Bees!

When we moved to our new house we inherited two beehives.  I've had a dream of having our own bees for a while now, and we thought about keeping them.  Bees need to be checked and managed, they are not a set-and-forget project, so in the end we decided that with everything else that requires doing and tending here it was just not practical to become beekeepers right now.  

Enter Scott from our local beekeepers club. He bought the hives from us, but as they were too heavy to move he first harvested some honey from them here at our place before taking the hives away.  What a treat! I find bees so fascinating, and it was fantastic to watch the process of harvesting the honey from the hives.

First up, getting the smoker ready. Time spent setting the smoker going well prevents the disaster of getting part way through and running out of smoke just as the bees are getting agitated.

 All suited up, Scott opened the hive and started pulling out the frames from the top box.

Next,  Scott checks the frame to see if it is ready to harvest.  Unfortunately, these hives were not set up very well. A fundamental aspect is to use a "queen excluder" which keeps the queen bee in the bottom box ("super") of the hive.  This keeps the baby bees, or "brood", down the bottom with the queen, and clean honey in the top super which is the one you harvest from.  Without a queen excluder, there was brood in the frames up the top, making the honey and wax dark rather than clean and clear.

 If the frame was ready to harvest, Scott gently brushed the bees off and placed it in a plastic container.  The container lid was put on to keep the bees from following along to the location where harvesting would take place.

You can see the beeswax capping over the top of the honeycomb in the photo above.  This wax was sliced off to open up the comb to enable the honey to come out.

You can see the honey in the frame after the wax has been sliced off in the photo above.  Below is the beeswax still dripping with honey.  This wax is drained for a couple of days and then can be used to make candles.  This wax may be difficult to turn into candles because of the mixed in brood cells.  You can see that it is dark and dirty looking rather than pale and clean.  We will still attempt to make candles with it-stay tuned for more on that project :)

 Into the centrifuge to spin the honey out.  Scott spun the frames fairly slowly to protect the honeycomb and minimise the amount of repairs to the comb the bees will need to do after the frames are returned to the hives. The more energy the bees need to put into repairing the comb, the less energy they will have for making honey.

 The honey is poured out of the centrifuge and through a fine sieve.

Finally, the honey is poured into jars.  Although we were only able to harvest from four frames, we collected about eight kilograms of honey.

My fascination with bees has increased after watching this process and I think I will keep bees sometime in the distant future.  And of course, the honey tastes superb :)