The Buzz About Bees in Alaska + Our Biggest Honey Harvest Yet

Oh my gosh, that's heavy. That's all capped. Oh, that's all capped! Oh my gosh, that's so beautiful! Just the season for pulling honey frames.

We have a full frame of honey from the girls. It's almost completely capped. We're in early August. We checked them about 10 days ago and frames weren't quite ready. So we're back now. This is our fifth frame and it looks like there is a lot more that we can pull.

Oh my gosh.

I'd say that weighs 30 pounds.

Since we're not gonna be extracting that honey today and putting those frames back, we do need to replace the empty space. And I just have some frames with some drawnout comb already. These are gonna be perfect. Alright we ended up with 19 frames of honey, almost two boxes. That's the most we have ever harvested. Very exciting and this is all just pure Alaskan forged nectar

from the bees. We stopped feeding them early June. So they've used up all of that sugar water that we gave them. This is one of the best years, how it worked out. The top two boxes were being used as honey supers. So there was no brood mixed in there.

And the bottom two boxes is where the brood and the queen is at. This is a this is a really heavy my arms are oh let me weigh this real quick 1.6 okay so we need 21.6 19.5. Two more pounds. 21.6. Since we just robbed the bees we are going to be feeding them and we are already thinking about fall and winter preparation for them. So this is thick syrup. It is a two to one ratio. Two part sugar, one part water. It is 20 pounds of sugar and a gallon and a quart of water. Eric just

made us this five-gallon feeder today. It has these little drilled holes through on this rim of our bucket. We're gonna flip it over and the bees are gonna be able to access that little pocket and get a lot of the sugar water at one time. The reason we do thicker syrup at this time of the year is because there's less moisture in it and that way the bees will have less work to do to get it ready for the winter. We're going to be adding some fumadil for the first time this year and this is to help the bees with nocema which is a parasitic disease that they can get and they're particularly more

susceptible to it in these spring and fall months especially with like a longer winter where they're kind of cooped up in their hive and they're not coming out. We've got our dosage already measured out and it is 12.5 grams. We're going to add that into four cups of water right here. And once this is dissolved, I'll add it to the sugar syrup.

This one didn't work because I drilled a hole where the handle is on the bucket. That's a no-no. So we got a new bucket here. I didn't drill a hole there. Let's see if this one will hold when we flip it upside down.

Okay, I guess the bees will eat this sugar, right? It's been close to six weeks since we pulled our honey frames. You can clearly see that we have transitioned from late summer into our brief fall season here in Alaska. Bees have taken down approximately 40 pounds of sugar and two pounds of pollen patties. We feed the pollen patties to them in the spring and fall months in order to stimulate brood. So the queen's not going to lay any eggs in there in the winter

and we really need to make sure that their numbers are good going into the cooler months. The pollen helps achieve that especially if they're not able to pull it from the environment. I did recently see an uptick in pollen coming into the hive. I'm not sure where they were pulling that from, some late season flowers, or maybe even our garden. At some point, we're gonna reach a dearth.

I'm not sure if we've hit that yet. And all that really means is the bees are not bringing any nectar from the environment. So there's no more resources left for them. And all that they really have to rely on is what's already in the hive. The timing's different every year with your individual hive and also the weather, but you want to start to like pull that pollen back and that sugar back

because we need to make sure that what they do have in their hive doesn't have too much moisture. It's capped going into winter. We don't want them actually eating pollen going into winter because it's really rich and it can cause them to go to the bathroom quite a bit. The problem with that is that they don't really have somewhere to go to the bathroom in the winter. If they come out, they will die. The feeder that Eric made did work pretty great for the first few days.

It eventually had some problems with the seal. So I pulled it and I used this little frame feeder that we have, and unfortunately the wasps found it and they were guzzling it down during the day all night. I switched over to an internal rapid feeder that just sits here in this top box, which reminds me that I need to go ahead and pull this out and condense the actual hive because this is more space they're having to heat. We did mix in some Honey Bee Healthy into the sugar syrup that we fed them after they got their dosage of the fumadil, and that's just essential oils,

things for Honey Bee Health. This colony is looking super good for winter. I'm excited about that. The girls are kicking the drones out. Quite literally, they drag them out. There's a bunch of them around the hive boxes now. So sadly, those guys are just not needed in the winter months.

And it's a really good sign that the hive is taking winter seriously. So they're doing all the steps that they need to do to prepare for those cold months coming up. We are finally getting ready to extract the frames that we previously pulled. If you followed a little bit of our beekeeping adventures this year, we did pick up these bees from an interior supplier, new to me. We got the Golden West and the Saskatraz bees. Lost a queen pretty early on and

had to combine them, so we have just one big hive right here and it is a Golden West Queen. This has been by far my most pleasant experience with bees. They were such a nice disposition every time I came out here. I did get stung once this year by this hive, but that was the only time.

And I honestly can't even really blame it on the bee. We both just kind of were like coming at each other and it bumped me in the eye. Something we were pretty excited for is the supplier actually did reach out to us and extend us an invitation to come along a day in the field and check out their beehives. They were doing bee checks. It was so nice of them to extend that invitation to us but they also

invited us to bring you. So, here we are at Georgeson Botanical Gardens at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And Georgeson is such a special place for our community because it's an absolutely beautiful place full of all different types of flora and it's a great place for people to bring their families and have a picnic or just have a time of solitude and just admiring all that creation has to offer. We keep bees here for botanical. Right now we have four

colonies, one top bar and three Langstroths to help pollinate all the

flowers. I won't lift the lid. Fairbanks. Awesome.

So we're here at the Botanical Gardens today here at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and we have James Harlow and Mike Harms. Hi. And we've been collaborating together to help other families keep bees in their own backyards. Today we're going to take a look at some Langstroth hives that have a special

design. They're really heavy because Robert Fox, who's now gone on, he took a bee class with me about 10 years ago and he took a regular Langstroth box and used rigid, one-inch rigid foam all the way around the perimeter of the Langstroth and then put another quarter-inch plywood on the outside of that. And every year I've used these that he's given me and we get anywhere from 8 to 10 to 12 gallons of honey.

Don you want to show them? Yeah let's do it.

Oh yeah, it's bombing.

I'm tapping off the bees just to make sure that if the queen's on there, She's not being taken out and away from the hive. This is a honey super Yeah, see this actually This right here is the rigid

Unfortunately Dawn's great explanation was overpowered by the buzzing of the bees She explained that this particular box does a very good job at helping the bees regulate their internal temperature. So bees already do this on their own very well but when we're talking about Alaska and the extremes from spring to summer to fall this box really helped them get that consistent temperature that bees prefer. On a cool spring day which is typical of an April install it would help keep the bees warmer and if it was a hot, blaring sun type of day, that added insulation would assist

the bees in staying cooler.

We're going to actually just cut right to the chase, take the supers right off and go right into the brood box to do this hive.

There were a lot of hives to check today, so efficiency was the name of the game. It already gleaned several tips at this point just like this one. A much quicker way to check the hives for queen cells rather than removing each frame is to take the box

flip it up like this and see if you see any queen cells hanging off of the comb. I don't see one queen cell on there. So we're going to put this on the rack. Oh, I smell bananas.

It's one way to be less invasive, um, on your hive chicks.

I'm actually just going to kind of loosen each of these.

banana. Dawn and Jimmy informed me that this is a pheromone that the bees give off to alert the other bees, to alert the colony to intruders, and is showing their displeasure for the hive check. I think this is a great example to show different beekeeper practices and the need to be realistic when you have several dozen hives to check versus someone like myself that only keeps one to two hives. This allows me more time to dilly-dally and take my time when checking the Arby's and it's also one of the reasons I can get away

with not wearing a bee suit.

We're having them build more comb. We give every colony a few bare foundations so that we're always getting new frames built out. This is a good pupa frame and there's some pollen in here. We'll be looking for the queen.

Having the queen mark can save you a great deal of time. In this particular case, they were looking for a blue dot on this queen since the year was 2025 when it was installed. Unmarked queens can be found pretty readily with a trained eye,

but it does take a little bit of practice. The queen has a much longer abdomen and there's only one of her in each hive and she is solely responsible for laying all of the eggs.

And no eggs yet. I think you're going to see eggs in yours, Mike. So one of the questions that people often ask is, can we put different breeds of bees next to each other?

Yes.

Although, if you have Russians, they tend to be a little bit more warrior-like, and they will fight with other species but if you're working with Carniolans, Italians, Saskatras, or Golden Wests, they'll get along just fine. Okay, found the queen. I'll let you put that frame down and then I'll hand you this frame. Okay, I'm removing queen cups first on this frame and that's even though there's no royal jelly in these, which tells me they're not real serious about swarming, I'm removing them because I

don't want this colony to swarm. They're doing great, they have a wonderful queen, they don't need another queen taking half of the population away.

So that's your, what you guys, your routine for just, because I'm doing that too right

now, monitoring for swarming. Every 10 to 12 days. Now I've been told that's too often, but in Alaska if you have a swarm you're done for the season. Because you really have to have a lot of bees, anywhere from 70 to 120,000 in order to get enough honey. Her mark is actually going away. Yeah, yeah. So, let's see.

She's right there.

Oh yeah, she's a beautiful one.

She's a big one.

Saskatraz. This year, the Harlows brought in Saskatraz and Golden West for the first time from OH Honeybees. Matt Wright in Northern California, Chico area. We were really hoping that they would be more prolific and a little bit less aggressive than the bees that were coming from Sacramento that I've been getting for the last 20 years.

And lo and behold, they are.

It's easy to see why beekeepers would prefer less aggressive bees. The sheer distance between the two farms ensures that the queens are not mating with Africanized drones, thus resulting in a friendlier hive

because ultimately it is the queen that will determine the overall hive's temperament. And although that may make perfect sense for a beekeeper, if you are a honeybee, your goal is survival. And the queens prefer to mate with the Africanized drones because they are stronger, more aggressive,

and can shelter without a hive.

We're very happy with the Saskatraz and the Golden West bees that came in this year and we're hoping that we see a pattern in years to come. So I think it's this colony is going to have a lot of honey. And the honey flow actually only has about four to five more weeks. You see the pattern here? That's a very good queen pattern. Those are the pupa. So every day this queen is laying anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 eggs.

Are you seeing quite a bit of eggs and larvae, Mike?

Plenty. It looks really good. The pattern is nice and tight in the center. The food stores and pollen are on the outer frames.

Great. Now we can look at the supers. I only found two queen cubs. What did you find, Mike? Two. They're very happy with their queen and they're hoping to make it through the winter.

Mine were on the bottom of the frame pre-charged.

With minimal queen cups found during this check they can rest assured that the bees are not serious about swarming. I did ask Dawn at this point if she primarily thought the bees were foraging at the botanical garden because of the abundance of flowers. She confirmed that they're most likely going off and foraging upwards of five miles if need be. This is a frame that's getting ready to be capped here in the next few days. We do not use queen excluders because imagine being a bee and having your abdomen full of

water or nectar and having to squeeze through the wires of a queen excluder. If the queen does come up into the top box and lay eggs, the bees realize after that, oh we need that space for honey. So they'll only lay, the queens only lay one generation of bees and when they hatch out, the bees will recycle that space and fill it with honey. So they do their own space management at this part of the season.

That's looking like raspberry, which is right behind us, are the raspberry bushes or fireweed. It's very clear, nearly opaque.

Honey harvests are highly variable depending upon the area, the weather that particular year, and your general beekeeping practices.

I'm seeing lots of larvae on this one super frame. I'm not worried about it because when these hatch out again they'll take that space and put honey in it.

And to harvest honey up in Alaska is about the third week, fourth week in

September. We had a mini discussion on when we start to pull honey from our hives and there was a little bit of variance on the time from each of us.

I start harvesting the first week in August just because I take any frames that are capped and I start selling it right away and then I do two or three harvests. Okay. Mid mid-August. Middle of August and then September one time.

Okay, mid-August.

But as soon as the temperature drops below 40, I take everything because they're going

to be eating it.

Eric chimed in for our viewers and wanted to ask, how do you know the difference between the sugar syrup that you're feeding them and they're storing versus the real deal the honey coming in from the environment?

Easy Don, you can you can take that one but uh yeah I mean it's it's pretty self-explanatory.

Yeah so they consume all the sugar water and you know because when you're doing your hive checks, the weight frames are lighter. And then you know by watching the flora around you that when they start bringing in the willow and willow pollen and then the dandelions start, you know, perking up, then you feel the weight increasing again on your friends. So that's how you can tell the difference between sugar water and natural nectar.

And it will be consumed before, like, they'll consume it throughout the summer before it even becomes a thing.

Like when you start to extract honey or pulling the comb from honey.

Yeah.

Yeah. This is a organic way of preventing ants to getting into your hives. It's water soluble, so you have to keep applying it.

As we're wrapping up here, we're letting in on another little tidbit. Ants are deterred by cinnamon. So sprinkling a little bit of cinnamon around the hive ensures that they are protected.

They can't climb up onto the foundation boards and get into the hive. So this is a top bar here at the Harlow Family Farm, and it's July 7th. We're going to do a quick check on this colony. Make sure that the queen is still in there.

They have sealed this entire thing shut with propolis. So I don't know how easy it's going to be to get it apart. There we go, we're making a little progress. Might have to just open it up. Thank you, Mike. Top bars are intricate and they require a lot more time during hive checks because

of the intricacy. These bees definitely did not appreciate our presence and they proceeded to attack the microphone. As we look into the hive we're able to see that some of the comb has fallen off during previous hive checks. Fresh comb is very soft and on really hot days it can be more fragile. You can see that the bees in this hive were actively working on drawing comb out. On this next frame, this is a great example of freshly drawn comb. It's pale. It's in the works.

The bees haven't completed it. Dawn points out the pupa, which is a stage in the bee development. She's not finding eggs and she sees very little drones. And they are also looking for the queen that is marked.

The top bar is best for providing comb honey rather than liquid honey because you can actually eat the wax. This is sought out all over the world and usually it sells for a square like a four inch by four inch square would be like $35-40.

Is that something you guys harvest?

We can harvest and we can also put a one inch by one inch chunk of comb into liquid honey into the jar. Believe it or not, the wax makes it so that the honey doesn't sugar as quickly. So it's a preservative, the wax is.

Yes. yes the Queen is spotted with her blue dot not an easy task when the beehive is approximately 80 to a hundred thousand bees strong

100,000 bees actually all of the pupa that was in these, that fell, have hatched. Pupa is the third stage. It's totally clean.

It's all hatched out.

Unfortunately I made the choice not to wear gloves during this bee check. And looking back, I'm pretty surprised that I was not stung sooner. I flicked a bee off my thumb and I can't remember if I was stung at that point or not. An abrupt sharp movement is one of the quickest ways to get a bee off of you and have them not feel threatened so they sting you.

This is a first year.

Yeah and we harvest the comb every year. So they build this from scratch every year. That's amazing. So pretty much our pipe checks, we go through all the different frames and we're

looking for queen cells. I'm not seeing any swarming activity. So we're going to go ahead and close it back up and let them keep working and doing their thing. And Mike, if you want to try to

go ahead. There's so many it's hard, we don't want to smash them. And one way to keep from smashing them is using smoke to help them go back in. We have a lot of smoke in Alaska right now. Wildfires all around us. So we don't want to contribute anymore.

Should have rolled the sleeves up, Jimmy, I made a mistake there.

Are they stinging you?

Yeah.

I got stung a few times on my arm there and had to walk away from the bee check a little bit early. I have heard about the alarm pheromone that bees give off when they sting to alert the rest of the hive to danger, but had never really experienced it. It was almost instantaneous as soon as one stung me they all had to get in on the action. But thankfully for me we were headed to another amazing garden nothing short of absolutely spectacular. Something I personally value and feel like it was a tremendous privilege to get to see this place where a lot of folks spend

energy and time into growing their food.

While they're storing the honey. Yep, we're seeing evidence of the honey flow beginning here in the center of these frames. I'm removing clean cups. They're just going to rebuild them, but it gives us another day maybe, a day or two, that they don't have it ready in case they think they're going to swarm. But usually once the honey flow happens or starts, they don't want to swarm anymore.

They want to stay with their resources and come July usually you don't see as much swarming activity.

Mike was removing queen cups from the bottom of that frame and Don explained that they've found doing these bee checks with two knowledgeable beekeepers really cut down on the time to perform them. The two hives at the community garden had two deep brood boxes followed by two medium supers that sit on the top. This breakdown is babies, babies, honey, honey. Now honey weighs more than water. It's approximately 12 pounds per gallon. You can imagine that these boxes get quite heavy

at full capacity, upwards of 60 pounds per box. Beekeepers have different options when it comes to what boxes they want to use. Factoring in the weight that you can lift come harvest time is important. I personally use all medium boxes for our hives to simplify things. I'm using my hip bone to hold the frame so that when

I'm working I can work with my tool with one hand. This hive check showed a healthy amount of larvae and several queen cubs which is very typical during the summer months when the bees are active and it doesn't necessarily mean that they're looking to raise a new queen or swarm and although it's important to keep an eye on them and see if they become charged it usually is just an indication that the hive is strong and healthy.

Nearby. So this is an example of the pre-charge that we're talking about.

So there's you see nothing inside of it so it's ready if they need it.

I think that's it for this box.

Are you finding like drone cells in there too right now?

Mostly workers. Yeah, we don't see her, but we saw lots of evidence. This frame right here would be a good frame to take right now because there is so much pollen out there. I can tap all the bees off of this, put it in the freezer, and then give it to them in the spring when we don't have any natural pollen in the area until May.

What a good idea! I never thought about that.

If I haven't already convinced you how truly fascinating honey bees are, I think some folks be surprised to know that there is a spectrum of pollen colors out there. So bees on these foraging trips will accumulate that pollen on their back legs and it's reflective of the pollen source or the flower or tree that they're finding the pollen on. Traditionally we think of pollen as orange in color but what we find is colors ranging from pale moon to purple, green, and even gray. These are new hives as well this year? Yep, brand new.

Hi! The garden looks lovely!

I'm just going to do a little bit of maintenance here because they're gluing it all.

It's getting real close to being capped doing a little bit of maintenance here because they're gluing it all. Yeah.

It's getting real close to being capped, but it is cold.

The honey stores in this hive were looking great. Don and Mike were using this super cool frame holder that hooks onto the side of the feed box and holds those frames to help you keep things organized and also freeze your hands. And a quick sweep of the Queen cups on the bottom of the frame. Oh look at that. That is insane. Look at that. Yeah and this, you can tell that these ones that have hatched out, this whole frame was pupa.

Just like that one.

And there's eggs and larvae on the outside edge.

That's how you know if you have a really good queen.

Finding frames like this is definitely something to get jazzed about. They were very well filled in by the queen and all you're seeing is a little bit of honey stores

on the top corners.

So it's amazing that one queen can produce this many. And this will definitely be a strong wintering colony.

That's what I was, so now you know, you've got these two hives that started out similar but clearly there's a higher chance of making it. Which is almost necessary. Yeah. All right we can put her back in. The queen was spotted during the inspection and safely put back into the hive. Bottom brood box. A lot of honey here. Both sides. No cups so far.

Actually I see some clean cups towards the top here.

Okay. Yeah it's unzipped.

Oh duh.

I'll close it up Don.

A bee inside your suit is never a good thing. They are excellent crawlers, so if there's any sort of gap, they can find a way in. Thankfully for this field trip, Jimmy was nice enough to lend me his bee suit and he sat out some of the inspections. Otherwise, there's no way I could be this close to the beehive inspections as they were occurring. And that my friends was the end of this wonderful tour.

A huge thank you to Don, Mike and Jimmy for the invaluable experience. We were able to take away such good information in regards to beekeeping, specifically local tips, what works for other beekeepers in our climate. I know for me, the ultimate goal, and I think I'm even maybe speaking for a chunk of folks up here in Alaska, is to keep bees, healthy bees, and learn how to successfully overwinter them.

So without further ado, we're going to head over to the shop and extract the honey.

One more.

Let her rip, I think before it gets too cold.

Here she goes. Can you see it?

Oh yeah, it's guzzling out.

You can?

Look at the edges.

Check that honey out at the bottom, huh? It's still whipping out the sides.

Eventually it does, yeah, it'll go backwards

and I think it gets out the other side.

Look at it.

See, it's still coming out.

Do you know what's like cotton candy,

like a little cotton candy machine?

Like whip.

No, still a lot of honey in there Oh, I don't like that number at all. 56 degrees. You guys just see the honey glistening. I guess because it's so warm now.

We're estimating we have about one and a half gallons so far of honey. This is taking a little bit longer than we anticipated. Tried to do this outside but it wasn't warm enough and we've actually had our wood stove in our shop going for about two days so we should have just stuck with spinning it in here. It's definitely going a lot faster now. I think they say the ideal temperature to spin honey is room temperature or slightly above that. Not all of our frames are capped and what I mean by that is the bees have not actually put wax on top of their honey stores. So the bees will do that when they're done, you know, storing everything, but also when it's the right moisture.

But sometimes as beekeepers, we can't wait to pull it until it's capped because we have a really short window or an opportunity to pull the honey. And also the bees will start to use the honey if you have rainy weather coming up in the forecast. When you're storing honey, you don't want it to have above 17% moisture of water in there, otherwise it could ferment. And although still usable, it's not good for long-term storage. So that's why it's best to wait until they cap it. But if you can't, like our situation, you can always put it in a dry area. You know, you can run a dehumidifier. We just put it in our seed room, which has low humidity, and it is pretty warm in there. That's gonna pull out some of the moisture,

and another way you can check if it's already ready, this has worked very well for us in the past, is do the tilt test. So you just tip the frame over, and if there's too much moisture, it will actually drip.

I've never had that happen, so it's already guzzling out. Harder to get it going because it's so heavy. Oh, it takes a while?

Like, it's just harder to crank because you're cranking like... Do you know what I feel like? Because it's so heavy. It's so heavy. It's so heavy. It's so heavy.

It's a little hard to get it going because it's so heavy. Oh, it takes a while? Like it's just harder to crank because you're cranking like...

Do you want to feel it?

It's so much harder to crank. I'm going to put this in the oven. This one has got like a hair. Okay, okay, you're going right.

Well, this is definitely a real treat. We ended up with three and a half gallons of gorgeous honey from the bees. We're storing some of it in a pail and the rest went in these little pints. And we're going to be putting this in our shop. It stays about 50 to 60 degrees year round, so that's the perfect temperature for honey. You know, it will crystallize if you keep it a little colder, which is not a problem, but you just have to heat it back up if you want it in that liquid consistency.

And honey has an indefinite shelf life as long as the moisture content is lower than that 17%.

So heavy.

One of the last things Eric and I are doing to prepare our bees for winter is making them a candy board. So that's what we have right here. And it's basically a hardened sugar block for them over the winter months. My old school thought when we were raising bees was to leave them a really good deal of their own honey to feed on in the winter.

But there's kind of two problems with that. So the honey itself is super rich and it causes them to go to the bathroom and they can't take those cleansing fights in the winter. And they also have a hard time accessing their honey. They don't want to break that cluster when it's really cold and they don't go out that far to get to the honey. This board actually sits right on top of the hive that way

they can easily access the sugar in the middle of winter when they need it. We've used this frame in the past for our beehives and we have 10 pounds of sugar in here. It sits on top of hard wire cloth that way the bees can come up through it but it also holds the sugar and there's a certain recipe you want to use when making a candy board for the bees. You put some vinegar, we put some honeybee healthy in here and you get it to this consistency where it's almost like wet sand and it kind of clumps but does also fall apart. You push it down, we will put some wax paper under here

so it doesn't stick to anything. We have a little piece of plywood and you have to let it harden. So we'll spritz it with some water. Usually that helps things go. We moved it over to the shop where it's nice and dry

and it is super hard now. Almost like concrete, which is perfect. We don't actually have to add this to the hive yet. It's still going to be probably two more weeks until we put it on them. Another benefit to this is that it can absorb moisture in the hive, which can ultimately lead to a hive not surviving the winter. And we do all this prep because the bees are not disturbed for about six months, our winter time. They're not necessarily locked up, but they don't come out like I mentioned.

And there's a lot more you can do to prepare your bees or overwinter them. We're going to be trying something different this year. It's not time for that yet. Candy boards have been a huge part of our success being able to overwinter bees. Candy boards have been a huge part of our success being able to overwinter bees. As always, thanks for coming along and we are going to keep you posted on how our bees