Hello Everyone,
The time has finally come! Two years of hard preparation and work, countless stings and a staggering amount of money spent, most of which Kat TOTALLY knows about, we’ve finally managed to extract pure Rainford honey! (for those of you who are just interested in the honey extraction feel free to skip this next update to the subheading below)
So now I’ve got that out of the way lets go into what I’ve been up to for the past… (genuinely checking my calendar here) four, almost five weeks. Yikes! Sorry about that.
This is going to be a REALLY long one so go get yourself a cup of tea and a biscuit, I’ll wait…
Sorted? Settled? Comfy? Brill. Right here we go:
In my last post, I talked about how I went to an allotment apiary to stop the Hives there from swarming. I got into a bit of trouble with that as (already mentioned in the last post) you shouldn’t go rummaging through other people’s Hives. It’s all been cleared up with the beekeeping association now and it was stated that “I did the wrong thing for all the right reasons” with everything seemingly being forgiven. The unfortunate fallout from the incident was that the allotment decided that they didn’t want bees on their site anymore, which is completely understandable as swarms are a nuisance and a danger to the public. The beekeeper sadly removed his Hives and I heard nothing for a good two weeks or so.
I was contacted out of the blue by Brian (originally asked me to come help) saying that they DO want Hives on site but want them to be managed well. He offered me a very tentative place with the addendum that if anything bad happens then I’m out. I of course accepted and went down the same day with the better half to collect the keys. Kat thought the place was as magical as I did, and Brian must have liked her excitement as he gave us a vast amount of curly kale and a massive red cabbage free of charge! Brian, if you’re reading this, Kat used them to make some crispy seaweed and some lovely coleslaw, thank you!
I’m looking forward to filling the apiary in the new season and I’m thinking of only putting a few Hives there for now until I can prove to the allotment organisers that I (kinda) know what I’m doing. We’ve already weeded the area and started laying down carboard as a weed suppressant but still have lots left to do. Keep an eye out on a future post concerning this, I guess.
On another subject, August is probably one of the busiest months in a beekeeper’s calendar as we are simultaneously removing honey and preparing for winter. One of the preparations that we do is make up small colonies to take over into the new year. These are called “Overwintered Nucs” and are extremely useful for replacing winter losses in spring. I’ve spoken about them in the past when I was trying to buy a couple in February, but I’ve made my own this time to save myself some money. There’s the added benefit that if I don’t have any winter losses, I will have brand new colonies ready and raring to make me honey in the new season. Kat’s father has also shown an interest in keeping bees recently, so I was thinking of giving him a Nuc in the new year and slowly helping him turn it into a full Hive. He has a lot of heather near him so he might get a decent harvest from his first year.
I elected to make four Nucs for overwintering, which meant stealing brood, stores and bees from my strongest Hives. In August, the bees are starting to wind down, so the queens aren’t producing as many eggs and the brood area is starting to be reduced. Nucs can take a couple of weeks to get motoring if you already have a mated queen and can take much longer if you don’t. This is why August is the last month to make any Nucs as you don’t want to damage your strong colonies for the sake of making small ones and you want to make sure the Nucs can get strong enough to survive winter.
During my inspections I note down the amount of brood each Hive has; this is so I can compare each colony against each other in case of problems and to see if any Hives need more space. In my last inspection Steph and Laura both had well over the number of frames filled with brood than the others, almost 11 frames each when the norm is about 7 at the moment. It was from these that I made up two of the Nucs. I still had the two small Apidea Nucs that I made up in May going strong with laying home grown queens. I was going to use the queens from these in the overwintered Nucs and buy two queens from my association at a discounted price to bring in new genetics into my apiaries. Unfortunately, the Apideas had been attacked by wasps completely unbeknownst to me…
I opened the first one up having seen it busy the day before and found the inside full of chopped up bees. It was horrifying, every single one was missing its head, and some had their legs and abdomens separated from their bodies. I’ll go into details about this in another post at some point but wasps this time of year are desperate to get their hands on sugary foods, like honey. They attack weak/small colonies of bees en-masse and kill everything by biting its head clean off. Once the queen and the majority of the bees are dead, they then strip the comb of all honey and nectar in minutes. This means I was two queens down.
Fortunately, Andrea from B4biodiversity (google her) posted on Instagram that she had a spare virgin queen that she didn’t know what to do with. I obviously said I’d give her a good home and a few days later Andrea turned up at my door, queen in hand. Regrettably, I was probably the most hungover I’ve ever been in my life and don’t actually remember the interaction… (#workingwhileinebriated)
I kind of woke up the following day to tooting coming from a queen cage on my bedside table. So, thanks again Andrea! Apologies for not being totally copus mentus!
I popped the queen in one of the Nucs then left her to be released from the cage and go off to mate. Checked yesterday and she’s laying up a storm thankfully; the weather has been terrible until very recently, so I wasn’t holding out hope but fortunately she must have tiny umbrella or something. Not long after installing the Andrea’s queen the beekeeping association I’m part of contacted me saying my queens were ready. Unfortunately, I hadn’t made up a second Nuc due to Andrea’s surprise queen so could only take one off their hands.
The breeder had put the queen alone into a queen cage with no fondant. Their advice was to leave the queen in the queenless Nuc for a few days and then just release her manually by picking her up and popping her directly on the comb. This was the first time I’d heard this method of introduction and it sounded dangerous as hell. Some stupid part of me said “may as well give it a go, this guy has decades of experience on you, he can’t be wrong.”
I really hate that stupid part of me.
I opened up the cage and gently placed the queen on the comb, watched her pootle over to another bee and get fed. After which she unfurled her wings and flew off to buzz around my head in a seemingly mocking “you have no power here” kind of way before flying away… After a lot of swearing, grumbling and head slapping I decided to close the Nuc up in the extremely slim hopes that she may find her way back.
Remarkably, about an hour later whilst inspecting another Hive (still beating myself up) I noticed her resting on a leaf near the Nuc. My guess is that she flew about trying to orientate but the big green flailing creature she had used to locate her home had moved on leaving her a bit confused. I snook up on her and managed to cup her in both hands. I took her to the front of the Nuc and I moved my thumb so she could only enter it. After a few seconds and a build-up of forager bees hovering around my person I checked my hands to see if she had gone in, which she had. A week or so later I checked on the Nuc and its full of eggs so thankfully my mistake hasn’t cost me a queen and the chance to overwinter a Nuc. Phew! That being said, I don’t think I’ll be trying that introduction method again...
After my queen releasing mishap, it didn’t stop raining for almost two weeks, so I used the time to prepare for the honey pull. I took everything out of the sanitary room and scrubbed the living hell out of it and then cleaned the honey extractor etc before placing them back in the room ready for the big day!
With that done and the rain still pouring, I decided to do another task to save me time on honey pull day. I went to each Hive and placed a feeder on it. Feeding straight after taking the honey supers off is incredibly important as most of the bee’s stores will have been placed in the supers leaving space in the brood box for the queen to lay eggs. When you take the supers away some Hives can starve to death in a matter of days, especially big colonies. Usually you only need to give them a litre of sugar syrup and they can then fend for themselves, as any nectar they collect is all theirs from that point on until next spring. Each Hive needs around 18kg of honey/sugar syrup to make it through winter and curing syrup can take a lot of time, especially when it is damp and cold like in autumn. So, starting winter feeding early is also a good idea because it means the Hives will be stronger going into the cold months.
Kat and I decided that the best day for us to spin the honey was Thursday 19th August as it was predicted as the driest day in weeks and we were both free to extract on the same night while the honey was still warm. Honey flows out of the comb easier when it is warm and if you try to extract when it is cold you can sometimes get something called a “blow-out” where the wax comb collapses under the centrifugal forces fighting with all the other forces (thixotropic, viscosity etc.) in the extractor. It makes a right mess, of the frame and clogs the sieve with big clumps of wax, definitely not what you want to happen. With the date locked in on our calendar I worked backwards to find the optimum day to put the clearer boards in.
Clearer boards are used for getting the bees out of the honey supers to make extraction easier and to reduce/prevent any casualties. A lot of commercial beekeepers use leaf blowers to remove the bees from the comb, but I think it’s a pretty brutal method of doing something that can be done completely peacefully and naturally if given time. There are LOADS of different clearer board designs in the world and they are all pretty good at what they do but each beekeeper tends to find one that suits their needs and then decides that it is the best and only method that should ever be used. I tried three different kinds of clearer just to see what the benefits (if any) are.
In essence all clearer boards work on one simple principle, bees always feel the need to be queenright. The clearer board acts as a barrier with a one-way exit facing into the brood box. When placed over the brood box, all of the bees in the supers (above the clearer board) slowly realise that they haven’t sensed the queen’s pheromone in a while and so go to investigate if she’s still about. They make their way through the bee escape, bump into another bee who smells queen right and then relax; by this time though they are unable to get back up into the honey supers. It generally takes a day or so for the supers to clear, so I chose Tuesday 17th August to place the boards on. As everything that was used was homemade by yours truly, and my carpentry skills are… lacking… I decided to wrap the area in clingfilm to prevent any robbing from wasps or other Hives through cracks and gaps.
So, two days later I took a day off work and cracked on with the honey pull. My tasks for the day were to remove the honey supers, apply autumn mite treatments and feed the colonies. I was doing quite well even though it was a bit mizzly, starting in Apiary 2, I managed to get the first supers off Hive SWOM without any incident. I marched the heavy supers into the back of my car and closed the boot to prevent robbing and then went back to put in some Apivar strips.
Apivar is a type of varroa mite treatment that takes the form of a plastic strip impregnated with a miticide. I’ve chosen to use this treatment instead of Apiguard, which I used last year, because all you need to do is place it in a Hive and wait for 6-8 weeks. With Apiguard you need to replace it after 4 weeks with the treatment taking over 8 weeks, meaning I’d have something extra to remember and worry about which is a big no-no when you’re pushing 20 colonies.
When I finished feeding SWOM and closed her up I treated Carni and Bucky (both doing well) with Apivar and fed them, then moved onto Steph.
I’m not sure if it was the moisture in the air or maybe something I did but Steph was in a BAD mood. I removed the supers to the car and by the time I had come back the Hive entrance was covered in bees. I removed the clearer board slowly and was instantly coated in a layer of buzzing fury! Now the best thing to do when covered in bees is to remain perfectly still; they will eventually get bored and fly back to the Hive. Unfortunately for me, one of the girls decided to sting me under my fingernail which induced involuntary flailing and swearing - exactly the thing I would suggest not to do. The bees on my arms used this as an excuse to complain about the weather via butt-dagger. It’s not often that I run away from a Hive screaming (it is! ~ Kat, ed) but I’m afraid to say that I did just that. Sitting in the boot of my car whimpering to myself whilst plucking out 20+ stings from my arms is not something I’d recommend.
I have some thicker gloves in my car that I use for swarm captures which should give more protection from stings. I decided to put these on to keep me a little safer whilst I finished my work. Turns out the plastic hand parts are definitely sting proof, which is good, unfortunately the fabric cuffs that are attached to them offer no extra protection whatsoever. By the end of the day, after taking all of the supers off and treating every Hive, I had received about 50 stings to my arms and hands. Painful is an understatement to say the least. I felt like my arms were glowing in the dark when I went to bed that night.
I piled the supers in the garage with clearer boards on the bottom and top so any stragglers inside could escape and left them for an hour or so whilst I waited for Kat to get home. Bees are drawn to light, so I turned all of the lights off and blocked all of the windows to the exception of the garage door. This meant that any bee that wiggled their way out of the supers would fly to the door and would be released calmly and peacefully when I entered later… see I’m a genius… or so I thought ... In reality, when Kat and I were ready to extract the honey, I opened the garage door for a small swarm to pounce on me (unprotected). I managed to slowly walk into the middle of the garden with my new bee beard remaining calm and they slowly buzzed off back home without a single sting coming my way. Phew!
Honey extraction (I’ve done this for those of you who wanted to skip to the good bit)
Kat and I entered the garage and did a good old surgeon wash (from hands to elbows scrubbed) in the sink and then put on our extraction “gear”. This takes the form of a fashionable red hair net, surgical gloves, an apron (made by Kat’s mother) and some bright blue disposable overshoes.
Annoyingly, we didn’t think to take a picture of us in the garb but just know we looked super attractive and cool.
The heater in the sanitary room, where the extraction was going to be taking place, had been set to 31°C which is very warm, almost unbearable when you’re doing a lot of moving about. As mentioned earlier, honey flows better in warm temperatures so its good to have a hot room and warm equipment to work with.
We worked out a little routine to make things faster for us. I would lift the heavy full super into the room and Kat would take out any fully capped frames and start the uncapping process. (Removing the cappings is very important in the extraction process as the bees seal the honey behind a wall of wax, if this remains in place the sweet stuff won’t come out.) Any frames that hadn’t been capped by the bees would be tested by me, the chemist, for water content by using a refractometer. Fully cured honey needs to be below 20% water, or it will start to ferment, which means the jars may explode on the shelf or at least turn into a thick mead, not wholly desirable on your croissant. All uncapped frames and those that passed my hydro-scrutiny were then placed into the honey extractor; Any that didn’t pass were placed back into the super and will be given back to the bees at a later date. The extractor was turned on once full. Its important to start the spinning process slow and then gently go faster as more honey leaves the comb. If you don’t take your time, then you can get blow outs (as described earlier) which just ruins the comb and all the hard work the bees put into it Unfortunately we found this out the hard way...
Kat tried a couple different methods of uncapping the honey frames. The first was using a sharp serrated knife, which is the common method amongst beekeepers and let’s face it, the most satisfying to watch. She found it quite difficult as the comb wasn’t completely straight, meaning she was cutting some comb back to the foundation in some parts and not touching the capping at all in others. This method was quickly scrapped for something called an “uncapping fork”. With this you just scratch away at the cappings until they come away. It takes more time and a little bit more effort, but it is much more precise with fewer cells missed.
All in all, the extraction went well, we filled the 30L bucket that I had prepared to the brim and needed to use the uncapping trays to collect the rest of the honey we extracted. We probably have around 40-50kg of honey ready for bottling now. I’ve left the honey for a few days to settle, so all of the fine bits of wax float to the surface and you can do the incredibly satisfying clingfilm trick to remove it all.
Once the labels are fettled and jars are ready, I will be putting them up for sale. Unfortunately, it will be a first come first serve basis as we have been inundated by requests and I’m unsure we’ll have enough for everyone.
I’ll let you all know when they’re ready ASAP.
I hope you’re all keeping safe and well,
Greg