Tutorial

360 o

This page is a look back at last year and our plan for the new year.

Over the last ten years we have seen a great reduction in the acreage of citrus due to freezes and disease. This has facilitated the acceleration of development , which has further reduced the available bee pasture available to our bees. The draining of wet lands has compromised even further the maple and willow we depend on for early buildup. The depletion of good bee forage in the area, along with the skyrocketing property values has led to the relocation of many thousands of colonies of bees away from this area to points further south and north. These hives played an important role in the production of drones for the mating of the thousands of virgins that were seeking tens of thousands of mates every week here in the groves of central Fl where we're located, along side two other queen outfits that have in fact been operating here longer than we have. As the new kids on the block, and as we have identified this potential problem, too many girls and too few boys, we decided to scale way back on the number of queens we produce and concentrate instead on nucs and cells.

MID MARCH 2010

We have just come through the longest coldest cold spell anyone in central FL can remember.

Our bees, the ones that did not succumb to CCD are finally making some quantum leaps thanks to the arrival of warm weather and just in time for a really promising willow bloom.

The plan of attack we have taken to rebuild started with the idea of purchasing brood from fellow beekeepers in GA, that did not go well. The weather kept the bees in and the build south GA usually enjoys never occurred, at least not in time to help us. So we regrouped and are cleaning up the dead hives, spaying the combs with a 3% bleach solution, culling older combs, painting box's, in short we have the best looking dead hives of any operation

We have been feeding mega bee patties and sugar syrup, as well as experimenting with citric acid, nozivet, and supplementing the syrup with vitamins and electrolytes. The hives are all in 3-4 story's now and almost ready to go into the orange, in fact with the rain were receiving now, and some continued warm weather we should see orange bloom in less than two weeks. We'll put as many cleaned box's on these hives as they can take and split every thing during the latter half of the orange flow giving some queens, and making others into 3 frame nucs that will get cells. We also expect to get some orange honey out of our efforts, how's that for optimism.

April 2010

As many of you know and may have even experienced yourselves, we had a rough start to this year. We were down to only about 300 hives in January, where we would normally like to keep our numbers up around 2000. But the Lord has blessed us with a very productive season; the weather cold, and wet, as it was made for a late start, but we were late also so it did not affect us to the degree that it could have, had we been on our normal schedule. We were actually able to take advantage of the almost month late orange flow. Had it been when it normally is we would have missed it almost entirely. It is always better to see your glass half full rather than half empty. We did end up getting all the empty equipment from the dead hives onto bees in the orange. We were able to make over 1000 splits from these hives, draw 90 boxes of foundation, and produce 9 drums of excellent tasting honey. PRAISE THE LORD!

May 2010

First load of bees included, the truck of 288 nucs for costumers and a trailer loaded with 200 hive for apple pollination. We were set to arrive early Saturday morning May 1st. Lost a set of duals off the trailer load of hives going around Chattanooga. It was 88 degrees, and we had no time to deal with the trailer wheels due to the highly perishable nature of the nucs on the truck. the solution was to leave the bees on a farm in the woods north of Chattanooga. Drag the injured trailer behind and return for the bees Saturday night. We should all only have to experience a trip like this once.

We had the bees in the apple orchard on May 1st but the bloom came early this year and it would have been better to be there a week earlier. We sent three semi loads of bees up to Wisconsin, all without incident. Watermelon pollination finished in mid June.

June 2010

Black-locust flow was early and short this year. Most of the bees were not up to full strength and only made a marginal Locust crop. Junes weather has been spectacular, just enough rain, plenty of sun, and lots of warm days and nights. The Linden flow was also early but this time many of the hives were ready . We now have many suppers full of Basswood honey. White sweet clover has also started to bloom.

The biggest news for June is that: Peter asked for and received my daughter Sarah's hand in marriage, two weeks later he purposed and she accepted!

July - September 2010

Well this summer has been somewhat bittersweet.

The good news is that the bees look awesome, we are not seeing a lot of mites and they have huge populations, the brood is looking healthy and as long as they have food, the queens are keeping the brood nest full. We are really exited about this winter and the future queen and nucleus production. If the bees stay healthy as they are now we will be able to produce double if not triple the nucs and queens we did last year (Lord willing).

Unfortunately we have had our worst honey crop since 1988! What looked like a perfect honey production summer at the beginning of the year and even into spring, has turned into an abysmal honey crop throughout WI. We attribute this to the incredibly wet and humid summer we experienced. The reason that we would blame the humidity is because, the bees must dry all the honey that they bring in each day, and when the humidity stays high throughout the night and during the day it makes is really difficult for the bees to be able to dry it down. Another reason that we would blame the humidity, has to do with what we have been hearing from other beekeepers all over the state who experienced similar crops. Some beekeepers on the western side of the state (were they received record amounts of rain this summer) say that they were lucky to make 20 lbs of honey in many of their hives that were healthy enough to be making over 100 lbs of honey.

At this point we are looking at preparing the bees to migrate back to Florida about the first week in November. Happily and surprisingly the bees have been bringing in a small amount of the Aster and late Goldenrod honey, our hope is that they will store it in their brood chambers so that we will not have to worry about them starving in the month of October. We have been medicating and feeding all the hives that we are stripping, to assure they will stay healthy and free from an overpopulation of mites, as well as to take away the risk of starvation in the hives that are exploding with new young bees.

October-December 31st 2010

Well last time I updated this page we were hoping that the bees would store away a little of the goldenrod and aster honey that they were collecting late in the season, I am happy to report that they did. Dad took the first load down in mid Nov. on his truck after which he stayed down there while us boys stayed up north to collect the rest of the bees (and do a little hunting as well) by the time we had collected the first load it was apparent that the bees had collected plenty of late season honey to keep them from starving for some time.

We did end up having to use three semis to get all the bees down, partly due to the fact that we had to take a few rows off of the second truck because he was over weight! It has been a long time since we have even had to worry about being over weight (Praise the Lord we have healthy bees again). This was the first time that us boys have done all the collecting and loading without Dad being there. (and the last load was just Caleb and I, cause Pete and Sarah had gone to New York to meet his family for thanksgiving). There were a few times that we were pretty nervous about whether or not we would be able to get them all in, but everything worked out fine without any problems to speak of.

Even though we did a lot of hunting between loads none of us were able to get a deer, both Caleb and I saw a little buck but never were able to get a clear shot (we were bow hunting). For gun season, I only saw one buck, but didn't see him till he was right in front of me and by then it was too late (I had dosed off).

We have been going through the bees pretty steady now that we are all down here, and have been really happy with how they are looking. Although we have seen a few small clusters the majority of them all look really good. We have been treating them all with medicated pollen patties (click here for a link to our treatments page) and we are just finishing our third round now. If the bees stay as good as they are now there we should be selling our first queens by the end of February, and hopefully be able to up the number of nucs that we sell as well.

The weather down here has been really cold for Florida, we have even broken a few records in our county. The coldest night that we had recorded was as low as 18 degrees BURRRR!

January-March

Wow it has officially been a year now since we launched this page and my how the story has changed since then. GOD HAS BEEN GOOD!

In the later part of January we really started getting into the bees and making up our nucleus hives for raising queens. similar to last year we had a fairly cold start to our spring season, but with a little less rain which allowed the bees to get out and keep foraging for pollen on the warm days. We saw the bee collect an amazing amount of pollen this spring, due in part to the dryer weather we had.

By February we were in the full swing of things and the weather really started to warm up, with the bees still collecting a lot of pollen, but not finding much for nectar we began feeding everyone to assure that as we made them into the nucleus hives they would have a good store of feed to get them to the orange flow.

February 19 we had our first wedding, it was an absolutely perfect day for it. Mid to upper 70s with just a slight breeze (which was good because we had the reception outside on the property). After the reception Sarah and Peter Ellis left for their honey moon... IN HAWAII !!! They are now a happy couple, still living right here on the property with us. Sarah working with Mom doing the bookkeeping and secretary work, and Pete helping fulltime in the bees, as well as a little tutoring on the side with the other kids.

March, has been beautiful with lots of sun and a great orange honey crop, which we are currently working to extract. This years crop is the best we have seen in many years, partially due to the fact that we put out over 5,000 new frames! God is good, and the bees have been doing a wonderful job not only drawing out all the foundation but also filling it.

Praise the Lord the bees are still looking wonderful, and we have been able to keep up with all the orders for queens and nucs that we have been getting (barley). For those of you who might be interested we are sold out of the 5 frame nucleus hives so will not be taking any further orders for them. Also we are almost sold out of queens as well, we really are only taking small orders now for the month of May. The queens have been looking really good, we are working on a 28 day caging schedule this season which seems to be working really well because all the nucleus hives have maintained really good health, many even making a small amount of orange honey.

(If you have any questions or comments you can email them to; info@indiansummerhoneyfarm.com also if you have any ideas of things you would like to see on the website, I would love to hear from you. I am always looking for new ideas)

You are welcome to call us on our land line (352-429-0054 from 8am-8pm EST) or leave us an email here at info@indiansummerhoneyfarm.com with any questions or comments.

Thank you for visiting our site, there is a map at the top of the home page. Just click on our winter or summer address, we always welcome visitors on “terra firma” also!

back to the top

Updated Sep 2010