and found this to be the key step in hexagon-formation.  By heating the cells, the bees cause the wax to become molten and flow like lava. Once the wax starts flowing, the cell walls naturally fall flat and take on the shape of a hexagon, like adjoining bubbles in a bath. This is physically the simplest and most stable way for cylinders to merge, Karihaloo said.

Honeycomb cells start off as circles within the first few seconds of formation (a) and then eventually morph into hexagons (b).
(Photo: B.L. Karihaloo, K. Zhang and J. Wang)  

Post text excerpted from Mother Nature Network, Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company.

Hunkering down for Winter

We started our hives in the river bottom along the Flatrock Creek that bisects our farm; the bees were very happy for a number of years.  But 11 months ago this month, freezing fog developed in the valley so quickly that the bees didn't have time to get back in a warm huddle.  We lost over 80% of our hives. 

To give the bees a better chance of surviving winter conditions, we re-positioned the hives up on the ridge this Fall where freezing fog is less likely.  It appears to be a great site where the bees can still  easily access water, our wildflower field, field edges and wooded areas that together provide a diverse and healthy environment for the bees.

This time of year, the female worker bees seal all of the gaps in the hive with propolis and kick the males out to preserve their honey stores for the winter.  They cluster around the queen and keep her at a toasty 95 degrees all winter long by vibrating their wing muscles which burns calories and gives off heat.  Aren't they amazing!?

On-the-spot Queen Rearing

As we began repopulating our hives, we decided to try on the spot queen rearing. Some thought was given to trying a new process this year based on information found in the book OTS Queen Rearing by Mel Disselkoen. Typically, in this process you pinch the queen and let the hive create a new one. This process helps break the varroa mite cycle in a hive. Rather than pinch the queen as recommended in the process, we were able to take the good queens and start a nuc or requeen existing hives needing a new queen. One of the benefits to this is you are getting a queen from a hive that is already adapted to the weather for that location.

On-the-Spot Queen rearing is done by removing the original queen and enough bees to make a nuc, the remaining hive is strong enough to create their own queen. By notching a larvae cell within the first 72 hours, the bees develop the larvae into a queen. A queen is created when the nurse bees feed royal jelly to the larvae for the entire time of development. Bees know when to do this due to pheromone cues within the hive. When the existing queen is removed from the hive, the pheromone that prohibits the development of queen cells dissipates, allowing for queen production.

Varroa mites rely on the life cycle of the bees for their reproduction. The change of queens in a hive breaks the cycle of reproduction for the varroa mites because mites reproduce at the same time as the bees by entering brood cells before the bee pupae have been sealed in. Bees are in brood cells for their transition from larvae to adults, a process known as pupating. Varroa mites feed on honey bees internal fluids by piercing the bee bodies. Varroa mites can transmit a variety of diseases, two of which cause the death of larvae prior to the brood cell being sealed. The most common virus affects the wings of the bees and can cause deformed wings when there is a Varrora mite infestation.

During on-the-spot queen rearing, the development of the hive is also slowed down since there is a period of time where the hive is not producing any eggs. Bees aren’t producing honey during the time they are forming a new queen. We wanted to try this process to see if we could raise some queens that were local to our area, and also to see if we could lessen the infestation of varroa mites in our hives. We were successful in our endeavor of raising queens, but it remains unclear the impact on the reproduction of varrora mites. We will have to weigh positives and negatives as we go into a new year to see if this is a good process for us to pursue.

Repopulating the Hives

In April of this year, we began efforts to repopulate our existing hives. We purchased two different types of bees from suppliers in Indiana. 6 hives were filled with Carniolan bees and 4 were filled with Minnesota Hygenics. Minnesota Hygenics have been bred to have a stronger resistance to Varroa mites and possibly colder weather. By sourcing bees from the same area, we are more likely to see the bees able to survive winter for this location. Unfortunately, we learned that our bees had been wintered in a warmer climate. We brought in enough bees to restock our 10 hives with plans to start 3 nucs. From this we were able to do on the spot queen rearing and move the extra queens with some bees to form 11 hives and 2 nucs. This wasn’t the combination we were working towards but indicates that our hives were doing well and we had more bees than anticipated.

When the packaged bees arrived, we were able to place an empty hive box over the package of bees on top of the hive and allow them to crawl out of the package. This was a new approach for us in populating bee hives and made it easier on the bees instead of shaking them into the hive. This year, we are keeping our hives in 2 different locations in hopes that any adverse weather will only affect one area of hives. The locations are different in elevation which could help with foggy conditions affecting the bees.

Usually when placing bees into a new hive, they have to coat the comb before they can begin making honey. During this time, the bees are not making honey and need to be fed sugar water as they build out the comb. Since the original bees were lost suddenly, there was still honey left in the hive. We were able to use the drawn out frames of honey as we started the new hives, so we did not have to feed the new bees sugar water as much as normal when starting the new hives. This also made less work for the new bees so they could begin to grow their population more quickly.

Due to having to repopulate our hives, we expect our honey production for the 2017 year to be lower than in previous years. The expectation is that first year hives will not produce any extra honey for harvesting. The hope is there will be some honey produced thanks to the help the bees had starting out with honey already being available in the hives.

Raising bees is always a new learning experience every day. It will be exciting to see how this season goes.

Rough Start to 2017

In January 2017, we lost 10 of our 12 hives. A few weeks after the loss of 10 of our hives, we lost the remaining 2 hives. An average loss rate over the winter months considered acceptable by beekeepers is up to 17% of a hive. For the 2016-2017 season, the state of Indiana had around a 40% loss rate and Fairholme Farms had a 100% loss.

We believe there to be two possible causes for this loss. The first was related to the temperature. It went from near 60 degrees to the 30’s overnight, which may have caught the bees by surprise since they break cluster when the temperature rises. The second possibility was the low lying fog the morning following this drop which could’ve caused the bees to get too damp. Cold weather should not be a problem for the bees as long as they remain in cluster and keep the hive about 92 degrees. Moisture is a much bigger danger for the bees because the bees need to stay dry.




Colony Collapse Disorder would be one possibility of the loss, but this would result in the adult bees leaving the hive. The bees were found in the hives. Some were found still clustered, some were found away from the cluster, and many were found dead in the bottom of the hives. The bee bodies were wet. It is not known if they got too wet from the fog and died or if the bodies became moist after they died.

We received information from the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) about an organization that performs laboratory testing on bees. We proceeded to send off a sample of our bees to this organization, the National Agricultural Genotyping Center (NAGC), for testing. The bees were tested for 11 pathogens, and none of these pathogens were found. This helped us narrow down what we believe to have caused the deaths and determine that is was most likely caused by the unusual weather pattern.

Each year is a unique learning experience. The decision was made to repopulate our hives following this complete loss and take what we learned and forge ahead to make the strongest and best hives we can.

Sources:
https://beeinformed.org/2017/05/26/preliminary-2016-2017-state-total-and-average-losses/