Miracle Butter - Beeswax Skin Care Product!

My lovely and creative wife has been experimenting with the beautiful wax cappings that we harvest every year during honey season.  She has built an interesting formula for skin care.  She calls it "Miracle Butter" and we have received some great reviews on it.  

After I've worked outside with my hands, either wood working or cement work, this stuff works great!

It is amazing what products come from our hives!

Miracle Butter Skin Care Product

Getting Fall Treatments On

As you may know, our bees face many threats over the year.  Right now, we have two primary threats:  Yellow Jackets and Varroa Mites. 

The Yellow Jackets become quite predatory this time of year - as nectar sources begin to dry up and their growing populations require more food.  They become desperate and will attack the hives.  In years past this has cost us many hives.  Our strategy is to reduce the entrances on our hives.  Since I use a round entrance, with a soup can lid as a swing door, this is rather easy to do.

Round Entrance with a Varroa screen attached

We will be resetting our yellow jacket traps as well.  This Spring we used them to catch quite a few of the Yellow Jacket queens.  Hopefully, with this management strategy will help. Last year, it did help - but the yellow jackets were so terrible we did lose a few colonies to them.

Varroa Mites

These guys are a real problem for us.  I use varroa screens on all my equipment and have been using Oxylic Acid and Hopguard this year to deal with them.  Once, the honey is pulled, I get after this in a big way this time of year.  My aim to have clean hives that are varroa free and this means a treatment regimen that lasts at least 3 weeks to make sure ALL of the mites, including those in the capped brood are eliminated.  Luckily, the late summer dearth leads to a slow down in brood production, but I want those hives to start building next month in preparation for winter.  This means feeding and hoping for some fall rain to bring on a 'mini flow' that will trigger brood rearing.  This yard also received ProDFM probiotic treatment this spring too and they are looking good now.  11 very strong doubles with a 2  that are lagging a bit.  These guys will take a trip to California in November to winter there and to work the Almond crop as well.  I will keep you posted.

 

Things are drying up a bit but a sunflower field is just 300 yards away

Wonderful Harvest!

We were blessed last week with a bountiful harvest and a great visit from my Daughter Hannah and her husband Michael.  We spun quite a bit of of it and made some cut comb too!

We are selling this rather fast and the reviews have been great!  Folks LOVE fresh raw honey!

Chuck Honey in the Jar!

Cut Comb Packages!

Beautiful light color this year

Beautiful Sunflower field - just across from one of our yards!

Starting the Harvest 2019!

Hello!

Yesterday was the start of our 2019 harvest.  This year,  I have experimented with frame spacing and using simple starter strips to make at least 2 frames of cut comb honey per 8 frame box.

Plus, I used just 7 frames instead of 8 to get them to make the frames 'fatter' to ease decapping and spinning.

This is a 'starter strip' frame

Beautifully translucent 

Nice 'thick' honey frame - ready for extracting!

After I transported this portion to our honey house, a wicked thunderstorm came up.  I was the most severe storm that I've traveled in living here in the Inland Northwest.  The wind gusts nearly blew me off the road!  I thought the rain was going to come through the windshield.  Luckily, I arrived home safe and watched the storm rage from the safety of my home!

Canola field cause an 'explosion' of productivity!

I placed our "Pollination wagon" on the Canola just under 2 weeks ago and they have filled up the honey supers!  I have to place more supers on this soon!  Amazing !

Powder Sugar with ProDFM pro-biotic treatments applied

Last Spring, I tried using this treatment on my breeder nuclei.  It worked great and I have heard good things from other beekeepers as well on it. 

So, I decided to treat again with my new nucs and singles to give them a boost.  Plus, the powder sugar is applied with the billows.  This puffs the sugar into a cloud and covers the bees.  This encourages cleaning behavior and helps with the mites.  I use varroa screens - so this method seems to work pretty well. 

ProDFM with Powder Sugar applied

New Buckfast Queens Introduced - From RWeaver Apiaries

 I have had some great experiences with the Buckfast bee over the years.  I highly recommend folks give them a try as they are prolific producers and brood raisers.   These queens will be making the trip to California to work the almond pollination later this Fall.

Here is R Weavers Site - in case you are interested.  They are GREAT folks to work with!

http://rweaver.com/

Arrived Safely 6-28-19