Campbell's Honey

A young woman,  anxious to shed a nervous fingernail biting habit, was advised by a friend to try Yoga. She did, and her fingernails were soon growing normally. When her friend asked if Yoga had cured this nervous affliction, she replied, "No, but now I can reach my toenails, so I bite  them instead." ~ author unknown.

After beekeeping, my next most enjoyable activity is Yoga. My wife and I have been practising Hatha Yoga since our oldest child was able to babysit his three younger siblings. We began by taking weekly classes, which have evolved over the years, into a 45 minute session, 6 mornings a week, before breakfast.

Yoga is a series of slow stretching movements designed to strengthen your muscles and lubricate your joints. After an early morning yoga session (trust me) you feel so good you will hardly be able to stand it, and the morning ritual is certain to become a favourite part of your day.

Along with a happy, healthy lifestyle, and a well balanced diet, I credit the practise of Yoga with the fact that, at age 75, I am able  to operate  four hundred colonies of honeybees, mostly by myself, and enjoy every day, as if it were my last.

My wife Lorene, is also healthy and happy, and able to spend large amounts of time helping with the honey,  keeping the house, and playing bridge at  several clubs, both in Canada and the US.

Comments welcome!

The weather in Southeast Ontario in April, May, and early June, was unusually cool and wet. Not  exactly the kind of climate we were hoping for, after coming out of a cold winter with a thirty percent bee mortality rate. However as spring turned to summer the cool weather turned hot, the bees surprised everyone. Without delay the strongest hives were split in hopes the new queens would mature, mate, and lay eggs before the first of July; we hoped the hives would get strong before the start of the traditional summer honey flow.

Our hopes were answered, and we began to 'super' the hives before the end June,  not only to provide for honey storage, but to cool the strong colonies and keep them content at home. Last week I was adding 6 or 8 supers on a yard of 30 colonies, This week  I have several yards with most of the hives supered, and one perfect yard where every colony has a honey super. Just to set the record straight - I now have my original 400 colonies back, after losing 100 (more or less) over the winter.

There's more to supering (adding a honey box) then you might imagine. First  and foremost we check the hive to make sure it has a healthy queen laying eggs in the brood chamber. This is important  because if the hive is queenless it will soon die, and we not only lose our year's honey crop, but probably also the wax frames which are then at great risk for loss or damage by wax moths.

If the hive has a young queen, not yet mated, its very possible that she may come back from her mating flight and enter the honey box above the queen excluder where she will begin to lay eggs. When she fills the honey supers with brood, the worker bees will store the honey below in the brood chambers where the beekeeper cannot get it.

If the hive is not checked for a laying queen before the honey super goes on, a young mated queen may be about to begin laying. At this stage in her life, although she is mated, she has not yet grown to her full size, and as she moves about in the hive she might crawl up through the excluder into the honey box.

We always begin supering with a single box on each hive. This is because Honeybees like to fill several boxes at the same time, which makes a lot of handling and extra work for the beekeeper as he gathers his early honey crop for extraction. The only exception to this, would be if the colony was exceptionally strong, with bees hanging on the outside of the broodboxes. Then we would add an extra honeybox to help cool the hive, and make the colony more comfortable

Later on, we sometimes tease the bees by adding a super of wax foundation (this is undrawn comb as it comes from the bee supply house). We like to put this on top of a box of drawn honeycomb. The bees will fill the super of drawn comb completely, before beginning to draw out the foundation above. They hate starting from scratch on the flat plastic or wax sheets, but when they have no other choice they will draw out the foundation and fill it with honey.

What sweet little creatures they are!

One of the special perks of beekeeping is working outside on most of the best days of summer. Beekeeping is great fun, but watching and listening to the birds just adds another dimension to the enjoyment. Although I enjoy all the wild birds, there are two members of the same bird family that are a special delight. The Mimidae Family are mimics, and have no song of their own, instead they are endlessly improvising, by mimicking the songs of other birds. Catbirds repeat their phrases once, and Brown Thrashers twice.  As I'm driving to a bee yard down a farmers lane lined with thick brush on either side, I see  a bright flash, as a Brown Thresher flits across in front of the truck.

Upon arriving at the bee yard, I put on my veil, light the smoker, and as I begin to work,  I hear a meow-call, (like a cat with a sore throat) coming from a tree along beside the yard.  My friend the Gray Catbird is warming up his tonsils for the day. He's sitting hidden, somewhere in the thick leaves, while beginning his long burst of song, with many different phrases in succession. His auditory display of high squeaky singing  goes on and on, as if  he's telling me the story of his life.  His song is music to my ears, and it makes my work even more enjoyable.  ~ Comments are welcomed! ~

The time for 'supering' the hives, (or adding honey boxes) comes in early June, right after the dearth, and with the advent of warmer nights, and stronger bee populations. It's normal for some colonies to be ready for honey supers before the rest.  Hives that have been split will have an old queen in one split, and a new queen in the other. The old queen's egg laying was not interrupted by the splitting, so her colony will have a larger population, and be ready first. The other half of the split has had to draw a queen, and their new queen will be several weeks later.  I'm finding many colonies at this time, with wall to wall bees on the top super, and the bottom super mostly empty. This has been caused by colder than normal weather, which left the bottom brood chamber too cold for the queen, and she refused to go down.

If swarm cells are observed on the bottom bars of the upper brood chamber, at any time after splitting season is past, the standard practise is to add the honey super, which cools the colony and usually changes their mind-set, from swarming away- to staying home and gathering honey. As you can imagine, temperatures, both inside, and outside the hive, are very important to a colony of cold-blooded insects.

Each honey super consists of eight frames of drawn wax comb, and can, on a good honey season be filled with 60 to 70 lbs of honey.  We usually add these honey boxes one at a time. In this area the early honey comes in slowly over a 4 week period. If 2 supers are added at once, the bees have a tendency to fill each box about half full.  To cut down on handling, and keep the bees honest, we wait till the first box is full, before adding the second.

Another tool exclusive to honey production is the queen excluder.

The queen excluder is a coarse screen, precision made to the exact size that will allow worker bees to pass through, but  block the  queen. The reason for the importance of this tool, is because the queen will always go to the top box of the hive to lay eggs. But the honey supers are stacked on the top of the hive to facilitate the honey harvest. The queen excluder is placed ( like a window screen) over the top of the brood chamber, under the honey boxes, and the queen is  thereby confined to lay eggs and raise the brood in the bottom two boxes of the hive, leaving the honey supers clear for honey storage.

Campbell's Honey is locally famous for it's purple loosestrife honey, and another product, called Honey Hand Cream.

Purple loosestrife nectar is gathered by the bees in August in the hottest and driest part of the summer. Because these plants have deep roots in swampy areas they continue to produce nectar all through the summer droughts.

The single variety honey known as Purple Loosestrife, is slightly darker than water-white, and has a slightly stronger flavor. When bottled in glass it can appear a pale shade of green. We like to call it the "medicinal honey" since its been used by doctors to heal bedsores on patients with stubborn conditions that were resistant to standard medical procedures.

Beware of beekeepers that advertise 'organic' honey

Although our Purple Loosestrife Honey is derived from plants which are not under cultivation, we do not label our product "organic."  Its our belief, there can be no organic honey produced anywhere in Canada at this time, because all beekeepers are finding it necessary to apply at least four different chemicals directly to the bees, to keep them alive, and to save them from the ravishes of two different types of blood-sucking mites, a small hive beetle, and several other devastating bee diseases.

Honey Hand Cream is another  popular product which we have been making for several decades. This homemade salve is prepared by hand in small batches, and sold to our many dedicated customers.

The main ingredients are beeswax, olive oil and honey. These constituents are heated, and mixed together with water and borax. The mixture is then beaten until it cools and thickens, at which time it is poured into small jars and labeled. The resultant cream is useful for many skin ailments, especially dry cracked skin on hands and feet.

Each spring in Southern Ontario, after the apple blossoms drop,  the dandelions blow and the lilacs have all turned brown, there comes a disruption in the nectar flow which is caused by an interval between the early spring flowers, and the summer blossoms. This seasonal interruption in the nectar flow is called a dearth, and the bees, predisposed to gathering nectar, become miserable and cross...

At this time I find it best to catch them in their hives, early in the morning, before they have ventured out, and returned empty and ugly.  Several puffs of smoke change their mindset, from brooding disappointment, to  rigorous desperation, and they will grudgingly allow me to rummage around in their nursery, and bread-basket.

Yellow Buttercups are blooming profusely in the pastures and roadsides, but the honeybees  fly right on by.  For some reason they are not attracted to Buttercups.

Bright red Honeysuckles bloom in fence rows and gardens, but the bees can't access their nectar, stored in the ends of the long tube-like flower. The dearth is a very difficult time in the life of a bee, but fortunately it  only lasts about a week or ten days.

The biggest thrill in beekeeping is always, finding the queen. It's especially nice to know where she is in the hive, but finding her by definition, is a chore in itself. Either you get lucky, and find her on the first frame you pull, or you search for an hour and end up shaking the bees into another super, minus the queen.

Some queens are so brazen they will lay eggs even as you hold the frame up in the direct sunlight, while the next queen is so shy she runs and hides in the darkest corner as soon as the lid is lifted. Nevertheless it'd be unusual to work in a beeyard for several hours without finding several queens by accident as you work in the hives.

Fortunately it's seldom imperative that the Queen be located, and there are other, much easier ways to determine her health and existence. During the  spring and summer when the beekeeper pulls a frame or two from the top super, the health and well being of the Queen becomes very obvious. Empty cells, or scattered uneven brood patterns, are a sign of an old or injured Queen, but when the frames are well filled with capped brood, or uncapped larvae and eggs, the Queen is alive and well.

A colony is only as good as its queen, and the queen is the mother of the colony. During the busy summer months she lays up to 2000 eggs a day, and the worker bee numbers soon grow to as many as 80 to 100 thousand. A honey bee gathers two teaspoons of honey in her life, and dies from overwork, or work related accidents such as a head -on collision with an outgoing bee as she is coming in, heavily loaded, for a landing at the hive entrance.

Spotting the queen amid 20,000 workers is a special skill. The trick is not to look for the queen specifically, but to  relax and let your eyes travel across the frame. The queen (if she is there) will jump out at you,( metaphorically speaking.)

A bad weather spell will sometimes keep a young queen from her mating flight. An unmated queen can be as small as a worker, but usually slightly lighter in color. Once mated she will quickly grow longer and thicker, to accomodate the sperm cells  from her mating flight, which she will use to fertilize the worker bee eggs. Hopefully she will have enough to last for her lifetime of 3 or 4 years.

When I bought my first 40 colonies of honeybees in the early 1970's I knew very little about beekeeping, except that my brother and oldest son already had five colonies and were talking about expanding.  I jumped into the business on a whim, and from that day forward we all learned the science of apiculture together, and called our business "Campbell's Honey."

Shortly after starting out, we began to purchase more  bees. Our first venture was 150 colonies from  an elderly beekeeper  who was suffering from heart disease.  To this day I can still remember his blue lips. As his wife told us later, she had never known him make a deal on paper, but  he wrote it out for us on Saturday, and died the following Monday. The deal had been signed, and we were able to buy the bees from his wife. Shortly thereafter we were approached by another retiring beekeeper who had been in the business for forty years and was firmly established with over 350 colonies. Again we were able to make the deal, and at this point we began to think of ourselves as Commercial Beekeepers.

We were able to get established in a hurry, but with old and worn equipment. The beehives were made of  pine lumber and had been sitting outside in the weather for many years. Although they were still serviceable, they were definately showing signs of wear. Its also worth noting that the wooden equipment had been made by many different bee-men, and came in all shapes and sizes. Many pieces were a loose fit  that allowed field mice to crawl  under a hive lid in the fall, and find a warm place to spend the winter. Field mice build their nests in the brood chamber, and chew holes in the comb of several frames. The bees will not repair the comb and the damaged frames must be discarded.

What happens to the mice? The bees get their revenge in the spring. The mice enjoy the warmth and shelter of the hive in the winter, and they get to eat some of the  wintering bees, but when warm spring weather arrives, the bees regain their freedom of movement. Honey bees are very clean insects and the rank smell of a mouse is enough to get them enraged. Venom from bee stings acts by slowing the muscle movement of warm blooded animals, and although some mice do escape,  ten bee stings or more, can be fatal, and quite enough venum  to stop the heart of a field mouse.

Swarm season is an exciting time for a hobby beekeeper with a swarm box set up and ready to (hopefully)  catch a swarm of honeybees looking for a new home. But more experienced commercial beekeepers are all about preventing swarms, and properly managing increases before the bees draw out a queen cell and 'split'.

In the old days, commercial beekeepers counted on swarms to make an increase in their  colonies.  Here's an old-time beekeeper's rhyme,

A swarm in May, is worth a load of hay. A swarm June is worth a silver spoon.  A swarm in July is not worth a fly.

There are several good reasons why catching swarms has gone out of style with commercial beekeepers. A swarm is an unknown quantity. Nobody knows if the bees are carrying mites, foul brood, or some other bee disease. Bees that swarm are not as able to produce honey because their efforts are focused on producing bees.  The swarming tendency is inherited, so the commercial operator is not usually interested in catching swarms. But he is very interested in preventing his bees from swarming.

I begin to split  colonies as soon as the queen bee is forced down into the bottom box (around May first) where she resumes laying eggs. I make continuous trips about every two weeks to each hive, until the honey flow begins around July first. I pry the supers apart and search for swarm cells that are built on the bottom bars of the top super.  A swarm cell is a queen cell built to expedite a swarm. When I see this cell I split the hive, and this usually succeeds in keeping the colony from swarming.  I want my bees to stay home and produce honey.

There are two kinds of beekeepers, honey producers and queen and nuke producers.  (A nuke is a four frame nucleus of a hive complete with a queen bee).  The queen and nuke producers (bee breeders) produce honey bees and queens for sale. If you are a member of a Beekeeper's Association, it's doubtful you will hear much about splitting bee colonies from the membership, because if everyone split their bees to make an increase the Bee Breeders sales would be flat.

There were an estimated five thousand beekeepers in the Province of Ontario in the 1980's. Many of these people were hobbyists and not up to speed on the prevention, cure or even the proper diagnosis of honeybee diseases. Consequently a malady known as 'American Foul Brood' became a huge problem in Ontario honeybees during that decade. This is a contagious disease that spreads quickly when bees from strong hives rob the spore infested honey from weak (diseased) beehives.

June 1990 I was asked to join a special task force of provincial government funded bee inspectors and work for the Dept of Agriculture and Food to stamp out AFB and other bee diseases while educating hobbiests on how to feed antibiotics. We were sent to inspect many different problem areas in the province to 'search and destroy' diseased beehives.

Once identified, American Foul Brood must be burned, as there is no known cure, and the spores of the disease will live in the ground for up to 70 years.  We found some bee operations that were totally inundated with the disease, which looks like brown sticky gravy and has a very distinctive sweet and moldy odour. An AFB Stick Test is conducted when a beekeeper pokes a brood cell with a stick and brown rope gravy clings to the stick as its removed.  At that point our only recourse was to have a large hole dug in a local gravel pit. Here the unfortunate beekeeper's infected hives and equipment was burned, often by the truckload.

The first procedure after finding the disease was to pour half a gallon of gasoline over an open colony to kill the affected bees. This made moving the colony easier, and facilitated burning.

Not everything had to be destroyed each time. When there were only a few colonies affected, we dug a small hole by hand, lit a fire, and burned the diseased combs. Then the empty brood chambers were stacked together with paper, and ignited at the bottom. As the fire caught,  the beeswax coating on the inside of the supers ignited, and the temperature soared to over 1200 degrees F. which is hot enough to kill the spores. Equipment scorched in this way could be safely reused.

One adventure that comes to mind, was an incident at a large apple orchard in the fruit growing area of Niagara. The owner had a few colonies to pollinate his apples, and when his bees became sick he called the Department of Agriculture.

I was dispatched along with a young helper to inspect these colonies. After diagnosing the disease as AFB, we conferred with the owner, and proceeded to burn the two affected colonies. After soaking them with gasoline we lifted them onto my small truck to take them to a suitable place to be burned. My helper was sitting on the open tailgate of the truck, with his smoker still lit. As we drove down the lane the breeze fanned the smoker, which flamed up, and caught in the  fumes emanating from the gasoline drenched hives. Suddenly I heard a  loud "Whoosh" as both hives exploded at once.

Thankfully, nobody was hurt, and no damage done!

I stopped the truck  backed around, and we kicked both burning hives off  the back of the truck and into a grassy ditch where they burned without any more problems.