Today I took some honey off the bees. That bald phrase in no way conveys the hotness and stickiness of the process, or the time involved. Beekeepers who sell a pound of honey for as little as four pounds (and I did see it advertised at that by the side of the road on my jaunt to Saffron Waldon) are commercially insane, and letting the side down very badly.
I started preparations to take the honey a couple of days ago, when I put clearer boards on two hives with honey ready to harvest in the supers. Beekeeping terminology is a bit like sailing jargon, in that the name given to something depends on what it is doing at the time as well as its physical properties. So, just as a rope is a sheet when it's attached to the bottom corner of a sail or a halyard when it's used to hoist the sail, the same square of wood with two holes in it is a crown board when it's on top of the pile of boxes making up a bee hive, but a clearer board when it's underneath the supers you want to empty of bees. In that case it is fitted with a bee escape, a one way valve for bees which (in theory) allows them to go down out of the super, but not get up into it. I use Porter bee escapes, which contain thin flaps of metal meeting in a V shape, the idea being that the bees can push out through the bottom of the V, but find it awkward to go the other way.
Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. In the first hive I opened, the two supers I wanted to take were almost empty of bees. I shook and brushed a few off, but there weren't many to deal with. I put the supers in a wheelbarrow, trundled them back to the house while listening out for buzzing, and then had to wait for a few minutes while a few confused bees emerged and began to crawl up the kitchen window. Honey bees, finding themselves indoors, are generally drawn to the window, where you can cup a glass over them, slide a piece of card in between the glass and the window pane, and carry them outside. Doing it half a dozen times is no problem. Repeating it for twenty or thirty bees gets tedious.
Things were not so rosy when I took the roof off the second hive, as there still seemed to be a lot of bees in the supers. Either they had not felt the need to go downstairs in the past couple of days, or they had worked out how to get up again. I stiffened my resolve, because I did want that honey, and prepared to shake and run. I'd gone to the apiary armed with a spare super with no frames in it. I stood it in the wheelbarrow, picked a frame out of the top of the hive, shook it to get the bees off, laid it down while I did the same with a second frame, then holding them both at shoulder height to keep them clear of the stray waving heads of grass trotted over to the wheelbarrow and slotted them into the super. I had to repeat this process not quite ten times, because the bees hadn't finished filling some of the frames, and I dropped the partially complete ones down into the empty super below and swapped them for completely empty ones.
It shows what nice bees they are that I managed to get away with doing this to two supers, without finding my wheelbarrow surrounded by an angry army of bees intent on defending their stores of honey. I legged it pretty quickly back to the house, though, abandoning the final empty super which had too many bees on it. I'll retrieve that tomorrow, together with a spare crown board which again was covered in bees.
Through a combination of caution about the honey being ready, and being busy with other things, I'd managed to leave this lot until the bees had finished capping virtually all of it. When the bees have finished processing nectar into honey, they seal it over with a wax capping. In theory you don't have to wait for them to do that, as long as the water content is low enough, which you can test for by shaking the frames and seeing if they drip. In theory. If honey is harvested before it's ready and while it is still too dilute, it will ferment in storage. So waiting until the bees have unambiguously told you that they think it's ready is not a bad thing. Except that if it is oilseed rape honey it may set in the comb before you can get it out, and if the bees are thinking of swarming they may fly off with it before you have taken it. So it can be tempting to take honey early on a precautionary basis.
A headline in the Telegraph this morning warned people to stay indoors out of the sun for the good of their health. I don't suppose that the medics who dreamt that one up were imagining that I would spend the day out of the sun but locked in a room with a four oven Aga on normal full clatter. Honey extraction has to be done in a closed room which bees absolutely cannot find their way into, so all windows and doors must be firmly shut, even on the hottest day. Years ago a hapless BBC programme showed a beekeeper extracting honey from the combs outside in her garden. Memories of that still makes our local beekeepers jeer. Do that (unless after dark by floodlight) and you will be surrounded by a mob of bees in no time. The beekeeper on the telly was wearing a suit and veil, I seem to remember.
I was not wearing a suit and veil, but the thinnest, lightest cotton trousers I had and a clean t-shirt, once I'd finished collecting the second lot of unwanted bees from the inside of the window. There were rather more, second time around, and one fell in the sink and almost washed down the plughole, but managed to hang on to a piece of kitchen roll I poked down to it. The kitchen floor was freshly washed and I was ready to roll, my supers in two piles on the kitchen table (covered in newspaper) with notes of with their hives of origin, 2a and 4.
After that things got really sticky. As a very small scale beekeeper I don't have anything in the way of elaborate equipment, and the commercial beekeepers I know won't do it the way I am going to describe. I slice the wax cappings off the first side of the first frame using a largish, sharp kitchen knife, and drop them into a pyrex casserole dish. Then I turn the frame around and repeat on the other side, while the first side drips gently on my chopping board. I put the frame in my hand cranked centrifuge, uncap a second frame, preferably with the same thickness of honey so that the centrifuge will be balanced. I turn the handle for the count of forty, then forty the other way for luck, then have to take the frames out and turn them round to repeat the process on the other side. Then I put those frames back in the super and repeat with the second pair of frames. And so on until I've finished. It takes ages.
The extractor is fitted with a gate valve at the bottom. When the honey in the extractor reaches up to the rotating cage, I run it off through a plastic sieve which gets out the little fragments of wax from the cappings plus any stray legs or wings, into food grade plastic buckets. I label each bucket with the hive it came from and the date of extraction. As the honey settles, any remaining specks of wax or impurities will float to the top, and I will open the bucket up and lay a piece of clingfilm across the top to skim off the very top layer containing the small debris as I peel it off again. I won't jar it all up at once, since it keeps better in the buckets.
The wax cappings, meanwhile, are heaped in a colander in a bowl on the warming plate of the Aga, where a remarkable quantity of perfectly good honey drips off them. Come evening, the empty but still sticky supers are stacked outside the garage, where tomorrow the bees will find them and clean them of every last trace of honey. Some people put the supers back on the beehives after extraction for the bees to polish them, but if I do that I have to trundle them all the way up the meadow in the wheelbarrow and back again, and I am all in favour of saving work where I can. It's in the nature of bees to find old bees nests to rob out, and the garage is so far from the apiary that I don't believe I am encouraging bad behaviour close to home.
That account makes it all sound very neat and organised, when in practice it is very sticky, very hot, and rather Heath Robinson. In order to hold the bottom of the plastic sieve clear of the honey in the bucket once it fills, I have to prop it up with a pile of tins under each of its three arms. Towers two tins high are not so bad, but to fit over the large honey buckets takes three. I wish that Heinz and Crosse and Blackwell would design their tins so that they slotted into each other when stacked. I try not to drip, but inevitably do, so at the end of it the kitchen floor has to be washed again, and the Aga, the table, the worktop, and the soles of my shoes. Scrubbing the fragments of wax off the wire cage of the extractor is a laborious task, since it is too large to fit right in the sink, and I have to do it section by section under the running tap.
It is a labour of love. We set the price at this year's Tendring Show at six pounds a pound, and when I think of the work that goes into it, not to mention the sugar you have to feed to the bees afterwards, and their Varroa treatments, and fresh wax for their combs every so often, it is cheap at the price.
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