Harvesting Honey: 5 Tips

August 19th, 2010

Harvesting honey is one of the most exciting jobs of a beekeeper (click here to see a video showing how to harvest honey). It is the time when all your hard work pays off, and it is such a thrill to taste the first honey from your own hive. But, as with everything to do with beekeeping, there are a few pitfalls you need to watch out for! Here are 5 tips to help ensure that your first honey harvest runs smoothly.

1. Honey is very sticky

Obvious, but still worth remembering. You will get honey on your hands, and everything you touch will get sticky. A bucket of warm water is essential to keep rinsing your hands.  Be well prepared, with all your extraction equipment at hand before you start. If possible, do your extraction in a garage or basement rather than in the kitchen (provided you can keep the honey clean and the bees out).

2.  Beware of robbers

Your extraction room must be bee proof. Bees will be attracted to the honey, and if they can get in, they will. Not only will they take back their honey – it is also very difficult to extract honey with bees buzzing around your head.

If possible, do not leave full supers sitting around for long before extraction. Bees are not the only insects who like honey – ants, earwigs and wasps will all steal it if given the chance.

3. Warm honey flows better

Extracting honey is much easier if it is warm – ideally 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 c) or more. In the summer time this is not usually a problem, but if it is cooler try warming the frames before beginning the extraction. The easiest way to do this is by putting the supers under a light bulb overnight.

4. You don’t need to buy all the extraction equipment.

Many household items will be good enough substitutes for extraction tools, rather than spending a fortune on beekeeping supplies. Rather than an uncapping knife, you can use a serrated bread knife. Kitchen strainers (or nylon stockings) can be used as honey filters. Tupperware containers are good for honey and the wax cappings.

One thing that you will need is a centrifugal honey extractor, but you can often borrow or hire this from your local beekeeping association.

5. Make use of the wax cappings

About 10% of the honey will be in the wax cappings, so be sure to strain these to get all the honey you can. The cappings themselves can then be melted down and are ideal for candle making. Do not use everyday pots to melt your wax – anything in contact with melted wax will remain forever waxy and cannot be used for anything else.

6. Bees are great cleaners

Once you have extracted your honey, put the ‘wet’ super with the empty frames back on the hive. The bees will do a great job of cleaning off any remaining honey, usually within 1 day, and the dry super can then be put into storage.

Enjoy your delicious honey!

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Beekeeping Video: Harvesting Honey

August 16th, 2010

 

Your supers are full of honey, now is the time to reap the rewards of all your (and your bees!) hard work. Harvesting honey is really exciting, but can be a bit difficult if you are not sure what to do or are ill prepared.

So to make sure you are on the right track, here is another great video from David Meldrum of the Essex County Beekeeping Association showing exactly how to harvest honey using a centrifugal honey extractor.

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Candle Making With Beeswax

August 14th, 2010

The main product of your bees should be honey, but there are also other great ‘by products’. Probably the most important of these is beeswax.  This has many uses, including for cosmetics, furniture polish and soaps but also of course candle making. If you have bees and are wondering what to do with all your beeswax, then how about trying candle making at home yourself?

Most candles that you will buy are made of paraffin or petroleum based wax, but beeswax candles are much more natural. They give a light warm glow, have a lovely scent, and do not emit any toxic fumes. And, with your own wax from your beehive, they are of course much cheaper!

If you keep your bees in top bar hives, you will have much more wax than in Langstroth type hives, and the perfect way to make use of this is by making beeswax candles.

So, where do you start? There are 3 ways to go about candle making with beeswax.

1. Rolled candles.

Rolled beeswax candles

Rolled beeswax candles

This is the simplest way to make your candles, and is easy to do if you are taking your beeswax straight from the honeycomb. You simply place a wick on the edge of the flat sheet of beeswax (extending the wick about 2 inches on either side of the sheet), fold the sheet approximately 1/8 of an inch over the wick, and then slowly roll up the beeswax sheet, keeping gentle pressure when rolling.  

After you have rolled the entire sheet, press the edge down so it does not unravel. Remove the wick from one end, and that’s it – your first beeswax candle!

2. Molded candles

The second option is to make candles using a mold. The wax needs to be melted down first, so this is a great way to use the wax cappings left over from your honey harvest. 

Use a double-boiler (or a pot inside a pot). Do NOT try to melt the wax in a single pot – it is highly flammable and will go on fire! Put the solid wax in the smaller pot, and place this in the bigger pot partly filled with water. Put this on the stove until the wax has melted. At this stage you can add any scented oils or dyes you require. Place a wick in the centre of the mold, and then pour in the melted wax. Be careful - melted wax is hot! 

3. Dipped candles

Dipping is the third way to make beeswax candles. After melting the wax as above, dip the wick in it. The wick will then be coated with wax. Allow the wax to cool between dippings for about one minute, then dip it in the melted wax again for the second layering, and so on. Keep doing this until the candle is the thickness you want. Then, once it is totally cooled, use a sharp knife to trim off any excess wax and make a straight edge for the bottom of your candle.

Candle making is a really enjoyable hobby, and a great way to use that surplus beeswax from your hives. Beeswax candles are very popular, so it can also be a great way to generate some extra cash from your hobby.

Learn the Art of Candle Making!

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Colony Collapse Disorder And The Decline Of The Honey Bee – Should We Be Worried?

July 31st, 2010

Bees are probably best known for producing honey, but their most important contribution to the world is really through their pollination services. Worker bees work endlessly to perform the activities to keep the hive going. At different stages of their life cycle, worker bees are ‘nurse bees’, caring for the larvae and tending the queen and then ‘foraging bees’ collecting nectar to make honey, and pollen to feed the brood.

Pollination in action!

Pollination in action!

By doing this foraging, they carry out a very large proportion of all the insect pollination needed by plants and flowers to reproduce (up to 80% of all insect pollination is by honey bees). Over 100 crops are pollinated by bees, including fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. It is estimated that honey bees are is responsible for one third of all the food we eat.

So the honey bee is an incredibly important part of the natural food chain. But it recently has seen a serious decline in numbers, most notably in North America. Up to one third of honey bees have mysteriously disappeared, in a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (or CCD).

It is not known exactly what is causing these losses, but ironically some of this decline is probably caused by is the relentless transportation of bees around the country to pollinate crops.

Beehives being transported for pollination

Beehives being transported for pollination

Sharing bees in an effort to boost crop production is big business today. Many farmers and growers are totally dependent on commercial bee farmers bringing in large numbers of colonies to pollinate their crops. These bees are left for a few weeks, and then transported on to the next orchard or plantation. This process continues throughout much of the season, with bees being transported thousands of miles every year.

Such intensive production methods are increasingly coming under scrutiny, both in terms of the monoculture and its effect on the local environment, but also in terms of the stress placed on the bees.

Scientists are now studying the full effects this regular transport has had on the bees. Many are worried that the stress might leave them open to infection and disease. It certainly does seem to have coincided with the massive drop in bee numbers. And recent research suggests that a likely cause of CCD is a combination of the varroa mite (a parasitic mite that infests bee colonies) and nosema (a disease caused by a parasite in the bee gut). Bees are much more prone to both of these problems when subject to stress.

The full causes of CCD are not yet known, and maybe never will be. But it is likely that the industrialization of agriculture is at least partly to blame. No reports of CCD have yet been recorded among natural beekeepers, and this tells a tale in itself.

Pollination image courtesy Gustavo

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How To Transfer Honey Bees From a Nuc To a Beehive

July 28th, 2010

Before you start beekeeping, you need to make sure you have all your essential beekeeping equipment ready – a beehive, protective clothing, a smoker, a hive tool, and a feeder. There are other useful tools, but these basics will be enough to get you started.

Once you have all this, then you are ready to get your bees. As a beginner beekeeper, there are several ways to get bees. Although not the cheapest option, buying a nucleus hive (or a ‘nuc’) is a great way to start. A nuc is just a small temporary hive, usually containing 5 frames with brood (young developing larvae and bees), a working queen, and about 10,000 bees. By transferring this into your beehive, your bees should get off to a great start.

So, if you decide to get a nuc, what is the procedure?

Opening a nuc box

Opening a nuc box

You need to collect your nuc in the evening, when the bees have stopped flying for the day and are all back in the box. The supplier should already have the box sealed using foam or something similar to block the entrance and keep the bees in – you do not want the bees to start flying out of the nuc when it is sitting on the back seat of your car on the way home!

Setting up the new beehive

Setting up the new beehive

 

When you get the nuc home, just place it in the exact spot where you are planning to put your hive and unblock the entrance. Remember to wear protective gear – the bees will mostly stay in the box (as it is still evening time) but the journey may have unsettled them a bit so some will fly out, and may be a little agitated.

Then just leave the bees in their nuc box for a few days and let them get used to their new surroundings. Once they have settled, you need to transfer them from the nuc box into the beehive.

Transferring a frame to the new beehive

Transferring a frame to the new beehive

 

Ideally, choose a warm sunny day when the bees are flying well – this way most of the foragers are out gathering nectar and pollen, so there will be fewer bees in the box. Move the nuc slightly to one side, and place your new beehive on the stand where the nuc was. Gently smoke the bees, and open the nuc box (using your hive tool – the lid will probably be well stuck on with propolis). Lift each frame one by one and put them into the hive.

Opinions vary about how best to position the frames in the hive. Some beekeepers keep all 5 frames with brood together, filling out the rest of the brood box with empty frames, others alternate them so you have an empty frame between each full frame of brood. Everyone has their own view, but the truth is that either way will be OK.

Once you have all the frames in the new hive, empty the remaining bees from the nuc box into the hive. If there are a few left in the box, don’t worry. Just leave it at the entrance to the hive and the bees will find their own way in. Put on the crown board, above this an empty super, and the roof.

Bee feeder inside a super

Bee feeder inside a super

To help get your bees of to a good start and encourage them to draw out the foundation, it is a good idea to feed them. If there is a heavy nectar flow in your area, this might not be needed, but it will do no harm. Make up sugar syrup (at a ratio of 1 to 1 sugar to water), put this in your feeder and put the feeder on the crown board (in the empty super). It is best to wait until the evening before feeding, because if you feed syrup when bees are flying you might encourage other bees to rob the hive.

The bees safely in their new hive

The bees safely in their new hive

 

And that is it – you are now a beekeeper! The most difficult thing now is to leave the bees alone – it is very tempting to keep opening up the hive to see what is going on! Resist this temptation, just sit back and give your bees a few days to get accustomed to their new home before you do your first inspection.

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Beekeeping Video – Installing A Package Of Honeybees

July 27th, 2010

There are several ways to get your first bees, and one of the most popular is to get a ‘package’ of bees. If you decide to get your bees this way, then this beekeeping video should be a great help!  

It shows David Meldrum and the students of the Essex County Beekeepers’ Association as they “install a package” or set up a new hive in Andover, MA. Watch as David talks his students through the process, showing exactly step by step how he transfers the bees to their new hive.

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4 Ways For The Beginner Beekeeper To Get Honey Bees

July 6th, 2010

As a beginner beekeeper, there are several ways to get your honey bees. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages. You can

1. Get a swarm
2. Buy package bees
3. Buy a nucleus hive
4. Buy a fully established colony

1. Get a Swarm

This can be a fun way to get bees, and has the big advantage that it is free. You can just put your name down on a swarm list with your local beekeeping association, which will often give preference to beginner beekeepers. Provided you have the help of an experienced beekeeper, a swarm is easily collected and placed in your hive, and you have a ready made colony.

Swarm of honey bees ready for collection!

Swarm of honey bees ready for collection!

But there are some disadvantages with this method of getting honey bees. It is very unpredictable – you never know quite when you will get a swarm, and there will often be other people on the list also waiting for a swarm.

Because there is no brood, you have no way of judging how good the queen will be, and swarms will often need requeened as soon as possible. Equally, you have no way of knowing the disease status or temperament of the bees in a swarm, as its origin is unknown. It is also unlikely that you will get honey in your first year, although this does depend on the size of the swarm, and the time of year – the earlier the better.

2. Package Bees

Package bees on top of hive

Package bees on top of hive

Package bees consist of 2 to 3 lbs of loose bees and a queen in a separate cage, all in a specially designed box that can be sent through the mail. There will also be a can of sugar syrup for feeding during transit.  Apart from a swarm, this is the cheapest way to buy honey bees. Because of the strain of transport, the bees can sometimes be difficult to introduce to the hive (especially if the weather is bad), but generally this is a relatively easy way to start beekeeping.

The drawback is that there is no brood, so no way to assess the queen. No brood also means that it will take longer for the bees to get properly established and build up in numbers. This may mean no honey in the first year, but again will depend on how early you get your bees and the nectar flow in your area.
Click here to watch a video showing package bees being installed.

3. Nucleus colony

Moving the frames from a nuc

Moving the frames from a nuc

A nucleus colony (or ‘nuc’) is just a small temporary hive, usually containing 4 or 5 brood frames. It will contain a working queen, about 10,000 worker bees and plenty of brood, honey and pollen. You will usually collect your nuc locally, so the bees will definitely be suited to your area – a real advantage.

The queen is a nuc is usually new, and you will be able to see by looking at the brood just how productive the queen is. By transferring this into your beehive, your bees should get off to a great start, and you should have a good chance of honey in your first year.

The main disadvantage is, because you are buying an established colony (albeit a small one) this is a more expensive way to get started than just getting loose honey bees.

4. Fully established colony.

Buying an existing colony is the most expensive option, although do remember that you will not need to buy a new hive. The main advantage of this is that you will hit the ground running. The colony will already be fully established, with a full box of brood and stores, so you are much more likely to get honey in the first season.

Apart from the cost, there can potentially be problems with disease, and the queen will probably be older so may be reaching the end of her productive life. Also, as the hive is used it may need replacement parts sooner.

If you do decide to go down this route to start beekeeping, get an experienced beekeeper to check out the colony for any problems before you buy.

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Beekeeping Video – Honey Bees Life Cycle

June 27th, 2010

As a beekeeper, it is very important to understand the life cycle of the honey bee. You do not need to know the exact scientific details, but knowing the basics is essential for the everyday management of your bees –  so that you can tell if the bees are healthy and the colony strong, and if not what is wrong and what intervention is needed.

Here is a great video from ScienceOnline which explains really clearly about the life cycle of the honey bee, and has some fascinating close up shots of the bees at work.

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Health Benefits of Honey

June 16th, 2010

Honey is not just one of the most delicious substances known to mankind, it is also incredibly valuable for nutrition and healing – and has been for thousands of years. Here are 5 modern day health benefits of honey.

1. Honey as a Hay Fever Remedy

Healthy breakfast with honey

Healthy breakfast with honey

If you suffer from hay fever, locally produced honey may help ease your symptoms. All honey will contain traces of pollen – and if it is locally produced honey, it will contain the same pollen which causes your hay fever. So if you take small amounts of this honey every day, the theory is that you will de-sensitize yourself to your pollen allergy.

As yet there is no scientific proof that this works, but many people do swear by it, so if you are a sufferer it is certainly worth a try. Of course, the most local honey you can get will be that produced by your own bees in your own backyard! You can learn more about how to start beekeeping here.

2. Increased Energy

Honey is also a great natural source of carbohydrates giving us strength and energy and is a stimulant, giving an instant boost in performance and endurance and reducing muscle fatigue – particularly in athletes.

Honey is known to keep blood sugar levels fairly constant compared to other types of sugar. This is because it is a natural source of fructose and glucose, which are very quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, and play a crucial role in preventing fatigue during exercise. Of course, it is not just when doing exercise that a boost can be useful, but also in everyday life.

3. Boosting the Immune System

Honey is an important source of vitamins and minerals, and honey’s antioxidant properties help remove free radicals from the body improving your digestive system, and enabling you to stay healthy and fight disease. This is a key health benefit of honey, as a powerful immune system booster

4. Treating Minor Injuries

Honey for sale

Honey for sale

Externally, honey has been used as a first aid treatment for cuts, burns and wounds. Its antiseptic properties help keep wounds free of infection, and it can help promote healing. It is also thought to be anti-inflammatory, so it will reduce swelling and pain from injuries.

Manuka honey is made by bees feeding on flowers from the Manuka bush, principally found in New Zealand. This bush has antibacterial and antifungal properties, making Manuka honey the most antibacterial of all the different types of honey and so is it particularly good for wound dressing.

5. Treating Sore Throats and Colds

Honey is a great natural treatment for sore throats. It not only soothes the pain of a sore throat, but also helps kill the harmful bacteria that cause the infection. Studies show it is often better than over the counter remedies for coughs, colds and sore throats. Particularly for children, when taken before bedtime honey can help stop coughing and allow a good night’s sleep.

There are many other uses of honey, but there is no doubt that honey benefits health – it truly is one of nature’s wonder products.

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Beekeeping Video: How To Feed Your Bees With Sugar Syrup

April 23rd, 2010

 

Here’s a great video from Georgia beekeeper John Pluta, showing exactly how he mixes sugar syrup to top up feed his bees in the spring and fall.

In the summer time, your bees should have a plentiful supply of nectar and pollen from flowers and trees. But in the fall, after you have harvested the honey, you need to be sure that they have enough stores to keep them going through the winter. The way you do this is by feeding them sugar syrup, which they take down into the hive, store and cap, in just the same way they do with nectar to make honey. 

In the spring time, when the bees are starting to get active but before there is a plentiful supply of nectar, the bees may also need top up feeds to keep them going until there is sufficient available for them outside the hive. This top up feeding is an essential part of beekeeping – without enough food, your bees will simply starve. Aside from pests and disease, this is one of the biggest risks your bees will face, and it’s part of good beekeeping management to make sure that this does not happen.

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