Honey Harvest 9/4/2011

Back in January and February of this year, I took a class on beekeeping through the ISU Extension Service. I've always wanted to do it and after meeting a beekeeper in Hawaii last year, I was dead set on starting a couple of hives. After finishing the class, I ordered two 4-pound packages of bees, and all the equipment and gear to get set up with two hives. In April, itl arrived and Greg and I put it all together and installed the bees. All summer I've been monitoring them and watching them build comb, forage for nectar and pollen, raise baby bees, and make honey. Because this was the first year, I wasn't sure there was going to be enough honey for me to take any and still leave enough for them to survive through the winter. Turns out, they were pretty busy this summer, and apparently had no problem collecting plenty of nectar. Last week I checked on them and decided Labor Day weekend would be Harvest Day. I ordered a small honey extractor, five-gallon buckets, plastic jars, filter screens, and gathered up some odds and ends from around the house to use as tools (bread knife, stainless steel pot, metal colander, clean towels).

Saturday morning, Greg and I washed all of the equipment and set up a work table on saw horses in the garage, after cleaning the place up as much as possible. Then, I suited up in my bee suit, gathered up my smoker, hive tools, and other equipment, and Greg and I headed out to the hives. The plan was for me to pull the boxes off, sweep the bees off with the brush, and put the boxes into the Jeep. Greg's job was to get it all on film.

Before we headed out there, I made a small wooden frame, about the size of the perimeter of a hive box, out of scrap wood. I stretched a black dish towel over this frame. This was my home made fume board. I had ordered this stuff called Bee Robber which comes in a bottle, wrapped in a plastic bag, then stuffed inside a larger plastic container. It Stinks!!! The triple packaging is to prevent any of it getting on anything you intend to keep. This fume board frame dealie was going straight into the trash as soon as I was done with it. I drizzled a few drops of this stuff onto the black fabric. The way it is supposed to work is the stuff starts to smell as the sun heats up that black fabric. You put the frame on top of the hive box and leave it for a minute or so, and it is supposed to drive the bees down into the hive and out of the box you are intending to harvest. Well, since it was only about 70 degrees when we went out there, I don't think it ever heated up enough to really have an effect, or maybe I didn't use enough of it or whatever, but after several minutes, it had had no effect on the bees.

After putting the fume board aside, I took off the top two boxes and set them aside since neither contained completely filled frames of capped honey. The third box was mostly full but there were a few frames that were not capped, indicating the honey was not yet dry enough to be harvested. Instead of harvesting full boxes, I ended up taking about six frames out of the fullest box on each hive, and just putting the frames in the back of the jeep. I reassembled the hives, gathered up all of my tools, and we headed back to the house. Pretty painless. No stings, and no mess in the Jeep. The bees will continue making honey until probably mid October. The goldenrod and ragweed are about to really start blooming so the honey they store from now on will be darker and have a more rustic or molasses like taste. I'll let them keep it for the winter, and I'll probably put the feeders back on in a couple of weeks to make sure they make enough food and get it stored before it gets cold.

Once we got back to the house, we carried the frames into the garage and set them in an extra hive box. With both of us working, we used the serrated bread knife to shave off the cappings, which fell into the metal colander that was suspended over a stainless steel pot. Then two frames at a time went into the extractor. This extractor is essentially a plastic drum with a contraption that sits on a bearing in the bottom of the drum. It holds two frames at a time. You hand crank it to spin it as fast as possible, and the uncapped honey that is still left in the frames, gets thrown out of the combs and up against the inside walls of the extractor. It then runs down and collects in the bottom of the plastic drum, and there is a gate valve at the bottom that allows you to drain the honey out of the drum.

I had ordered three filter screens, a 600 micron, a 400 micron, and a 200 micron. They nest inside each other and fit on top of a five gallon bucket. The extractor was on top of the work table with the valve extended over the edge. With the valve closed we spun/extracted about a half dozen frames, then stopped, opened the valve and allowed the honey and some of the wax comb to run down through the screens and into the five-gallon bucket that was sitting on a small stool directly under the valve. Once we had processed six frames, we shut the valve and did the other six. We tilted the extractor forward and propped it up on some scrap wood so it could drain completely. We also poured the honey that had collected in the stainless steel pot during the uncapping step, into the filter screens. All in all, I think we have about three gallons of honey and a big pile of very clean beeswax to play around making candles or lip balm or whatever. I'll need to compress the wax to squeeze any remaining honey out of it and then melt it down in a coffee can or something into a block and then save it until I'm ready to use it for something.

After several hours, the filters were finally empty and all of the honey was collected in the five gallon bucket, which also has a gate valve. I had ordered two cases of 12 ounce plastic bottles and nutrition labels for them from the beekeeping supplier, Mann Lake, out of Minnesota. Since Greg and I had plans to have dinner down at Honey Creek Resort on Lake Rathbun, we decided to take a bottle of honey to Pat Koffman, the chef there. Pat's a good friend of ours and is always interested in what's going on the vineyard, what we're growing in our garden, and so forth. At some point I hope to be growing herbs and vegetables for the restaurant, probably once I have a high-tunnel greenhouse and can grow veggies from March through December. Anyway, I wanted him to have some of the honey so we washed and dried one of the bottles and filled it with the honey from the five-gallon bucket. Ideally, the honey should set for a few days so any trapped air bubbles can float to the surface of the bucket and be skimmed off, but since we were headed down there for dinner, I figured it'd be okay. Turns out, it was almost crystal clear, hardly any bubbles at all, and a beautiful golden color. I had made some cute tags for the bottles so I tied one on it and it was ready to go. The restaurant was packed to the gills but we caught up with Pat and I handed it off. Can't wait to hear what he thinks about it. We'll wait a day or so to bottle the rest of the it.

Open the Pod Bay Doors Hal.

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.


Heh, no this isn't the escape pod from the International Space Station... It's our new air-blast vineyard sprayer. It arrived today on a flat bed trailer. It's a few years old and we got a good deal on it. We'll clean it up and use it once the vines go dormant this fall to spray lime sulfur fungicide on the canopy once we move the sheep out of the vineyard.

Cynthiana

The Cynthiana grape is only marginally successful in Iowa because it has a very long growing season and in some years we get a hard freeze early enough in the fall that it is not yet ripe when the vines shut down for the winter. We put this vine in our vineyard because we're pretty optimistic that we are far enough south in Iowa that we have a good chance of getting it to ripen in most years. This is the first year these vines have produced a decent crop as it has taken a while to get them established in our vineyard. We think it is worth trying to grow this grape here because it makes a very good, full-bodied red wine when fully mature, and fills a niche that most of the cold-climate hybrids are not able to fill. It ages well, responds well to oak, and has lots of tannins, which smooth out as the wine ages.

Cynthiana is considered to be a genetically true American grape (Vitis aestivalis) as opposed to the more familiar European grapes of the genus/species (Vitis vinifera), such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and Pinot Noir. It was grown extensively in the Eastern US, particularly in Virginia where it was first noted, and also the Midwest prior to Prohibition, which pretty much wiped out the wine industry east of the Rocky Mountains for decades. It is grown extensively in Missouri and parts further south, and is actually the state grape of Missouri. It is often made into a high quality dry red which is aged in oak barrels, and once bottled, some additional aging is usually recommended before drinking.

Wines made from cold climate hybrid grapes (the majority of the grapes grown in the Upper Midwest) tend to be a little thin when it comes to mouth feel so being able to grow the non-hybrid Cynthiana in this area really fills an important space in a cold climate winery's repertoire. New hybrid reds are coming along and eventually grape breeders will come up with other combinations of cold-hardiness, good disease resistance, and good red wine qualities, maybe knocking Cynthiana of its perch. In the meantime, Cynthiana, also known as Norton, is holding down the fort for cold climate winemakers looking to make a dry, red wine.

This is an exciting time in cold climate grape breeding and research. There are interesting crosses being made with obscure Eastern European and Russian grapes that have just recently made their way across the Atlantic. There is a huge blank canvas out there, with lots of room for new grapes to take their places in the cold-climate viticulture lexicon.

The more, the merrier!

It comes at the perfect time because more and more wine drinkers seem to be in the mood to try new things. That's great news for winemakers in areas of the country not considered traditional wine regions, as it allows for the development of regional signatures or fingerprints, so to speak. It's a fun time to be learning the ropes. Things are certainly moving quickly as more research and breeding produces better hybrids with the characteristics necessary to succeed in the challenging conditions in the Upper Midwest. It also fits nicely into the Local Food movement. The State of Iowa has been out in front in trying to support and demystify the wine experience by getting out of the way and allowing wineries to do tastings and sell wine at farmer's markets, treating wine as the agricultural product it is, and enabling the public to really get to know their local winemakers and grape growers. It's benefited the wine industry here in a big way (as well as wine drinkers!!!).


Here is a closeup of our Cynthiana grapes as they approach ripening. We are probably still at least three weeks from these being ready to harvest. Greg will be checking the brix (soluble sugars) with his refractometer in the next several days to determine where things stand. We'll need to net these vines soon because the birds will start grabbing them as sugar content goes up.

Log Rolling...

One of the hardest things we had to do when we turned this former cow pasture into our home and vineyard was taking out several huge oak trees. I made a commitment at the time to turn the logs into something other than firewood. Eventually.

Since we built the garage/apartment back in 2005, we've been procrastinating and postponing building the rest of the house. I guess we've become comfortable in our cozy one bedroom "loft" and the longer we live in it, the harder it is to imagine having a full sized house. Really the only time we notice how small the place is (880 sq ft) is when we have company or when trying to find something in the overcrowded kitchen cabinets, closets, or the garage. We really do need more space around here and have started thinking again about what we'd like to build. We even attended the Greater Des Moines Home Expo to check out about a dozen new homes by various builders and to talk to some of them about our potential project.

Anyway, earlier this month we took a trip out to Wyoming and Idaho with my parents, and we stayed in a cabin/lodge on the South Fork of the Snake River. The home was gorgeous and had been constructed with salvaged timbers from an 80-year-old factory that had been torn down.

This got me to thinking again about the numerous logs just sitting around the property, waiting for me to decide what to do with them. The easiest solution would be to find someone with a portable sawmill that would be willing to come on site and mill all of these logs into usable lumber. Some of these logs have been on the ground for over five years and I've been sort of half-heartedly trying to find a portable sawmill for at least three years. After numerous leads fell through, and after putting it on the back burner several times, I finally located a guy on CraigsList about an hour from here with a portable sawmill. I contacted him last week and he said he'd work us in sometime in October. Great! Well, that gave us plenty of time to plan on what to do with all of this wood. Greg and I are planning to build a small building this fall and some of that lumber would come in handy when we finish the inside, including trimming around the windows, possibly some tongue and groove ceiling or paneling, possibly the floor (?) and definitely some pieces of rustic furniture.

We discussed various options for cutting the wood, and finally settled on 1 x 6 boards for flooring and 6 x 6 timbers that could be used for any number of things, and milled into 1 x 6 boards if we ended up not needing the timbers. On Monday of this week, I got a call from Duane, the guy with the mill, and he said he'd had a cancellation and would I like him to come on Thursday. Of course, I said, without really thinking about what that actually means, including moving some logs out of the front sheep pasture, and figuring out where we were going to dry and store it.

On Wednesday evening, Greg and I moved several logs to one staging area using the tractor and a pull-strap, and one really long log had to be cut into two pieces in order to move it. It was probably 3o feet long.

On Thursday morning, Duane showed up with his sawmill and after some discussion he decided to set up the saw on the top of the hill by the vineyard, which is pretty much the only level spot on the entire property. Not an exaggeration! There were at least a dozen logs up there and we decided that I'd take the tractor and haul all of the logs we'd staged out front up to the vineyard and he would mill all of the logs up there in one spot. After Duane and I manipulated the first log onto the saw, he went to work cutting it into boards and I headed down the hill to start hauling the logs up the hill with the tractor. These logs were all somewhere around 15 to 20 inches in diameter and 14 to 18 feet long. I have no idea what they weighed but based on some of the timbers they yielded, it would not surprise me if some of them exceeded two thousand pounds.

This sawmill was pretty amazing. The logs are rolled onto some curved arms that reach down to the ground. The arms then hydraulically lift the log up onto the platform, and then a giant band saw is lined up and makes a cut horizontally from one end of the log to the other. The log is rotated 90 degrees and another cut is made, and this is repeated until the log is a four sided beam. At that point, the beam is cut into boards or timbers, making the best or most efficient use of the log. Here are a few of the timbers, including one that is 17 feet long.

















Once the lumber comes off the mill, it is stacked and the scrap thrown off to the side in a big pile.



















Here is a picture of the stack.
This is about half of the logs. Needless to say, he ended up getting about ten logs milled before running out of daylight, and I have at least that many left to go. Most of the really big ones are done and I think, including the timbers, we are at right around 2000 board feet of milled lumber. The ends of a few of the timbers will need to be cut off to get rid of some bug damage but for the most part, these logs are incredibly solid all the way through. I was pretty surprised that there wasn't more than this little bit of bug damage, given how long these logs have been lying around outside.

By the time we're done with the rest of the logs, I don't think we'll have any trouble getting enough wood to cover any size floor in whatever size house we end up building, plus we have nine timbers that can be used in the house possibly in a timberframe vaulted great room. The flooring will be six-inch wide planks. Some of these logs are over a hundred years old and have very distinctive grain. We'll dry it and play around with some different stains to see what the future floor will look like.

On Saturday morning, Greg and I moved some stuff around in the garage to make room for storing the wood. We initially thought we would need to build a kiln to dry the wood before it could be used, but after talking to the guy with the sawmill, our heated garage should work just fine to get the wood dry enough to use. Here's a picture of where the wood will be stacked.

We'll set up a small fan to circulate the air so the wood dries uniformly. Tomorrow we plan to move the remaining four timbers and all of the 1 x 6 and other miscellaneous boards into the garage so it can start drying as well.

If we get the little building built this fall, we'll have all winter to play around with different things to finish the inside of it. In particular, there is so much scrap left from the mill that we can sort through and rip with the table saw to make furniture quality boards out of. I see some new tools in Greg's future... We plan to put up the little 12 x 16 building and at least get it to the point of being weathertight before winter really gets going and it will be a nice project to work on through the winter. We plan to put a gable loft in it for storage of things like Christmas, luggage, camping gear, and so forth, all of which is currently taking up shelf space in the garage. The majority of the space will be a spare "cabin" for guests.

Sometimes The Middle Of Nowhere...

Is breathtakingly beautiful!

Honey, it's hot in here...

Do you know what comes with Late July heat and humidity? Tons of wildflowers, that's what. I've been checking on my beehives about once a week this summer, watching them slowly build up the comb and fill it with eggs. It's pretty interesting to see the eggs, which are only two to three millimeters long, white and attached to the very bottom of each comb cell, quickly grow into a grub-like larvae that get bigger and bigger until they fill the entire cell. At that point, the bees seal up the cell and each larva transforms into a fully developed bee in about 21 days.

While I've watched the bee population expand in the bottom two boxes of each hive, I've added additional boxes one by one, and these have been filled with pollen and honey, and eventually just honey. I put the sixth box on each hive today and they'll probably need at least one more each by the end of the summer. I plan to steal the top three boxes off each hive around Labor Day and extract the honey and bottle it. I've already stolen a frame (about two weeks ago) just to see how much the yield would be, and how it tastes. Since it was early season honey, it had a very mild flavor and a light color. As the season progresses, and the bees forage for nectar further from the hives, on more and more diverse flowers, the honey will be darker and the flavor will be more intense in character. A lot of commercial beekeepers collect the early honey in mid summer and leave the darker honey for the bees to feed themselves through winter. Since this is the first year for these hives, I've decided to wait until September to see how much honey they actually make before making the decision about how much I'm going to steal from them. I'll be able to compare the September honey to the sample I collected a few weeks ago to see how much of a difference there is between the two.

If I end up pulling off three boxes from each hive, I'll end up with a total of 60 frames. If each frame yields two pints, I'll end up with roughly 15 gallons of honey, and that's still leaving at least two full boxes of honey on each hive to get them through the winter. As I was lifting the boxes off the stacks this morning, there were two that were 100% full of honey and I was shocked at how heavy they were.

I took each hive apart this morning because I wanted to get a look all the way down in the bottom box on each hive to see if there were any empty frames or if they'd all been built out with comb. I mainly wanted to make sure there was enough room for the queens to keep producing eggs through the rest of the summer. It looks like that is the case. In the process, however, the bees got pretty cranky and I ended up getting stung three times; twice on my right hand, and once through my suit just above the knee. I had one whole hive taken apart and had to walk away for a few minutes to see if they would settle down, and they really didn't. I ended up closing things up and getting out of there but I did add the 6th box on top of each hive before putting the covers on. Greg's going to have to put together another 20 frames soon because with all of the wildflowers blooming right now, they are definitely not even close to shutting down the honey production. I will probably keep adding boxes until I see the first ragweed blooming, then I'll pull off what I'm going to keep, and let them make honey out of the fall ragweed bloom, which they can keep. I've had several beekeepers tell me ragweed honey is not particularly tasty but the bees apparently don't care.

Happy Independence Day!

We'll be firing up Sunny, the clay oven for homemade pizza tonight, and listening to the outlaws up the road fire off the artillery shells or whatever the hell that thing is that goes off every 4th of July...