We maintain a succession of queen banks at the bee store from mid April through mid August.  It is simply a small queenless hive with lots of young nurse bees to take good care of the queens until such time as they are sold.  I use five frame nuc boxes for my queen banks.  I simply pull out two frames of capped brood from one of my hives at home for each queen bank.  The capped brood will emerge over the next twelve days and provide a continuous supply of young nurse bees.  When I get down to the last queen I usually allow the bees in the queen bank to release her.  I can use these released queens to either requeen one of my colonies at home or to supply a small colony for the observation hive in the shop. Besides I think it is a good idea for me to use some of the queens that I sell simply for quality control.

   When we receive a new shipment of queens they come in what is called a battery box.  That is about 50 queens in their individual cages with about a half a pound of loose bees inside the box to care for them.  When they arrive I have to transfer the queens to the queen bank.  The queens usually come in what is called a California mini cage. Each cage has a hard plastic tube filled with fondant which acts as the release mechanism when the queens are installed in a new hive.  Since we don't want any of them released prematurely I have some modified frames that queen cages are placed into which don't allow the bees to access the fondant.  I place one frame of queens on either side of the two fraames of capped brood in the nuc box and then add the loose bees from the battery box.  In order to minimize fighting between the two groups of bees I spray them all down with a strongly scented sugar syrup to make it more difficult for them to tell friend from foe.   The scented sugar syrup is pretty important. I omitted it once and ended up with a significant pile of dead bees in front of the queen bank.

    When I make up a new queen bank I am always very careful to try to avoid using frames with any eggs lest the bees start raising their own queens.  However, the eggs are so very small and it is very easy to miss them if there are only a few eggs on the frame.  This happened with me on my last queen bank. Since I am often somewhat busy when I have to get into the queen bank I don't always check the two frames of brood as often as I should. The queen bank had been in use for about a week before I noticed that we had a few queen cells in progress.

    A loose queen in the queen bank is a serious problem as she will immediately start killing the caged queens.  Once I had a queen escape while I was marking her.  I thought she had simply flown away, but darn if she didn't find her way back into the queen bank twenty feet away. I lost several hundred dollars worth of queen bees before I discovered that I had a loose queen in the queen bank.  Since then I have used a queen muff when marking queens so they are better contained.

   Normally I would scrape off any queen cells I found in a queen bank, but I decided to try something different this time.  I made up two "press on" cages using number eight hardware cloth and used the cages to confine the queen cells.   One cage didn't seem to stay in place very well so I did end up removing two of the queen cells.  The other cage worked as intended and I was able to remove a virgin queen about a week later.  I marked the queen, put her into a queen cage clearly marked "Virgin Queen" and gave her to a friend.

   The following photos show me removing a frame of queens from a queen bank and holding it up so you can see what I'm talking about.  Our immediate next door neighbors at the bee store are plumbers who fortunately are gone most of the time.  They have been pretty patient about the small bee hive in fromt of the store.  The honey customers usually aren't beekeepers so some of them will get a little nervous about the bees out front.  However, I simply remind them that it is a bee store after all.

   

    The last serious nectar flow we have in western Washington is Japanese Knotweed. I will start out by catagorically stating that this is a non-native invasive species and nothing in this blog should be construed to encourage anybody to plant or cultivate Japanese Knotweed. That having been said, it is a dynamite honey plant and produces the best dark honey I have ever tasted.  As a general rule dark honeys are more strongly flavored than light honeys. They are also reputed to be more healthy as they have more anti-oxidants than light honeys. However, many dark honeys have strong unpleasant  aftertastes. Buckwheat and Western Sumac are both good examples of this general trait of dark honeys. Some people have grown up with honeys such as this and describe the light honeys as lacking in flavor. I, on the other hand, do not care for the "funky' flavors of many of the dark honeys. If the only honey I have on hand is buckwheat honey, as far as I'm concerned I am out of honey.  Japanese Knotweed honey is a notable exception among the dark honeys. While it is strongly flavored, no aspect of the flavor can be described as unpleasant or odd. Knotweed honey has a strong and loyal following among the Beez Neez customers.

    Japanese Knotweed is a tall plant, growing to about six or seven feet tall,  with large heartshaped leaves. It has a jointed stalk which has led it to be called beautiful bamboo.  It is not a bamboo but is actually a member of the buckwheat family.  It produces a massive amount of roots which make it very difficult to eradicate. It is like the mythical hydra when you try to pull out the roots. Every little broken piece of rizome can start a new plant.  It readily colonizes along streams and rivers can can be found in many other places in our damp climate.  When it blooms it produces a mass of wispy upright white flower clusters  It was originally introduced into the United States as an ornamental, but it quickly escaped to the wild and has become a significant problem plant in many parts of the country.

     The nectar flow from Japanese Knotweed starts in mid August and lasts through mid or late September.  This makes it somewhat of a challenge to harvest knotweed honey as this is the exact time that many beekepers are doing fall medications. I know of one sideline beekeeper who charges a premium for his knotweed honey due to the disruption it causes to his normal management scheme to harvest it.  While the plant is fairly widespread along the river systems and not uncommon in other places, not every beehive will produce knotweed honey. My beehives are only a mile away from the Pilchuck River which has lots of knotweed growing along its banks.  That seems to be far enough away such that most of my beehives don't produce a significant amount of knotweed honey.  Mainly the bees use it to backfill areas of the broodnest as the broodnest shrinks in the late summer and early fall. I'm assuming my bees might produce more knotweed honey if I lived a little closer to the river.

   The above photos of Japanese Knotweed were taken today (August 14) along the bank of the Pilchuck River, just north of Snohomish.  The flower clusters are just starting to open and the bees have just begun to show an interest in the blooms. If anyone has an interest in learning more about Japanese Knotweed the local county weed control board is usually a good source of information.

       I intend to use this blog to write about beekeeping here in beautiful wet western Washington. I thought I would start out by dedicating some space to various Northwest honey plants.  When I talk to new beekeepers about the various nectar flows I often get a "deer in the headlights" response as I rattle off names like Japanese Knotweed or Fireweed.  I have to remind myself that not every beekeeper starts out as a serious plant geek.  I was a plant geek before I was a beekeeper, but I'm even more into plants now that I've had bees for over ten years.  Every time I find a plant with bees all over it I can't rest until I find out what it is.

    On my way to work this morning I drove by this lovely patch of fireweed and I had to stop and take a few photos.  Our local fireweed honey is one of my favorites, but the fireweed honey we get in western Washington is rarely pure fireweed honey.  There is another honey plant called pearly everlasting whose bloom overlaps the fireweed.  Pearly everlasting is a sort of white strawflower that grows up in the mountains and foothills where the fireweed grows profusely.  Pure fireweed honey is very light colored and would normally be classed as extra water white on a honey grading scale.  Pearly everlasting produces a much darker honey such that even a rather small percentage of pearly everlasting honey mixed with the fireweed darkens the honey significantly.  Thus the fireweed honey produced in western Washington is often darker than fireweed from other locales and can vary a bit from year to year in color and flavor.

    This is mostly information I have gleaned from several commercial beekeepers who put their bees in the fireweed every year.  I have never taken my bees to the mountains and we do not have sufficient quantities of fireweed growing here in the lowlands to produce fireweed honey.  What small amount of fireweed honey my bees gather is usually lost in an ocean of blackberry nectar. That being said, I still love to watch the bees working on fireweed  blossoms and I have tried to protect it even when it has sprung up in inconvenient locations in our gardens. My wife Linda is less enamoured with the fireweed. She finally lost patience with me this past spring and ripped up most of the fireweed growing in our garden. Based on her description of that task it appears that fireweed has a pretty extensive root system.

   My daughter, Rachel, left our beekeeping supply store last year and moved to Oregon. I had to either take on an employee or go crazy being shackled to the bee store all of the time.  I hired my good friend Quentin this past January and it has worked out very well for me.  I hope it is working out as well for him. He is very good when it comes to woodworking or mechanical things which are very useful skills to have around the bee store. Quentin has also been a very quick study with the bees and I consider hiim to be a fairly knowledgeable beekeeper at this point.  He has really taken to the honey and is now a serious honey snob.  His absolute favorite honey is our local fireweed.  He is positively evangelical when it comes to educating the public about our wonderful local honeys and he is especially delighted when a customer decides that they like the fireweed best.  I'm hoping he doesn't suffer a serious crisis of faith if this year's fireweed honey tastes a little different from last year's fireweed.