Awn Kitchen’s Urban Honey Bees

Three summers ago I decided I wanted to get honey bees. It’s not quite as simple as just making the decision to get bees in the city of Edmonton, there is a bit that goes into it – sourcing the bees and equipment, taking a course, getting permits, etc., which I wrote a bit about last year. I didn’t want honey bees for honey but because they’re pollinators and the most interesting, fascinating insects to learn about.

Last year was my first year with bees and looking back it was an easy year. We had to do a late season split of our hive which meant we had two weaker hives rather than one strong. The resources they had worked so hard to build (honey and pollen) were left theirs for the winter, except for one and a half frames of excess honey after condensing the hives. You can read about last year and early this year.

I can’t help but feel a little proud of the honey we got from our backyard bees this year. It’s been an interesting second season of backyard beekeeping; a whole lot of testing of nerves and patience, but many good times too, a summer of friendships being built over bees, a summer of learning. Week after week we’d open the hives to inspect and check in on what they’ve been up to. Early this season when I realized one of our hives didn’t make it through the winter I felt sad and guilty. Had we done something wrong? The days of rain in the early summer had me worried – would they have enough resources for this winter? Opening our second hive created fear and led me to being stung for the first time (such an aggressive hive!). The first attempted swarm had me wanting to give up, as did the second attempt, as did the first actual swarm, and the wild swarm, and finally, the fourth attempt. Why was our one hive so determined to swarm after we had done everything we needed to prevent them doing so!? Even after seeking advice from professionals we were left confused. Waiting for a queen to hatch and go on her mating flight and having to re-queen two other hives led to school girl squeals when I finally saw successful brood! Learning how to harvest and cleaning up the endless sticky mess left me with a great feeling of accomplishment (even though the bees did most of the work!). We harvested 16.5 litres of honey this year and the bees still have plenty to get them through the winter! Tending to three beehives in my backyard (that aren’t a source of income for me but rather a hobby), made me realize farmers feel those things all year too – whether they have bees, livestock, or grow field crops of veggies, fruit, grain, etc. That sense of accomplishment didn’t dawn on me until I saw my rows of honey on the kitchen table. Farmers feel that accomplishment too and it shows in the pride they take all year doing what they do. That’s the short version of our summer, if you’re keen to learn a bit more about what some of this means, keep reading!

We all know that honey comes from honey bees, but I must say I didn’t really know much about the process prior to getting bees. Last year we left most of the honey in the hives for the bees. Those tiny little insects over-wintering in Alberta is some thought, hey? They work so darn hard all summer foraging and bringing resources back to the hive.

There are various types of bee hives, we chose to go with a beecentric hive, these hives are made right here in Edmonton by Dustin Bajer. A bee hive consists of boxes (supers) full of frames. These frames can have foundation or not, the foundation is a piece of plastic in the frame. A foundation-less frame, is just that, a frame (imagine a picture frame). The first step for the bees is to build up the wax (comb) on these frames, this comb becomes a place to store pollen, nectar, and honey, and a place for the queen to lay her eggs. They also work very hard using a substance called propolis to seal the entire hive together, this is SO sticky, and I feel bad every time I go into the hive and break apart frames that have been stuck together with propolis (checking urban hives weekly is very important to avoid swarming). The bees really like to build on foundation-less frames. We do a combination of frames with foundation and without, they tend to start building on the ones without foundation first. Using a combination means things stay slightly more in line. If they are “free” building the comb, things can get a bit intricate and not so perfect, which doesn’t bother the bees, but makes it harder to do inspections (often you break capped honey and it’s a sticky mess), because they end up attaching two or more frames together with comb. The foundation forces them to work in a more perfect way, selfish maybe for beekeepers to use, but it really means less waste, and a cleaner hive. This comb takes a long time for the bees to build. From there, bees head out to forage bringing back nectar. The moisture has to be pulled from the nectar in order for it to be honey that can be stored. Once this is done they cap it, meaning they cover it with a thin layer of wax.

Last year when we took the little bit of honey that we did, we brought these frames in, scraped all of the comb and honey off the frames, and let it drain through fine sieves. This means, we destroyed ALL of that work that the bees had put into make the comb, something I wasn’t really comfortable with. I didn’t get bees for honey, remember, so taking the honey out and ruining their work just didn’t seem fair to the bees. Taking 18 frames this year, if we had extracted the honey like that, it would mean that those 18 frames would go back into the hive next summer when the bees need more space, and guess what… they’d have to build up all of that wax again, which means two things – it’s a lot of work, and they can’t build up their stores as quickly. Now, for a beekeeper, saving the comb means next year our yield technically should be higher, which is not important to me, but if we had a really terrible, wet year, it could also mean that the winter stores would be more abundant for those bees.

This is why we decided to invest in a mighty expensive extractor. We had a little honey extracting party as I have a few friends with bees, so it made sense to get together and do it all at once. We used a warm knife to scrape the capping off the comb that seals in the honey – the thin layer of wax mentioned above. These frames are then put into the extractor and spun to get the honey out, leaving the comb intact. We got better as we went, breaking less comb each time. The honey pours out of the bottom of the extractor through series of sieves and then gets bottled. Everything about bees is sticky! I figure I lost a litre of honey to my clothes, skin, the floor and counter! The most satisfying kitchen clean ever!

I have shared a lot about the bees on social media and I always get loads of feedback, my bees have a little following. I love sharing the stories about the bees with you all and appreciate that you enjoy hearing about them. This year has been a real test of patience and nerves, it’s also been a year full of learning! One of the most common questions or comments I get is something along the lines of, “wow, who knew it was that much work, why do you do it?”. It is a lot of work and it’s also not a cheap hobby, but it’s very rewarding. I know why people ask that, and I will admit that looking back on this summer, there were days I had doubts.

These past two years with lots of rain have provided some challenging times for beekeepers (commercial and urban alike). Early on in the year our bees attempted to swarm. As mentioned above, checking your hives weekly (in an urban setting especially) is important to prevent swarming. Bees will swarm for various reasons – if the hive gets too strong and there are too many bees with not enough space they can swarm, or they can swarm because something negative is happening to the hive. Usually you can tell when a hive is going to swarm because you will see queen cells. Queen cells can mean one of two things – the original queen died or is sick, or the bees are getting ready to swarm and need to prep the hive to ensure a new queen will hatch. When bees swarm, about 50% of the bees leave with the original queen, the bees will have been busy leading up to the swarm to scout out a perfect place to go, often they will leave the hive together, re-group and then find the perfect spot. So what does this look like? Well, it looks like chaos, pure chaos and it is very loud. Thousands of bees leave the hive, and it takes time to settle in at their new location.

As mentioned, our bees attempted to swarm a few times. Now, this sounds like a contradiction, shouldn’t we have known that they were going to swarm? Yes, we should have. But it was a bit of a challenging year. I will break it down a bit to make more sense of it:

Hive 1: Our original queen, the hive that had survived the winter.

Hive 2: A nuc (a colony of bees) we purchased early in the spring.

Hive 3: A split (meaning we took the bees and split the hive in half) from hive 1 that we conducted in July.

So here’s what happened. Hive 1 attempted to swarm in early July (swarming wasn’t really on our radar). It was a day I will likely never forget. A crazy frenzy of bees was flying around the garden (thousands of bees!)… I didn’t know what to do. I called Dustin Bajer who thankfully talked me through the process, the bees calmed down and went into their hive again. We did an inspection and all seemed okay, we didn’t see queen cells. The fact that they never actually landed anywhere had us all a bit confused. A week later, I was having coffee and thought, this weather seems a lot like the day they attempted to swarm. I was looking out the window and the bees seemed busy, but not too busy… five minutes later, they were at it again! Once again, they did their thing, flying around for about 30 minutes, then went back into the hive. I called my friend Penny, she came over with her kids who were part of the urban beekeeping project at Northlands, and we decided to split the hive to hopefully stop them from swarming again. This meant our original queen that was in this frantic hive went into what became hive 3 with half of the bees. Hive 1 was now queenless, but the bees are so industrious, and it was early in the season, so we let them make a new queen. The bees make a new queen by feeding an egg royal jelly. Once the queen hatches, she will go around and kill all of the other queen cells, go on a mating flight (the only time she ever leaves the hive), and hopefully make it back to the hive.

A few weeks later hive 2 swarmed. They didn’t do any of this attempting to swarm, they just did it – which I must say was actually kind of a relief. You can read all about that swarm here. This hive never managed to make a new queen successfully, which meant we had to re-queen it. What does that mean? We purchased a queen from someone and introduced her (in a cage) into the hive to ensure the bees would accept her. These are mated queens, which meant she started laying very quickly once they accepted her.

A week after that, we woke up to a swarm in another tree. What a relief to find out it wasn’t our bees! People asked how we knew it wasn’t ours… when you open up a hive that has swarmed the colony is about 50% less, it’s quite obvious as soon as you’ve opened it. Our were still at their original numbers.

About ten days later hive 3 was at it again, this might seem confusing because it was originally hive 1, but remember we moved them to a new hive? They did the same thing as before – attempted to swarm. We were smarter this time around and split them straight away. Although we did everything to keep our original queen, and were confident we had, a few weeks later we realized that we had a queenless hive and we needed to re-queen the hive. We are still unsure why this hive was so adamant to swarm, and we really did do everything we could to prevent the swarms. Here’s to a better year next year!

We now have three healthy hives set for winter, with enough resources to get them through and a healthy laying queen. Fingers crossed they all make it through. As the evening temperatures drop to below freezing we will wrap our hives and that will be it for beekeeping this year. Now if you’ve followed along this far, you might have a question about what happens next year when these three hives get super strong in the summer… we will be proactive next year and split them early on, re-queening the splits (and giving them to a friend). This should hopefully prevent swarming and also save us from having an entire backyard of beehives.

MORE PHOTOS FROM OUR HONEY EXTRACTION: