3/24/2024
Since I was sick for several weeks, we are behind in our planned Spring activities, so it was time to do a little catch up.
Saturday
Saturday morning we pulled the rest of the frames out of the freezer to see who many there are and to see what condition they are in. I found 15. These will be used, as needed, in the swarm traps and hive boxes. We also found a couple bags of comb. Didn’t really know what to do with other than to learn how to melt it down and capture the wax. This turned out to be a little harder than expected.
Comb melt take one
We first started to try to melt the comb in a double boiler.
Adding foundation to frames
While this was going on, I started putting foundation on some existing frames. Last year we tried using a heat gun. The results were mixed. Sometimes it worked really well and other times, not so much.
This year I bought a “wire embedder.” In reality, it’s not much more than a laptop power supply with alligator clips on the ends. But it does work well.
Using the “embedder”.
Touching up a swarm trap
While all of this is going on, Linda is touching up the paint on a swarm box.
Something we learned from last year is we needed to add a some trim around the bottom edge of the trap so it would hang straighter. This will hopefully help with the “wonky” comb we had to deal with last year.
“Wonky” comb is comb that align with the frame. It can sometimes be drawn across multiple frames or sometimes have a big bulge in it. The bees will, generally speaking, draw out comb that is level. When the swarm trap is hanging at an angle this quickly becomes something the beekeeper has to address.
After she finished with the existing trap, it was time to paint a new one. This one will be called to “ice cream” trap.
OOPS
After watching the comb for a bit, we realized that the double boiler idea wasn’t working well. it seemed that the wax was melting and then was sucked into the debris left behind. So I went back to the articles I read and found out that I was wrong. The comb needed to be in the water to. So we tried again.
In the end, this worked out okay.
To finish out the day, I replaced the lemongrass essential oil that is in a tube in the swarm trap that Linda was touching up, added a mixture of used and new frames, and screwed the lid on
Sunday
Swapping out a swarm trap
Sunday morning we placed the refurbished trap in the car and went to church. After services, we headed over to Howard County to replace the trap that we had placed late last summer and kept there all winter.
We caught two swarms at this location last year and hope to do equally well this season.
Comb melt take two
After getting home, we warmed up the comb and ran the liquid though a strainer. There was a disappointingly small amount of usable wax, but we learned that, in the future, we would need to get, or make, a solar melter and process the comb outside.
The ice cream trap
After we got home, Linda finished painting the new swarm trap. It came out pretty great.
All in all, it was a very productive weekend.
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