I took the honey crop off the bees today. I'm terribly late, and I should have done it a fortnight ago, but I was so pleased that there was finally some sunny weather and the bees were flying, I wanted to give them as much time as possible to gather a bit more nectar and finish processing it, in the hopes that I'd get at least a few jars of honey. I grow quite a few late summer flowering bee plants in the garden, so this wasn't an entirely fanciful idea, though I don't know if they really brought in much more in the past couple of weeks.
The deadline is imposed, not by the requirements of the honey harvest per se, but by the fact that I'm applying a varroa treatment that can't be given until honey destined for human consumption is removed, requires a maximum daytime temperature of fifteen degrees centigrade to work properly, and takes four weeks. If September is chilly then the medication may not be fully effective during the latter part of the treatment period. Then after the varroa treatment is finished you need to feed the bees for the winter, and again cold weather could be a problem, as then they won't take sugar syrup. To be on the safe side I've bought a box of fondant paste, just in case the weather has turned against us by late September. You can put fondant on as an emergency feed in February, so I'm sure they'll manage to take it down in October, if needs be.
The treatment consists of a tray of gel which contains something toxic to the mites, but not bees, or indeed humans. The only reason for not giving it while there is a honey crop on the hive is that the gel could affect the taste. You peel the lid off the tray and put it on top of the brood frames for a fortnight, then repeat the exercise with a second tray. The bees don't like the smell very much, and can get rather tetchy, or even abscond, which makes me nervous about using it. On the other hand, varroa infestation can destroy a colony and there aren't many good medications about, since the mites developed resistance to the one in general use when I started beekeeping. I've used this gel before and the bees stayed put, but friends used it and their bees simply left home, so it's a bit nerve-wracking.
In order to make room for the tray of gel on top of the brood nest, you need to lift the crown board slightly. Last time I used extra super boxes, the ones the bees put honey for harvest in, but that meant emptying out the frames and storing them in cardboard boxes for a month, which wasn't ideal. The best place for spare frames is inside a closed beehive, a mouse-proof, insect-proof wooden box where they can't get broken or infested with unwelcome inhabitants. You can buy purpose-made, low square sections from beekeeping suppliers which they call ekes, presumably from the same root as the term 'to eke out' something in short supply. The Systems Administrator says that eke is used as a noun in carpentry, meaning an extra fillet of wood used in an unobtrusive place to make something fit together. The flat pack self assembly eke kit seemed a lot of money for four smallish bits of wood, so I bought one to use as a template, and the SA built me some more out of decking offcuts. This turned out to be a fiddly job due to not having enough clamps of the right size, but was not intrinsically complicated.
The mite-killing fumes need to linger inside the beehives, so I had to move them from their usual floors made of metal mesh on to solid wooden ones. The idea of the mesh floor is that any varroa mite that drops off the bee it's holding on to will fall through the floor and out of the hive, before it can climb back on to another bee. I've been using them for three or four years now, and the bees seem quite happy on them, even in the winter. I did worry that it would make the hive too cold for them, but they don't seem to mind, and the mesh floor does prevent condensation building up. Luckily when I made the switch I kept the wooden floors.
The honey extraction didn't take long, alas, because there wasn't very much of it. There'll be enough for me to eat (the SA isn't especially keen on honey, or sweet spreads generally) and give a few jars to close friends and relations, but certainly none for sale. A little honey had solidified in the comb, but most spun out in the centrifuge. It is a medium coloured honey in show terms, a nice mid brown, with quite a strong flavour. I'm very partial to it. I stored the supers and combs away as soon as I'd finished extracting, layering them with newspaper and lining up each box exactly with the one below it, finishing the pile with a wooden crown board and a lid. With earlier extractions I would put the boxes outside for the bees to take what I can't, but now it's the wasp season, and I don't really want wasps crawling all over the combs. I need to get the bees to clean them at some stage, as I want them to take the granulated honey down into the brood box and clear the combs for me, but I'll put them on a hive that's going well next spring.
Nothing to do now for two weeks, except hope that the bees don't dislike the varroa treatment so much they move out. If you are thinking of taking up beekeeping please don't follow my example in this case. Like I said, I should have done everything two weeks earlier.
No comments:
Post a Comment