Honey and the Mason Jar Sieve

A colony dies in N. California

A colony of my bees didn't make it this winter, so I've begun pulling out the honey they made. 

Why did the bees die?

A number of factors, not the least of which we had a lot of rain in late November and December with chilly temperatures. 

Bees need to get out and fly every couple of days to purge themselves, but they can only do that if the temperature rises above 50 degrees.  Then too, these colonies were somewhat weak going into the fall.  They had two "brood supers" (the big boxes where the queen lays her eggs) of stored honey, but they ended up eating out some of the frames and getting into a frame corner, and they didn't have enough heat to stay warm.  So they starved themselves and then got too cold.  Sad! But that's what happened.  I found the queen and a small circle of attending bees surrounding her, dead in a corner of a frame.

Queen and attending bees had food. But they were just too cold.

So, anyway, a few dead bees and a lot of unused honey. What to do?

 Pulling honey without an extractor

I don't own a honey extractor - the one I had back in Indiana was auctioned off when I left there 30 years ago.  It was the old six frame extractor that I picked up at an auction, and I had never used it.  It was made out of galvanized steel anyway, so it was no big loss.
 
So I've been pulling honey for a couple of years now without an extractor, one frame at a time.  Here's what I use:

Bill of Materials

• Plastic foundation in all the hive frames.
• Very large stainless steel bowl.
• Large stainless cooking spoon.
• Rubber (or sometimes wooden) spatula.
• Four empty wide-mouth quart mason jars.
• Six wide-mouth mason jar rings.
• Four lids.
• A bit of new, fiberglass window screen.
• Scissors.
• Duct-tape.
• Plastic straws

Simple Mason Jar Sieve for straining honey from comb

Here's what I do:

1. The plastic foundation allows me to scrape out the honey and wax - down to the foundation - without re-wiring the frames each year. The bees will rebuild the comb as they bring in new nectar. (Not very efficient for the bees, but they're cheap labor.)
2. Normally I pull out one frame at a time from the colony, brushing off any bees, and bring it into the house.
3. Scrape the honey and wax into the large stainless bowl using a stainless spoon until I have cleaned the frame down.  I use the rubber spatula to get as much honey off the frame as possible, and then rise the excess off with hot water.  Then I return the frame back to the colony. (In the current situation, back to the empty super.)
4. I chop up the honey comb as much as possible with the spoon, and then ladle the mess into two quart-sized mason jars.  One deep frame of honey with wax seems to just fill two quart jars, but sometimes it goes to three.
5. I take two mason jar rings and duct-taped them "top-to-top" so I have a single band that can hold two jars, mouth-to-mouth.
6. A piece of fiberglass window screen is traced with the mason jar lid. I cut the screen in a circle that fits exactly inside of one of the duct-taped rings.
7. I put the taped rings (with the screen) onto the jar containing the honey comb so that the screen is honey-side in the ring.
8. I insert an empty mason jar into the top of the ring and then turn the whole thing upside down.

The honey drizzles down into the empty mason jar and that's about it.

The only problem with this technique is that as the honey drizzles down, it creates a suction in the top mason jar.  Placing the jars at an angle will allow the air in the bottom mason jar to move as a bubble to the top of the top jar.  This gets things going pretty well: I use the cleaned up stainless bowl for this purpose to act as a stand.  Two jars, bottom-to-bottom leaning against the rim of the bowl. It's a little wobbly with just two jars in it, but it works okay. If I'm doing two frames at a time, it's a little tricky, but as I said, it's a big stainless bowl.

Still, eventually I'll end up with a wax/honey plug that is against the screen that slows the drizzle.  So, if the mixture is really thick, I'll open the top jar and push and "smoosh" the wax along the inside glass with the spoon, and then insert a straw behind the screen - reaching to the top of the top jar containing the honey and wax combo. The straw then allows enough air to seep into the top jar and keep the mixture draining.

The process takes a couple of days, and I keep fiddling with it until all the honey is out of the comb. This is a work in progress, and I am still working on the details of the easiest way to set this whole rig going.

When I figure I've got as much honey out of the wax as I can, I simply disassemble the filled jar, put a lid on it with a new ring, and put it into the pantry.

I run hot water into the remaining jar with the screen and the wax - washing the wax until it's sort of granulated.  When the wax no longer has any honey on it I dry the wax between paper towels, and then put it into a plastic bag for a later time when I have enough to melt down in a homemade solar extractor.

The entire process, as I said, takes a couple of days, but the amount of time I'm actually working is usually pretty small - maybe 15-20 minutes per frame if I'm focused. Clean up is easy, as everything goes into the dishwasher - including the screen circles which I reuse. 

This obviously isn't the most time-productive way to pull a lot of honey, but since I normally only take a single frame or two at a time, it's appropriate for the normal amount of honey that we use. A quart jar filled with honey is about 3 lbs. It's certainly less expensive than buying an extractor, or the mess of setting one up, extracting, and then cleaning up that contraption afterwards.

Now, however, I've got a lot of frames with honey, so we'll see what I end up doing.

Thanks bees!  Sorry you didn't make it this year.  Next year - if we continue with this kind of weather - I'll probably insulate the hive boxes. 

One more note:  Last summer I took a colony from a tree that had been working wild mustard in the vineyards.  Wow! Amazing honey. The stuff was almost pure white, and was like eating candy.

The only problem was that the wild mustard nectar was mostly composed of dextrose sugar.  The result? 

Dextrose crystallizes easily, so I had a lot of crystallized honey in the comb itself.  So I had to heat the mason jars filled with wax and crystallized honey in a water bath before I could run it in the sieve.  A little more work, but the results were good.  A couple days later the dextrose honey was again crystallizing in their jars.

Removing Bees from an Interior Wall.... A Recollection of What We Did.

Thirty years ago Judith became a bee widow. That is, she lost her husband(me)to the escapades of an Indiana Agricultural Inspector named Bruce who adopted me as a cohort in his beekeeping adventures. Bruce was a wonderful friend, but to Judith -- who was struggling with a newborn baby -- he was a kidnapper who spirited me away on different adventures with wild bee hives colonies.

One of these adventures was the removal of a well-established colony of wild bees that had built a nest in the walls of a rural house. Over a period of about 1 month, Bruce showed me how remove the bees and extract the honey without removing a single nail or board.

I'm remembering this adventure now only because a neighbor has complained of a similar malady of bees. I'm writing down what we did so that, perhaps, I won't be called upon to help. It wasn't that hard, but removing bees from houses is one of those skills that one does not want to publicize. Experience shows that, once known, calls from potential customers come all too frequently, usually just as one is sitting down to dinner.

Here's a description of the house where the bees inhabited:

It was a small single-story cape -- something we used to call a "National Home" -- situated out in the countryside, close to the Michigan/Indiana border. We knocked on the door and were met by a huge man -- well over 300 pounds -- who was gripping a shotgun in his mitt. He didn't seem particularly grateful to see us until Bruce told him that we were there to try to remove the bees. Suddenly he looked at us with a new garrulousness, relaxing his grip on the shotgun and happily asking us to follow him.

The house seemed to have two bedrooms, a kitchen area, and a tiny living room, but the exact configuration was a bit hard to discern because the entire house was filled from floor to waist-height with junked ham radio equipment from the 1950s and 60s. In fact, the only pathway through the house was so cramped that we had to walk sideways through the equipment where we came to the kitchen area. The wall between the kitchen and the living room had been torn down and a huge plywood platform was erected upon which lay functioning ham radio equipment and a disgustingly dirty mattress where the owner must have slept. This was the combined work/home environment of this man. I imagined he ate, slept, and lived on this platform, listening long into the night to other ham radio operators who were strategically stationed around the world. I imagined they too were exchanging news of our arrival as we spoke to the man.

I've got to hand it to Bruce, however, who took in this sight without the slightest expression of perplexity. Bruce was there for the bees, and what ham radio was for this poor benighted radio operator, bees were to Bruce.

"So, where are they getting in?" he asked.

"In?" I wondered to myself. "Is this the place Bruce has brought me? To a crazy den of junk radio equipment, to extract bees from radio tubes and circuit wires?"

"Outside where the electrical service comes in," was the reply. "I wasn't too worried about them last year, although they were kind of noisy. But now they're moving into my receivers, and the other day I got stung."

We wandered outside to where the power line from the Northern Indiana Public Service Company trailed off a pole and arrived at the corner of the house. Sure enough, there was a hole in the wall near the cable through which a steady stream of bees could be seen coming and going. It was clear that this was not a new colony, but one that had built up over years and years of casual neglect. The noise of their coming and going was very loud.

We returned inside and, stepping over the mounds of equipment, made our way to a small closet adjacent to the power service entry. A few bees were confusedly coming out of a couple of small holes in the wall. Bruce knocked on the wall tentatively, and we heard a loud increase in the level of buzzing through the wall. I thought to myself that, had he knocked much harder, the particleboard walls would collapse and there we would be, facing a very large, very angry colony of wild bees, our exit path hindered by the bulk of this huge man and the tons of radio receivers in our way.

Fortunately, the wall held.

"Okay," Bruce smiled. "We'll have these out of here in no time at all!"

"Are you gonna have to tear down the walls? Cause I don't have no place else to go."

"You'll be fine! But it will just take a little time."

Later, on our way back that evening, I asked him what he intended to do to get them out.

"We'll rob them out," Bruce said. "And I think we'll get about 200 pounds of honey at the same time."

The next evening found us back at the house with section of wire screen deftly rolled into a funnel, and an empty hive body with a couple frames of newly capped bee brood. We also had a few nails and some wood. We searched for all the holes in the side of the house where the bees were coming and going, and carefully stuffed them all with rags, except the main entrance.

Here we fitted the screen cone, wide-side in, over the entrance, tacking it up with just enough nails to make it solid. Since it was twilight, the majority of bees were already back in the walls. Bruce and I then jury rigged and attached the empty hive body against the house itself, using a two-by-four and a couple of ropes. We slipped the brood frames into the hive body, closed it up, and headed for home.

The following evening we returned to the scene. The bees had become confused by the reconfiguration of their entrance. The worker bees had found their way out of the colony through the wire cone, but now could not figure out how to get back in. They were amassing on the outside of the screen, and eventually found their way into the empty hive with the brood frames. We had brought a new queen with us, in a queen cage, and now placed it atop the brood frames. This was to attract the bees who could not get back into their own colony.

Over the next week the homeless bees migrated into the new hive body. They released the queen from her cage and took care of the brood that was beginning to emerge. In about two weeks, only a few new bees -- bees emerging from the brood inside the walls of the house -- were exiting the cone. The rest of the colony was now successfully relocated to the new hive body.

Finally, Bruce returned to the house, removed the new colony, with the new queen, and smoked the old colony with a heavy dose of sulfur smoke. This killed the old queen and all the brood that still resided in the house. After a day or two, when he was certain that no bees were coming out, he removed the cone from the side of the house. But there was a problem.

Inside the walls of the house were still the honey and the beeswax comb.

So he returned the colony that had origianlly come from the walls and set it outside the house. The bees found the honey, robbed it completely out over three days, and moved it entirely to the new colony. Then Bruce carefully patched up the side of the house, and took the new colony home.

When I asked him about the old brood and the remaining wax in the walls he said that, over time, wax moths would set up a colony in the walls and consume the wax very rapidly. He didn't think it would be a problem for the radio operator at all.

So that's how we -- actually mostly Bruce -- removed the bees. It was a neat trick. You should try it. Just don't call this bee man. Judith doesn't want to be a bee widow again.

Does a cure for Bee Colony Collapse end the threat?

A recent article in ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2009) reported that scientists have isolated the parasite Nosema ceranae from professional apiaries suffering from honey bee colony collapse syndrome. The article also said that the scientists had successfully treated infected colonies with Fumagillin, a fungal metabolite that suppresses the formation of new blood vessels.

What's all this mean?

There are a couple of different takes:

First of all, western beekeepers have been battling a different nosema parasite quite a while: Nosema apis. This critter used to be thought of as a protozoan that got into a bee's gut and weakened it to the point of death. But more recent studies have now classified it as a microsporidian: A single-celled fungal-like creature that reproduces with spores. Beekeepers really fear Nosema apis because it severely reduces the viability of a colony, and because its spores are really long-lasting and resistant to freezing -- meaning that successfully over-wintering a colony won't bring relief. Scientists now believe that the bees become infected by eating honey that contains the Nosema apis spores.

Fumagillin had been previously shown to be an effective means of controlling and/or curing Nosema apis. But it's a powerful antibiotic agent that interrupts the cycle by preventing by blocking blood vessel formation. It does this by binding to an enzyme called methionine aminopeptidase. Sort of like deep magical poison. Fumagillin is also used as an experimental anti-cancer drug.

What's curious is that Nosema ceranae -- the completely different microsporidian -- has now been finally identified as the parasite that has been behind colony collapse disorder.

Nosema ceranae is a much more recently discovered pest. Some say that it has existed in the Eastern honey bee Apis cerana for some time, but it was only first discovered in Western honey bee populations in Spain in 1996.

This would suggest that it made a species jump relatively recently -- as little as ten years ago -- and that could be why it's been so virulent: The Western honey bee Apis mellifera has not yet developed any immunity or resistence. If Fumagillin does, in fact, work, it's great news in the short run. But it's not the best news one could hope for.

Why?

The world's dependency on the Western honey bee Apis mellifera for pollination has really gotten out of hand.

Agriculturalists will always tell you that crop monoculture is dangerous to the ecology because it concentrates an environment that permit pests to evolve to specialize and take advantage of the niche'. We saw this in the wine industry with Phylloxera.

Today U.S. crops are now heavily dependent upon a different sort of monoculture: The pollinating capacity of the Western honey bee Apis mellifera.

How is this being manifested?

Thirty years ago, when I first became involved with beekeeping, the number of bee pests were significantly fewer. The Tracheal mite Acarapis woodi was not known in the U.S., though it had appeared on the Isle of Wight. It arrived here in the early 1980s. Varroa mites Varroa destructor were not in the U.S. until 1987. All that beekeepers had to deal with back then were American Foul Brood, European Foul Brood, Chalk Brood and wax moths.

Most of the diseases that beekeepers of Apis melliara are seeing seem to be as the result of contact with Apis cerana: The Asiatic honey bee or also known as the Eastern honey bee or the Indian honey bee. This Eastern honey bee isn't as productive as the Western honey bee, but it's been quasi-domesticated for just as long, kept on farms in wooden logs, or more recently in hive bodies. This bee co-evolved with Tracheal mites and Varroa mites, and consequently has managed to build up evolutionary grooming behaviors that help keep the colonies healthy.

So it appears that the more recent problems associated with bee diseases is really a genetic problem that has resulted from the contact of different bees species beyond their naturally occurring ranges.

The downside of this is that the use of pesticides or fungicides may halt a particular disease in a particular colony, but it's not helping the species develop resistance or behavioral modifications that can prevent future problems.

There has been significant work done, however, in creating hybrid bees: Bees that are crossed to create genetically resistant strains.

For instance, the bees that we will be getting are a Carniolan/Yugoslavian cross that is said to be more inherently resistant to Varroa mites. The queen of one variety was artificially inseminated with sperm from a different variety: In this case, Carniolan queen with a Yugoslavian drone. This process is done over at Honey Bee Genetics nearby.

However, another interesting thing that has been documented is that the vitality of queen bees themselves has been seriously diminished -- though it's unclear what the cause might be.

Thirty years ago, it was expected that a queen would be viable in a colony for an average of two years. I'm learning, through reading, that today the viability of a queen is often less than one year, and that re-queening mid year is not uncommon at all.

When you stop to realize that our entire food supply is dependent upon the pollinating capabilities of Apis mellifera, it's a sobering thought about how quickly this dependency could unravel our entire food chain.

Spring and Bees

Judith has prompted me to get into beekeeping once again. This could be, literally, a sore subject because I have a slight allergy to bee stings. But we'll see.

When we lived in Indiana 30 years ago I had several colonies of bees. I got into beekeeping by accident: I bid $5 at a neighbor's auction and ended up with several hundred dollars of beekeeping equipment. No sooner did people hear that I had bee equipment than they began calling me with news of swarms that they wanted me to remove. This, in turn, led a local Ag Inspector -- who was also an avid beekeeper -- to start calling me to go on "bee adventures" with him. Each Saturday he had a new adventure involving bees, and they generally consumed the entire weekend. On one such adventure, we captured a colony that was living in an old tree. In another adventure, bees had taken over a house, and we were asked to remove them. After a single summer of such adventures, I had more bee colonies than I knew what to do with. Judith started calling herself a "Bee Widow".

Eventually we left the farm and moved -- without the bees -- down to Indianapolis. I didn't bother to tell the bees where we were moving. I figured they could take care of themselves. And they did okay for a number of years, finally dieing out about four years later.

So now we're going to start beekeeping again. I'm wondering what kind of mischief I'll be in before the summer is out. Will Judith once again don the striped headscarf of the Bee Widow?