The Queen is Dead! Long Live the Queen!

At the end of my last blog, I reported that my queen Roxi was no longer in her hive - a queenless hive - yikes.  So I hurried home to tap into my beek (what beekeepers call themselves) secret weapon - the Austin Urban Beekeeper Group - to find out where I could order a new one.

As expected, I received a very prompt response - no more than 3 minutes after I posted my question.  Jim Hogg - who goes by the moniker "Daddy's Bees" - is the biggest bee evangelist you will ever meet.  He is also the nicest guy you will ever meet.  His calling in life - and he will tell this to you every time you speak with him - is to save the bees - and he's one of Austin's most active bee salvagers.  He must do 3 or 4 "cutouts" a week.  Cutouts are what occur when you discover that a colony of bees has been living and growing in your roof, in your shed, in your composter, ... and you want them removed.  People that do cutouts, not only remove the bees and relocate them to a better spot, they usually cutout a lot of the infrastructure housing the bees - hence the term "cutout".  This has to be done because you have to remove all the comb as well as plug their method of entry in order to keep the bees (or other bees) from returning to the same site.  Jim also collects swarms and finds new homes for them.

Luckily Jim is plugged into just about every bee-related website in the universe, so he was able to tell me exactly who to contact (Koehnen's out of California) and what type of bee to order.

$48 and two days later a new Cordovan Italian queen bee arrived with 7 attendants.  Jim assured me that these Italian queens are the mellowest bees around.  If Jim says it's so, I'm sure it is so.

As luck would have it, when I was doing the queen installation my husband, Tom, and a couple of his friends drove by my hives in their golf cart.  My hives are located between the 15th & 16th holes on the Barton Creek Canyon's golf course over looking a beautiful pond - you can see the two white hives above the far side of the pond that look like two little towers:

Here's a closer look:

Stuart Sargent (one of said golfers) pulled out his iPhone and managed to take a picture of my new queen right before I installed her - what luck - here it is!  It's a bit blurry (wonder why?  he wasn't wearing a bee suit), but you can see the little wooden box that she arrives in with mesh on the side.  It should take 3 or 4 days for the bees to eat away at the candy plug in the end to free her - that should give all the bees enough time to get used to the new queen and accept her.  I'll be doing another inspection in a few days to make sure she's alive and laying.  Hope so!

Bees Gone Wild.

DEATH IN THE HIVE!

I went out the other day to do a weekly feed and inspection of the hives, and in the course of opening Roxi's hive I found lots of honey, but no brood (babies).  Usually when looking in the brood boxes (the lower two supers), I can see bee larvae in various stages of development.  The eggs look like tiny grains of rice.  As they get larger they resemble wet, gushy, white grubs, and as they get even older, the brood cells that they're growing in are capped for final development - at which point they chew themselves out of the cell and become adult bees.

Well, there were no developing bees in Roxi's hive AT ALL!  Nada, zero, zilch.  That could only mean one thing - Roxi was no longer there.  And to further corroborate that fact, I noticed that the girls were building queen cells on a couple of the frames.

A colony can not function without a queen.  So if the queen dies, goes missing, or slacks off in her egg production, the hive will begin developing a new queen.  They first begin by building queen cells - which resemble unopened peanut shells like this:

Then they feed the developing larvae royal jelly that transforms a regular worker bee into a queen.  Once she hatches, she will leave the hive (the only time she will ever leave willingly) and take off on a wild bender for 3 or 4 days where she will mate with multiple male bees.  During this flight she will obtain all the sperm she will need to reproduce for the rest of her life.  It's sort of like "Spring Break: Girls Gone Wild," but with bees.

It's not a good idea to let the hive develop their own queen, because you don't have any control over the bees that she will mate with.  We have Africanized honey bees here in Central Texas, and if the queen mates with one of these smarmy dudes, the brood she produces will carry those genetics - and it's likely that the hive will become more aggressive.  Not what I want.

Better to order a new queen from a reputable bee breeder.  The problem is that not many breeders have queens available this late in the summer - they tend to produce their stock for spring when everyone starts new hive installations.

I must go log onto my Austin Urban Beekeepers site to put out an APB for new queen sources.  They are an extraordinarily knowledgeable and helpful group of beeks.   I'm so lucky to be part of it.

Stingville .....

It was like something out of a Freddy Kruger movie ...

I went out yesterday to feed my bees and do a normal hive inspection.  Normally, I open each super (or box) of the hive, pull out each frame, and check them for things like mites, beetles, chalk brood and other nasty things.  So far (knock on wood) the only problem that I've had to deal with is a few hive beetles here and there - and never more that 4 or 5 in each hive - which a really good, low number.

I opened Maybelle's hive first.  Things were looking great there.  Her girls had done an impressive job drawing out all the comb in the third super - lots of capped honey - and even more nectar being dried before capping.  I was feeling pretty darned good about things because everything in that top box is mine, mine, I tell you!

Then I went into the lower two boxes - I knew I should have closed up shop once the wind picked up, because we all know that bees don't like the wind blowing into their open hive.  But I had to disassemble the hive right down to the bottom board to see if my organic, olive oil beetle traps were doing their work.  So, technically, yes it was my fault, but I just overstayed my welcome and Maybelle's girls are not always known for their manners.  Before I knew it, 20 of Maybelle's minions were attacking my glove like ham on rye ... or bees on honey.  I was lucky to walk away with only three stings.

Oh well, you can't be a beek without expecting to get stung.  My hand looks horrific today.

I Cut The Cheese ... Literally

I've been a cheesemaker for a few years, but have always had problems aging hard cheeses.  Soft cheeses - those requiring 6 weeks or less to age - are no problemo.  I've always been able to successfully ripen them using a small undercounter refrigerator with an external thermostat to keep the temperature at the right level - usually 50 to 55 degrees.  The problem with the small refrigerator, though, is that it doesn't regulate the humidity.  Cheeses like high humidity and refrigerators don't have a means of stabilizing this.

I've had some success controlling the humidity with jars of water and wicking material - but it's time consuming and very inconsistent.  I can manage to make this approach limp along for a few weeks - which is great for my bries and camemberts.  But I've never had success aging anything longer than 2 months.

And then I discovered the Eurocave - from France - that uses cold wall technology.  This machine has been designed to generate high levels of humidity.  It's really meant to be used to age wine, but coincidentally wine and cheese like the same humidity and temperature ranges - so why not cheese, I ask?

It was a birthday present to myself - and it wasn't cheap - the big question was - would it work?

Well ... today I had the pleasure of cutting open my first ever Monterey Jack cheese including green jalapenos grown in my garden.  Actually Tom did the cutting while I did the photo essay.  It had beautiful color and was very, very delicious.  Next time I think I'll put in more jalapenos.  The only negative was there were cracks in the center.  Don't know what caused that - perhaps not turning it enough early in the aging process?  I'll have to do some research.  It didn't hurt the taste, just the look.

Overall, I'm so over the top with the outcome - especially knowing I can know work on mastering hard cheeses.  Let the curdling begin ...

People are giving me strange looks in the grocery store ...

Normally when establishing a hive the beekeeper feeds the bees in the early spring, until the warm weather ushers in a good nectar flow.  Then, when fall approaches, a careful beekeeper will feed the hive again for a month or so to ensure that the colony has enough food to overwinter.

Well the drought is SOOOO bad here in Central Texas that all area beekeepers are being encouraged to feed their bees throughout the entire summer.  Sugar water is the best food.  It's easy to make:  boil the water, take it off the heat, stir in the sugar, cool to room temperature, put it in the hive feeders.  The ratio of sugar to water is huge, though.  The recipe calls for equal parts water and sugar by weight.

Realize that a gallon of water weighs 8.3 pounds - so for every gallon of bee food, I dissolve one and a half regular 5 pound bags of sugar into it.  Consider that each of my hives is going through two gallons of food a week.  Multiply that by 2 hives, and it turns out that I'm using over 30 pounds of sugar a week!

I really should be feeding them twice a week since the feeders are dry each time I go out, but my work schedule has been crazy - making it hard to get out to the hives more than once a week.  And also, do you have any idea how expensive sugar is???

You can imagine the looks I get when I schlugg my grocery cart to the check out line full of bags of sugar.  Like a drunk covering their tracks, I tend to go to different grocery stores each time so people can't follow my sugar buying habits.

This morning the check out lady looked in my cart - full of 8-10 pound bags of sugar.  She was around 60 if a day, maybe 5'2", toting a BMI in the 30+ range, and sporting 3" of root growth.  In a sarcastic Boston laced accent she asked, "Planning to do a lot of baking are we sweetie?"

Yes, I am DEFINATLY going to have the most expensive honey ever produced.