BEEKEEPING COLUMN - Creating a buzz in August
Welcome to the eight edition of Rubery beekeeper, Jas Payne’s monthly column. Take a fascinating glimpse into the beautiful, industrious and vital role of bees in nature and experience life as an apiarist.
August is quite possibly the busiest, and most physically demanding, time of my beekeeping year!
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve begun the job of removing excess honey from the hives. I do this in one of two ways.
Option one involves lifting out one frame of honey at a time, shaking any bees that are on the frame gently back into the lower part of the hive, placing the frame of honey into a sealed box and repeating until all the frames of honey are removed.
Option two means adding a ‘clearer board’ under the boxes of honey. The clearer board acts as a one way valve. Bees go down into the main part of the hive but can’t get back up, and when I return 24 hours later the bee-free honey boxes can just be carried away.
The next job is extracting the honey.
I slice or scrape away the wax cappings that cover the honey, and six frames at a time are placed into my extractor. These are then spun – by hand – until as much of the honey as possible has come out.
The honey passes through a sieve that removes any flakes of wax, but still allows the pollens to get through, and it’s then ready to go into jars.
The wet frames are returned to the hives they came from so that the bees can lick them clean. Not a drop of their honey is wasted – it’s far too precious!
It’s back breaking work – each frame can hold 2lb (just under 1kg) of honey and each box holds ten frames – but it’s all worth it for that first taste of summer honey. It really is sunshine in a jar!
After that it’s the little job of cleaning everything down. It’s amazing how far honey can splatter, and just how sticky it is!
If you’ve only ever eaten supermarket ‘honey’ before, please do consider supporting your local beekeeper instead. You’ll be amazed at how different real honey tastes,
