I was all set to extract honey today. I went up to the bees on Sunday when it was warm and calm and put excluders underneath a couple of supers, one full and one fairly full of capped comb that was ready to come off. For the non-beekeeper who wishes to know more (otherwise I should skip the next couple of paragraphs if I were you) this translates as follows: a beehive consists of a stack of boxes. The queen bee lives in the lowest box where she lays eggs that develop into new bees. The upper boxes are there for the worker bees to store nectar and honey. You can tell they have finished converting nectar into honey when they cover the honeycomb with a wax capping. At this point if you want to remove the upper box and the honey without too many bees you need to get them out of the upper box(es) of finished honey. There are various ways of doing this, but one of the easiest for an amateur beekeeper with only a few hives is to put a board underneath the box(es) to be removed that has a couple of holes in it, in which you place little plastic devices the bees find it easy to go through one way but difficult to navigate in reverse. A day or two later most of the bees should have left the box(es) above the board and been unable to get in again. You don't leave it too long or they will find their way back up. There, now you know what was going on.
I got ready for the extraction, tidying the kitchen, washing the floor, digging the extractor out of the cupboard under the eaves, and finding a couple of honey buckets. Then, dressed in my bee suit, I set off up the meadow with my wheelbarrow, armed with a soft plastic brush to help clear any recalcitrant bees out of the boxes I planned to take. (Sometimes there are still some bees above the excluder board, who either found their way back up again or never left in the first place. Giving the super a sharp jolt can often shake a lot of them out, and I keep a couple of sturdy wooden boxes in the apiary that are useful in such cases, as well as providing a handy place if you need to put a stray super down for some reason. If there are really a lot of bees still in the super there are ways and means, including lifting the frames out one at a time, giving them a hard shake and a brush, putting them in a spare super you have in a wheelbarrow a little way from the apiary, and then legging it with the barrow as fast as you can before the bees work out what you are doing. This really doesn't work for more than about one super. If you were a professional bee farmer you wouldn't even mess about with excluders, but would have a machine that delivered a puff of something the bees didn't like into the top of the hive and they would all go down towards the bottom).
As soon as I reached the apiary I could see that something was wrong. There was a small but busy crowd of bees darting around the back of the top super on this year's strongest colony. That was wrong. Bees should only ever be flying about the entrance to the hive, which is at the bottom, opening into the brood box where the queen resides. Access to the upper part of the hive should only be via the front door, which the bees guard against intruders, be they wasps or bees from other hives. (When I started going to beekeeping classes I was taught that in the summer you should give the bees a wider entrance, perhaps even stretching the full width of the hive, to make sure they got enough ventilation. Now that all my hives have floors made of metal mesh, to help with varroa control, I reckon that they will get enough air through the floor, and leave them with their one inch wide door all year, reasoning that it must be easier to defend. In winter I put a metal cover over it with holes large enough for a bee but too small for a mouse to get in, but that is another story).
I needed my metal hive tool to prise the top super loose, as the bees had already done a good job of sticking it down again in less than forty-eight hours, and it was sickeningly light, whereas when I put it back on Sunday it needed real effort to lift it to chest height. The top of the excluder board was powdered with crumbs of wax, and some dead bees. Robbing. I had somehow failed to make the top of the beehive entirely bee proof and bees had found their way in through the gap and stolen most of the honey from the super above the excluder. Normally a good sized colony would defend their assets, but of course with the excluder in place they couldn't get up there to repel boarders. The litter of wax was from the cappings, which the robbers had torn off the comb to get at the honey beneath. The dead bees would have been killed in the fight between the robbers and the hive residents. Poor bees.
I removed the excluder board and left the robbed super in place for the bees to finish clearing out what honey remained. Later I worried that it would still have had some robbing bees in it and that if they made their way down through the hive and out of the entrance they could theoretically bring reinforcements back to rob via the front door, but the colony is probably strong enough to defend itself, even assuming that the robbers made it out alive. As I said, poor bees.
I took the super I'd planned to collect from the other hive without incident, and extracted the honey, though there wasn't as much as there had been in the super I'd just lost. By half past one I was all finished, floor washed again, extractor washed, honey harvest finished for another year. The next job will be to remove the supers now the colonies aren't growing, and feed the bees for the winter. Objectively speaking I didn't really need the last bucket of honey, having harvested enough for our own consumption and to give some to friends, and not being geared up to sell it. It is galling, though, having got the bees so far through the summer, past the hazards of swarming and wasp attack, to have lost half the crop from that hive at the eleventh hour through carelessness. I think there must have been one frame sticking up slightly proud somewhere, so that surfaces that should have touched and made a perfect, bee-tight seal did not quite touch and there was a little gap, small but big enough for bees to get through. I only hope they were my bees doing the robbing and not somebody else's, then at least the honey is still in the apiary somewhere and the bees or I will get the benefit of it eventually.
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