Tag Archives: honey

Aug 23 2013

Honey Bucket and My First Honey Collection

Subscribe to The BeeKeepers Digest

Last year I left all the honey in the hives for the bees to use over the winter. This year however, early in the season I found almost a whole box of honey plus some more stored in the box below....so, some for me and some for the bees.

Typically beekeepers use a langstroth type of hive with frames that either have wax or plastic foundation on them. To collect the honey they use a hot knife to slice off the thin cappings on both sides of the frame, then put several frames in a spinning machine to use centrifugal force to spin the honey out of the comb.

In my case however I'm using Warre hives. The bees start with nothing more than a top bar from which to hang their comb, so I use the crush and strain method to separate the honey from the comb, not nearly as pretty but it gets the job done.

Step one is getting the bees out of the box of honey you want to collect. I put a bee escape below the box I wanted to collect. Check out this blog post for more details on that. I left it in place for about 10 days. Most of the bees were gone but there were some die hards that just would not give up the honey. No worries I was able to gently encourage them out as I pulled the frames.

honey comb smashed up

smashed comb

Next I found a big white bowl (color doesn't really matter) and a wooden spatula to do the smashing. I cut the comb off into the bowl (I did this away from the apiary as once the bees get the scent of honey you will be over run.) and began smashing it up. It really looks like a mess.....this is the "Crush" part of crush and strain.

Next I poured this sticky mess of honey and smashed wax into my separating system or you could also call it a Honey Bucket, not the kind you see on a construction site.....a real....honey.....bucket. This is two buckets stacked on one another. The top bucket has a nylon straining bag in it and has holes drilled in the bottom. the bottom bucket has a lid with the center section cut out of it to allow the honey from the top bucket thru. It also has a honey gate....or valve at the bottom. This system is the most natural way to collect honey as there is no filtering of the honey which could filter out pollen or other great nutrients the honey might contain. Here is a link to a couple of similar systems: Mann Lake - Brushy Mountain Bee Farm - BeeThinking. I got mine from BeeThinking.

Honey Straining Bucket

Now, time to put the buckets out in the sun. Warm honey flows much better to the bucket below. ***Big note here --- When I do this again I'm going to wrap saran wrap around the seam between the two buckets. There is just enough space for bees to get in and I had to scoop several out who got in and could not get out**** By the next day all of the honey had moved to the bottom bucket leaving all of the crushed wax....and other goodies in the mesh bag above.crush and strain honey collection

Honey Bucket in the sun
Filling jars of honey the best part of beekeeping

Filling the jars

Now the fun part, pouring the honey into the jars. There are lots of choices when it comes to honey containers, jars and bottles which you can buy from most of the beekeeping suppliers. From here just make sure each jar has its cap screwed on tight and wiped down so there is no stickiness on the outside. Design and place a cool looking label on the outside and we are ready to roll.

Couple of notes; I did wash all of the jars before using them. Honey attracts moisture so if you can do much of the work in an air conditioned space the better. Too much moisture in your honey and it will spoil.

All told this first harvest was about 17 pounds of honey. The first of the jars filled with honey from seabeck farmshoney went to our bee friendly neighbors. That sounds like a lot of honey but as you can see not many jars.

I took the wax and melted it down and turned it into candles....I'll share that process in my next blog post.

 

Subscribe to The BeeKeepers Digest

 

Apr 1 2012

Bees need a balanced diet too.

CCD or Colony Collapse Disorder seems to be a title that man has put on a multifaceted problem. Of course this fits nicely with our overall need to seek “the one thing”. The one pill that will make us thin, the one idea that will make us rich, the one secret to living a fulfilled life, the one exercise that will melt away love handles.

The more reading I do and the more people I talk with leads me to believe that CCD is not one ailment but rather a series of deficiencies that lead up to the demise of what was thought to be a healthy bee colony.

Though I’m not a scientist, nor do I have a laboratory in my basement…that would be cool though, I can sift through lots of data that others have collected and make sense of it. See the logic (at least my logic) and draw some conclusions.

Painted Backyard Beehive

Backyard Beehive

While reading this last issue of American Bee Journal I came across an article that made sense to me. The article by Peter Loring Borst speaks to a bees diet and covers a lot of great information about pollen and its food value. But one part jumped out at me specifically.

Two groups of bees were analyzed. One that was on a monofloral  diet (one crop of plants, one primary source of pollen like huge fields of soy, or large groves of almonds) and bees who were eating a polyfloral diet (variety of plants around the hive, no one predominant pollen source).  Both diets produced what the bees needed to be healthy and active in this life cycle….however bees that were on the monofloyral or restricted diet produced a smaller amount of an enzyme called glucose oxidase (GOX).

Glucose oxidase is an enzyme that converts sucrose into an antiseptic that we are all familiar with called hydrogen peroxide. The hydrogen peroxide is used by the bees in honey and larval food production to help reduce the growth of bacteria and pathogens.  So, while the bees on a monofloral diet that are currently flying might be healthy, the next generation of bees may well have a weakened immune system due to being fed food with higher levels of bacteria.

The bees on the polyfloral, or balanced diet, on the other hand, produced greater levels of GOX, which would provide for food with lower levels of bacteria or pathogens thus producing new offspring with normal immune systems.

While there are many other factors out there that lead to the loss of a colony; weather, pesticides, pests, starvation and the beekeeper, providing a balanced source of pollen and nectar for your bees will give them the strength to deal with all the other threats against them.

Those of us that are into back yard beehives may well have the best chance of providing for a balanced diet for our bees. Just look around your neighborhood and I’m sure you will see lots of variety.

Mar 25 2012

Setting up the hives for our new arrivals…in a couple of loooong weeks.

With the weather beeeing so nice I’m hoping that this will mean we will indeed get our bees as scheduled, the first Saturday in April. My guess is that it has to do more with what is happening in California which is where the bee packages are coming from.

As promised in my last post here are some pictures showing how I placed the hives and how they turned out. If you ask 10 different beekeepers how to build a base you will come up with 10 different answers. Right or wrong here is how I did it for my first time.

These hives have the entrances facing south and are in full sun most of the day.

I have screened baseboards….if I didn’t I might want to have the hive lean a little toward the hive entrance so that condensation would have an easy way out of the hive.