June 2006

“News About Brews”

StoneForge

This month we met at the StoneForge in South Easton to sample their 30-something beers on tap.  While they had many beers which did not excite me, there were some gems in their draft line-up including Affligem Blonde and Bigfoot.  Also, I must say that their knowledge of their beers and how to serve them is lacking (Bigfoot in a pint glass just doesn't seem right).  However, despite my criticisms of the beer I would go back.  The food was high-end pub fare and the pizza I had was excellent.  And there was a decent selection of beers from which to choose, which is better than most places.

We took care of club business and held a raffle to help fund Paul's trip to Belgium next year (or maybe some other adventure).  The room they placed us in was great for having the meeting (once we closed the doors to keep out the noise).  Thanks for setting that up Bill!

The Pitcher Gallery has pic's from the Group Brew.  Check them out.

Don't forget that we're not having a July meeting in lieu of the club picnic at Dan Kahn's.  The August meeting will be a Belgian Strong Ale competition, so get your entry ready!

                                                                                          Brew On!

                                                                                          Jimmy B

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At A Glance…

Things You May Want To Know, Or Not

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Sip by Sip

Minutes of the Previous Meeting

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Date:  June13 ^th, 2006

Location:  StoneForge in South Easton

Number of Members Attending:  ?? (forgot to count, greater than 15)

Business

A raffle followed, with numerous items acquired by Mike K.

No Topic This Month

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It’s All in the De-t-Ales…

Articles, Reviews and Information

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Contents:

Making Mead the Long Way

Part 1

by Fred Sterner

Part 1

We started making mead over 10 years ago and of course the most expensive thing is the honey. It is also not that easy to find really good honey anymore, it seems that some diseases have taken their toll on some of the hives.       Since we are in an ideal location with some land, a big garden, apple trees, lots of wetland plants, and a nearby cranberry bog, we decided to try beekeeping.

Most counties in MA have bee clubs and many offer a winter “bee school”.   It is tens of thousands of dollars cheaper than Harvard’s B (business) school, so we both signed up.  The one in Plymouth County consists of 7 sessions, taught by members of the club.    For the both of us to attend  (including a textbook), it was $40, and that includes a year club membership.   We started going every other Thursday for 2 hours.  Subjects include bee life cycles; hive building and location, diseases, extracting honey, other products (like pollen and beeswax), and seasonal care.   Some even rent their hives for pollination, for example to pollinate cranberries or blueberries or apples.  The CA almond crop needs 1.3 million hives for 2 months for pollination.  One of the better beekeeping books is “The Beekeeping Handbook”.   A lot of work for that was done at Cornell University.  There is lots of stuff online.

 The people that keep bees don’t seem much more unusual than people in the beer club or even schooner sailors or Newfoundland dog owners.  They personalized their talks with bee stories, some of them quite funny.   The best involve retrieving a swarm, the bunch of bees that decide to leave.   It turns out that you can sometimes start a new hive with them, if you can drop them into a box instead of on your head.

The cost of setting up a beehive, getting the bees and some safety equipment can add up.

By making the hives (boxes) and assembling some other parts, you can spend somewhere around $150 per colony, including the bees. The bees are around $65.  Buying the assembled parts may be more like $230/outfit.  These numbers are for 2 big boxes (deeps) and 2 smaller ones (supers). These 4 stacked up may be needed for one colony of bees.  Under excellent conditions, even more supers may be needed. Other stuff including things like a hive tool, a smoker, and a veil may cost around $100. We decided to start with 2 colonies.

The other big question is the amount of honey that one might expect to get from a hive.    They said that you have to leave some for the bees so they will have food for the next winter.   If we did very well for the first year and got 130 lb, we would be close to breaking even, if you figure honey at $3/lb.   It is likely we will get less than that the first year.  The bees usually do better the second year, because they can start earlier, and also because the honeycomb will be already in place, therefore they won’t use their resources in building it.

The outfit consists of a series of boxes or hive bodies. I made the hive boxes, the inside size is 18 3/8” x 14 ¾” x 9 5/8”. There are also supers, same size but a height of 6 5/8”.   The insides of hives (deeps) and supers have 10 frames, each frame holding an embossed sheet of beeswax.  This gives the bees a starting point.   These things are critical, the sizes were picked so the bees would be able to get around, and if the frames are too far apart, the bees fill up the space with extra honeycomb, making a mess when you are trying to get the frames out.. 

The photo shows the frames and foundations being assembled.  The vertical wires in the foundations are for rigidity, especially when centrifuging the honey out.

Bees will make honeycomb anyway, but with this size and arrangement, the frames, honeycomb, and honey are removable.  This way you can get at the honey without destroying the bees and hives.  You start with one box, and as they get that box with the 10 frames full of eggs, larvae, pollen, and honey, you add another box.    If that fills up, you start adding supers.  The bottom two layers are for the bees; they need them for raising young and storing food (honey) for the next winter.  If they get to the supers, this is honey for the beekeeper.  

 If you can figure out what flowers the bees are working when they fill each super, you can label that as varietal honey.   If they are working lots of different plants, beekeepers usually call that wildflower honey. We found that one of the plants around here that is a great source for the bees is sweet pepperbush.  It has nothing to do with peppers, and the bees make lots of honey from it.  It would be great to make special mead if we could separate a super of that.

Some of the people we talked to got as much as 50 pounds a colony in their first year.    The first year is the slowest, because the bees have to make the honeycombs.  In the next few years, they use the same combs, so that saves them some work.   Some have done a hundred or even two hundred pounds per hive.      I may use about 12 pounds of honey to make 5 gallons of mead, so that would be plenty, possibly leaving enough to sell to other people in the beer club.

Most of the bees that come into New England are brought up from Georgia.   You buy a 3 pound box of bees for each hive, and if you have never weighed a bee, that comes to 10-12,000 bees that arrive in this screened cage.   This also includes a queen and a few attendants in a separate cage.  The queen is new to the colony, so as the other bees get used to her, she eats her way out of her cage (or the workers eat their way in) thru a candy plug, and by then she is accepted.  She starts laying eggs, around 1500 a day, and after about 3 weeks when they start hatching, the colony starts growing.  By August there may be 60,000 bees per hive.   It is best not to whack the beehive then (or ever).

The bees came April 23. Picked them up in the morning and put them in the hives in the late afternoon.  Pulled the queen cage out of the shipping box first and put it in the hive, then the workers.  We put a gallon of sugar syrup in the hive so they would be sure to have enough food; there was still some syrup in the can they shipped with the bees.  Some flowers were out as well as some peach blossoms. The plum and apple trees were about ready to open.    There were many wild plants that are on the verge, and they were feeding on the dandelions.

You can almost see the queen’s cage under the bees in the center of the photo.  The frames and foundations are under the feeders.         Once there is plenty of food for the bees, we will remove the feeder. When the 10 original frames are full, we will add 10 more in the space you see.

After a few days, the workers ate their way thru the candy plug in the queens little cage and she is laying eggs (hopefully) and the workers have honeycomb ready for that.

Contact Information

If there are any updates or changes to the information posted here, please contact:

blanchette.j@comcast.net

Last modified: March 24, 2008