Bee Chronicles Aug 2011

Where are we with the Bee Yard work today? Honey,Honey,Honey! It is 22 July, the temperatures are in the 90’s. The sourwood nectar flow is over (mostly). Now is the time to spin out your honey. There are tricks to doing this and several different ways to process the honey. It mostly depends on how big of an operation you have, how much money you want to invest in equipment, and how fast you want to get the honey extraction work done.

Most regions will be in a nectar dearth period in mid July. This means there is not enough nectar flowing to keep your bees happy. If your hives are full of food and crowded with bees, the queens will want to swarm. The instinct will be stronger than spring swarming. If the hives are out of food because the bee population grew rapidly and the winter stores were consumed feeding larvae there may not be enough nectar to replenish the winter food supply. This will cause the queen to abscond. This is similar to swarming but there will not be any bees left behind. The entire colony will fly away looking for nectar sources. Usually, they won’t find the conditions over the hill any better, so the colony will starve to death in the “wild”. Does it ever get to be good news in the hive?

When you “rob” the honey from your hives you create an over crowding condition which can stimulate swarming. There were bees in the honey supers that you take off. Now they need to crowd into the remaining hive body. They don’t fit. My trick is to put an empty honey super on the hive body and let the bees think they are working. If there is any nectar out there they will find it and be happy working slowly. This becomes additional winter food. If it is hot and dry, even though there are flowers (clover), there may not be nectar. Just check the honey super to see if the bees are making honey. Also, watch for queen cells. If a dearth situation is occurring, you will need to feed your bees syrup to simulate nectar flow.

This is a good time to draw wax. You want to keep the bees busy and wax takes 4 times the work as honey. The newly drawn comb can be used to cycle out old comb in the brood chamber or create clean comb for next years honey supers. By putting foundation frames in the appropriate box, honey super or brood chamber, you create the correct replacement frames.

Now we have pulled our honey supers and settled the hives for their next chores so they don’t swarm. What we did for the week end in between these two activities is extract the honey. Some individuals like to “mush “ their wax. This can be a preference or a cost saving measure by not purchasing a centrifuge. In a tub, cut the comb out of the frame. You do not have to be careful except don’t cut your self. As you mash the comb with your hands pull out any support wires that might be in it. You can put the gob of wax and honey in a cheese cloth pouch where it can be worked and squeezed. Then place it in a large colander or hang the pouch so it can drain. You will probably need to “mush” it several times to get most of the honey out. This process will provided you with a lot of wax that you can process into other items.

For those of us who claim superior intellect, decapping the frames and running them through a centrifuge extractor is the way to go. In this process you are only limited by how much money you have. Look in any catalogue and you go from hand processing to totally automated. However, the process is the same. Decap the frames (cold knife, electric hot knife, or machine), catch the capping and drip extract the honey from the cappings. Put the frames in the centrifuge. Take the frames out of the centrifuge. Catch the honey as it runs out of the centrifuge. Filter the honey for extraneous wax and bee parts. Hold the honey in a tank (5 gal bucket) until bottling. You can sophisticate this process at many points by adding piping, pumps, and fancy filters. Ideally what you want to do is get out the big chunks and not heat your honey above about 90 degrees. When you start approaching 120-140 degrees you destroy the pollen and can change the flavor of the honey. If you use high pressure micro filters you remove too much pollen and this changes the flavor of the honey.

The MOST IMPORTANT key to honey processing is to be clean. Clean work area, Clean processing equipment, and Clean bottling.