“I prefer the round hives, but the square ones are good too. I don’t think there is any difference between a round gum and a flat gum. The honey is all the same color. I had bees in round hives [made from hollow trees] for twenty years before the bees died out. If you’ll keep the honeycomb cut out where there is a fresh comb in there, they’ll stay in the hive a long time.
PLATE 100 Jesse Ray Owens with his bee gums
“You’ve got to keep that comb cut out, or it’ll get tough and black. We always cut it out in March. We don’t put any [paraffin] in the round hives. We don’t put a thing in there but the cross sticks. [The bees] always go to the board [covering the top of the bee gum] and start pieces of comb. They fasten it to that board and go all the way down to the bottom of the gum with the comb. They’ve got to hang [their honeycomb] from somewhere, so that’s why they start at the board [at the top of the gum]. The cross sticks are in there just to keep the comb from collapsing. I’ve seen one gum that collapsed and drowned all the bees. The comb was too big around and got too much weight in it.
“I never put in new queens at all. I just let the bees handle that [make a new queen] themselves.”
PATENTED GUMS
Patented gums are rectangular boxes consisting of a hive body or brood [egg] chamber on the bottom with supers added, as needed, to collect honey. Supers are rectangular boxes about five inches tall. They hold nine frames in which the bees store honey. The first super above the brood chamber is left on the hive to give the bees a food source and additional room.
Patented gums can be handmade or purchased and have been used by beekeepers for over one hundred years.
Glen J. Taylor explained, “The first thing you got to do is get your hive bodies ready. The hive body is the lowest chamber of the hive, where the bees live and reproduce. These bodies consist of ten frames. Then get all your starter combs and everything in there. I build most of them, and I buy some; I use white pine to build my hives. Then you put your bees in there. To start with, you’ve got to give them sugar water to help boost them up where they’ll go comb faster and build up faster. After you get that hive body full, then you put a super on there and let ’em fill it up. The super just goes on top of the hive body, and then after they get the hive body and super filled up, you can put another super on so you can get some honey for yourself.”
PLATE 101 Glen J. Taylor examining one of the frames that make up the super
“The hive bodies we use now have been in use for over one hundred years. And they have really changed very little,” according to George Prater. “The guy who designed the modern beehive’s name was Langstrom. He came up with the principle called the bee space. He found out with his experiments that if you have a space inside a hive which is the same as the space between these frames, the size of a bee, they will leave that alone. Anything smaller than a bee space, they will take their bee glue, called propolis, and glue it up, fill it up. Anything wider than a bee space, they will build a comb in. But a bee space, they will leave it alone. That is why you can have a hive like this and have the frames where you can take them out. They don’t glue them to the sides and build combs from one to the other.
“I run nine frames in my supers, but ten in my hive body. But a lot of the old mountain beekeepers used board gums, which is four wide boards nailed together, and I guess they did that so they didn’t have to buy all the equipment.
“This equipment is real easy to make. Anybody with any kind of carpentry skill can make a hive themselves. But these frames, this is how they come from the factory. It is in pieces. You can see that that is pretty precision stuff. You just stick the pieces of wood together, then you have got to nail it in several places. Your brood [eggs] would be down in the bottom. When you start out a hive, you just start them with a brood chamber, and then after they get that filled up, then you put a super on top. I usually don’t even take the lower super off. I’ll pick it up to check the frames underneath it.
PLATE 102 A view of Glen J. Taylor’s bee gums
“You can see the different divisions of the hive. The bottom part is the brood chamber [or hive body], where they have their eggs mainly. Generally, the outside frames just have honey and pollen, and the eggs will be in the center. The next one up—well, the next two up are the supers, where they make their excess honey. Occasionally, the queen will actually move up into the super and lay some eggs up in there. In the summertime, you can have as many as four more supers on top of those, just depending on how well the hive is doing.
“The way I put the supers on is I will have one above the brood, and I’ll stick another one on. If I need to put another one on top, I’ll raise the last one I put on up and stick the new one underneath it. The theory is that it encourages them to go up through this one to finish what they were doing up there, and it will get them to working in the new super faster.
“You don’t take one super off and sling the honey [extract honey from the frames], because when you get into the summer and they are in full production, they need the extra room for the bees. Also, you need to add a new super when the one on top is probably two-thirds full. So when you are putting a new one on, the old one is not ready to be taken off yet. If you try to extract honey before they get it all sealed up [before it is capped by the bees with wax], it will be too watery. If you eat it, it will give you dysentery.
“Mainly, you mess with the bees for six months out of the year. In the wintertime, you don’t really do anything. When I close them up in the fall—around October—I probably won’t look at them again until March. The springtime is when you have to keep an eye on them and make sure they have enough to eat.
“After you start getting frost and very cold weather, you put the entrance reducers on to help them hold the heat in the hive. [An entrance reducer is a small handmade block of wood placed over the entrance to the hive.] It just makes the hole a little bit smaller and makes it easier for the bees to be able to protect the hive. In the wintertime, all the bees will cluster with the queen right in the middle. If they don’t cluster, a lot of the bees will die off. If the hive gets too cold, the brood will die.”
ROBBING THE BEES
In order to obtain the honey, beekeepers have to “rob” the bees. Equipment used to rob the bees varies from beekeeper to beekeeper. All the beekeepers we interviewed used a smoker—a funnel-topped can with a small bellows attached—a veil, and a hive tool or pry tool. Some use gloves, bee brushes, and protective clothing.
George Prater told us he robbed the bees when the hive was ready. “I’ve never gone by the signs. When you pull the frame out and all the comb is sealed over, they are ready to be robbed. I look in there once a week or so. They can fill up a super, if there is a real good honey flow, in about a week.
“A lot of the old-time beekeepers don’t even wear veils or gloves or anything. When I rob the bees, I use the smoker, and I have a set of coveralls; then I put a veil on that zips down to the coveralls and gloves. Now, Daddy didn’t used to use anything but a veil and some gloves. A lot of beekeepers don’t use gloves, but I find that they sting me on the hands worse than anywhere else. They are all the time stinging me on the hands; I don’t know how people stand it, really! I get stung almost every time I mess with the bees. They can sting you right through your coveralls, gloves, or veil. If there is a way for them to get at you to sting you, they will try.
“Generally, the hives that are under stress are more likely to be mean. Stressed hives could be hives that are queenless, or if the weather is too hot or too cold, it stresses the bees. Also, if there is nothing in bloom for the bees to make honey out of, they’re more likely to be mean. They will be more gentle if you work them regularly. If you check them once a week or so, they will kind of get used to it.
“Smokers distract the bees, generally, and it makes them calmer. The theory is that when you smoke them, they think their hive is on fire. They claim they will rush in there and go eat a bunch of honey. Then they are too fat to bend th
eir tail down to sting you good! When you open up the hive and you start smoking them, you see them stick their little heads in there and start eating the honey. But they’ll still sting you!
“My bees are pretty good-natured; the last few times I was taking off honey I hardly got stung at all. Usually, that is the worst time to get stung, because you are really disrupting them. You have to brush off the bees that are on the frames, because you don’t want to take any bees in the house with you.
“I usually use hay in my smoker. That is generally all I use. Sometimes I use hay baling twine or newspaper to get it started. It takes a little practice to get a smoker going. This is the one I use now, and you can see it is the same thing as my daddy used. You take a handful of whatever you are burning, and you light it. Then stick it down in there. You give it a few puffs and try to get it started smoking. So what you have got is a smoldering fire. You don’t really have any flames. Somebody explained it to me that the best way to do it is like you are smoking a pipe. The way people that smoke a pipe do it is they put tobacco in there three different times. Each time they put it in there, they put it in firmer. The first you put in there real loose and get it going; then put a little more in, and the third time, tap it down good.
“I have a little pry bar to get the lid off the hive with. It is a flat pry bar, and you just stick it underneath the edge. One end is crooked, so you can get in there and pry up one frame or another. It is called a hive tool. It just takes a little practice to learn how to use it. I also use a bee brush. It is soft and allows you to brush the bees out of your way.”
According to Jesse Ray Owens, “I reckon, as you grow up, you just grow into [handling] them. When I’m putting a hive on the stands for the bees, I usually put a bee veil over my head. That’s all I need. I never rob a new swarm at all the year I put it in [a hive]. We could rob ’em, but we don’t. They might need the honey.
“We rob the hives on the new moon in March. If they make enough honey, we’ll cut the hives again in June. Our ancestors always done it this way. They always went by the moon for everything. If the bees have lots of honey, we’ll go in there and cut it all out, plumb to the cross sticks.
“A big swarm can fill up a gum in about four or five weeks. I figure a big swarm is about a gallon of bees, a little swarm about a half gallon. I don’t know how many that’d be in number. I’d say [the number of bees in a hive] varies every year. Some years [there are a lot more bees in a hive] than in others. It depends on the honey flow. But once in a while you’ll get a lazy stand of bees. They just barely will survive. I had two hives that made just enough to live on. Then they’d quit. They were just lazy bees.”
Glen J. Taylor explained, “To rob the bees, you get you a pair of gloves, a veil, a hive tool, and a bee brush so that you can brush the bees off. The brush is soft, and it won’t hurt the bees to brush them off. Now, you’ve got your smoker; put your smoking paper, which is newspaper soaked in saltpeter, so it will smoke, not burn, and light it and put it in the smoker. With one piece of paper, you can do eight or ten hive bodies. Whenever you take the lid and the inner cover off the hive, you just kind of smoke the bees down a little bit and get them out of your way. You can get the bees out so that you won’t be killing none of them or nothing like that. You can smoke them down in the bottom, in the hive body. Then you take the super off and take the frames out with a hive tool so that you can check them. The hive tool is what you use to pry the super off.
“Daddy used to have bees all the time. If he had a hive that was real mean and he couldn’t rob them and do anything with them, he would take some tobacco and use it on them. He would roll it up, put it in the stove, and get it good and dry and brick-like, and then he would roll it up in an old club. He would light that and stand over the bees and blow, and that is the way he’d smoke the bees. He didn’t have veils. He just robbed them without any gloves and without any veils.”
PLATE 103 The hive tools used to rob the bees
PROCESSING HONEY
“Whenever they get the super filled up and get it capped over, that’s when you sling the honey out, strain the honey, and jar it up,” according to Glen J. Taylor. “It don’t take long to harvest the honey. You can uncap it [with a knife] and sling a comb out in about an hour. I generally sling it out with a honey slinger and let it sit out ’til the next day. All that fine comb and stuff will come to the top, and you can kind of rake the top of it off and get that comb off of it. Then you can strain what you got left. You can get the rest of the comb out of it and have pretty clear honey whenever you strain it and jar it up.
“I don’t know how many jars I get from a hive. Some years I make a lot. And, then again, some years I don’t make too much. About three years ago, I didn’t make but very little because we had a lot of rain that summer.”
George Prater uses newer methods for extracting his honey. He uses an electric uncapping knife, rather than a butcher knife, to cut the caps off. He also uses an electric extractor. He told us, “I think an extractor is the best investment you can make if you are keeping bees, because you can double your honey production.”
He also told us, “If you let the honey settle overnight [so small pieces of the comb come to the surface to be skimmed off], you should stir it up, because the heavier honey will settle to the bottom and lighter honey to the top. I have got ten hives right now. If a hive is doing a little better than average, it will produce three supers of honey a year. Each super will have about eight quarts of honey in it.”
While some of his methods are newer, many are the same as what Glen Taylor described. As George finished describing his method of processing honey, he told us, “One of the things I like to advertise about my honey is that I don’t heat it or treat it or do anything to it. It is just raw honey. This honey that has been in contact with the electric knife I consider heated. So a lot of this I will use to feed back to the bees in the springtime when they need feeding. The main thing with honey is to be clean with it. You have to be really clean, because it is food.”
SWARMS
A swarm is a group of honeybees that fly off together, accompanied by a queen, to start a new hive. George Prater explained swarms to us. “Swarming is their natural way of reproducing. That is the way they reproduce. What we try to do as beekeepers is just inhibit that if we can. Because a lot of times, if a hive swarms, then they may not have enough bees to make any excess honey for that year. So you try to keep them from swarming if you can. One thing you will do during the swarming season, which is May and June, is take the hive apart once a week. Take out every frame where the eggs are to see if there are any queen cells in there and cut them out.
“When they are ready to swarm, they will build a special cell, and the queen will lay an egg in it. And they will feed the egg a special preparation called royal jelly that, I guess, has some type of hormone in it; it will make it into a queen bee. Then, when they get ready to swarm, generally what happens is the old queen will fly off, and half the bees will go with her. The new queen will stay there with the hive. But sometimes the queen will fly off before the egg hatches. Then hopefully, that queen will hatch out, and it will be all right. If the queen doesn’t hatch out, if it is a bad egg, then you have got a queenless hive; and if you don’t do something pretty quick, the hive dies.
“You may have been told how gentle swarms are. There is a lot of people will tell you swarms are gentle; they won’t sting you. That is not exactly true. One time Daddy and I were hiving a swarm. Somebody had called us. We were both in the insurance business at that time. I think I had my suit in the truck. But I didn’t have my boots with me. We went out to this guy’s house, and the swarm had clustered on this little apple tree. It was on the main trunk of the tree, so we couldn’t cut it off. So we put the hive underneath it. I was holding the hive, and Daddy was going to hit the tree to try to dislodge the bees. I had my coveralls on and my gloves and veil, but I didn’t have my boots on. So Daddy hit the tree and all these bees went all
over the hive and bunches of them just went right down on my feet, right on my ankles. I got stung about twenty times, through my socks. Swarms are fairly gentle. But if you start messing with them, they will sting you!”
Howard Prater recalled, “They are hard to do anything with; I tried to get a swarm of wild bees one day down in Hartwell. They were in a tree. I cut into it with a saw, and I smoked them down into my hive, had my hive down at the bottom of the tree. I tried to run them down in it; before I could get the lid on, they’d go out again. I worked and I worked down there and it was hot, but I didn’t get stung a bit while I was working on them. So I finally just gave up and went out there and got a paper and set down out there near the tree. I was sitting there reading the paper and one of those bees jumped down z-z-z, bit me right here on the neck, and I slapped at it, and it was just like a hypodermic needle shot all that stuff in there. In a few minutes, I ran in there and got a bath, and I was white with red spots all over. I had to go to the doctor and get a shot. And I still didn’t get the bees and didn’t get but one sting. But I’ve been stung lots of times by bees. I didn’t have any reactions after that.”
Foxfire 11: Wild Plant Uses, Gardening, Wit, Wisdom, Recipes, Beekeeping, Toolmaking, Fishing, and More Affairs of Plain Living Page 20