Honey Part One

2 stings

A hearing aid

A bed sheet

And a wheelbarrow
 

Planned like a military operation.......
 

We didn't start keeping bees because we like honey.  We realised that it would be most unlikely that our bees would produce enough honey for us to take some off in their first year but at the last inspection we had 2 supers full of honey  and one of them is the super that used to be a brood chamber ("STUTBABC"). The frames in STUTBABC are old and need to be replaced with fresh frames.  So, we might as well spin out the honey then we can melt out the wax and, hopefully, exchange the old wax for new wax foundation for frames next year.

 

Taking off honey has to be planned like a military operation.   It is, after all, stealing stores from the bees.  They don't know that we plan to take less than half of their stores and to supplement their remaining stores with food to make sure they have enough for the whole winter.  We have to expect them to defend their stores and see off all attackers.

Phase One - reordering the supers

The first step is to make sure that the super we want to take off is at the top of the hive and has no bees in it so we don't have any G Bees "helping" in the kitchen with the honey extraction.    In our case, STUTBABC is the bottom super so we planned to the change the order when we put the supers back during our regular hive inspection.  We also planned to put a clearing board under STUTBABC.  This is a solid board with two gadgets fitted in to it that allow bees to go down into the supers below but not come up again.   

 

During the inspection, there were a lot of wasps around, they were also after the honey our G Bees have made and the G Bees were more agitated than usual, pinging our veils.    (Yes, I do mean they fly straight at the veil hitting it with a "ping" and bouncing off.)   Unfortunately, they also pinged the official photographer who, used to the normal gentle behaviour of our bees, was standing perilously close, and he wasn't wearing a veil!   He was stung - twice.

 

Later in the day when he went for a shower, he noticed that he had lost a hearing aid.  A finger tip search of the garden eventually turned up the hearing aid which was dislodged in his rapid retreat to a safe distance.  It is a miracle because it's one of those tiny hearing aids.   Phew!

Phase Two - take the super to the kitchen

The weather forecast was not good.  We had only a small window to work with the bees so after they'd gone to bed and it was nearly dark, we went to take off STUTBABC.   We took along a wheelbarrow with an old bed sheet spread out in it, planning to sit the super in the bed sheet and quickly wrap it up to make it bee proof in case they tried to follow us to the kitchen.    

 

We had also planned what we would do if there were still bees in the super.  We had with us a large feather for brushing the bees off of the frames in front of the hive entrance and a fine water mister to spray to convince them it was starting to rain and they should go inside (and not follow us).    But when we opened the hive there seemed to be just as many bees in the super as before Phase One.  

 

We thought we hadn't given them enough time to move down in to the hive so we left them for another 24 hours.

Phase Two - again

Once again we had to find a tiny suitable window in the weather to go back to the apiary equipped as before.   This time when we opened the hive and saw all the bees in STUTBABC we realised we had another problem.   STUTBABC came from the bee rescue (see the Blog for 20th July) and is a slightly different size to our other supers.  We thought we had positioned it to ensure there were no spaces that bees could slip through but we hadn't.   Instead of only being able to exit STUTBABC via the bee escapes in the clearing board, they had been able to slip in and out of the sides.  That didn't help them much because that just got them in to the space in between the inner hive and the outer casing but they had plenty of stores in STUTBABC and it's still warm so they had no incentive to go down to the nest in the brood chamber.

 

We have now taken all the frames out of STUTBABC and put them into one of our spare supers and put that on the hive over the clearing board.   It fits neatly.   Why didn't we do that before? We're going to give the remaining bees plenty of time to make their way down into the hive before we try again.   I'd better get a veil for the official photographer too.