Fruit Mead, Melomel

Okay so I made up some mead previously, just for the sake of using up some honey rather than anything else. I've sampled it, and it's going rather well. Since then I've read a bit more about mead and discovered fruit meads. Yeah basically mead made with fruit in it. The 'proper' name for this is Melomel. The name could be from latin as mel mellis means honey and mellitus can mean honeyed or it could come from greek in which meli means honey, or perhaps some long forgotten brewer named it after his ladyfriend Melissa -I guess we'll never really know.

So fruit and mead... I was swapping a tin of beewax furniture polish for a box of apples. I'd made apple sauce with the previous box but this time I decided to try making an apple Melomel. Whilst waiting for the apples I went and bought yeast, pectolase and a few other bits I figured I'd need. I no longer had enough honey for the mead, gave most of it away lol, so on my way home popped into a supermarket to buy some more. Whilst there I spotted half price cranberries. So on a whim I bought them and decided to make a Cranberry Melomel, relegating the Apple Melomel for another day and another post. As with the mead I concocted my own recipe based on the many existing recipes floating about on the internet adapted to what was available to me. The fruit can be added before or after the primary fermentation, which ever you use affects the final flavour in different ways. I opted to add the fruit right at the start because it just sounded easier.

I purchased a kilo of cranberries but only used 500g having noticed people seem to be using less cranberry than they used other fruits. Going by other recipes I'm still using quite a lot of cranberries for the volume I'm making.

This lot will become a Cranberry Melomel

Cranberry Melomel Ingredients
1.36 KG Honey -four jars of Tesco's cheapest is adequate I reckon
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1 pack of yeast
500g Cranberries
2.292 Kg sugar (I was going to use 2KG but had a bag to finish off)
One teabag
Packet of yeast
1/4 teaspoon of yeast nutrient
5 litres of water -I didn't use all five, when the demijohn's full enough just stop adding it -this isn't rocket science...
1 teaspoon of pectolase

I boiled up the cranberries with the sugar in some of the water in one pan and in another heated some more of the water with the honey to dissolve it. To get as much honey as I could from the jars after pouring them into the pan I filled them with water and left them a while before pouring that out into the pan with the too. I also steeped a teabag in a little water whilst this was going on. The more surface area of the fruit available the better so once the cranberries had softened I got out my hand blender, dipped it in and turned it on to liquidise them.

Blending the Cranberries
-WTF? Another picure without any bees in it!?

That done and all the honey dissolved in the other pan I ladled the contents of both pans into the demijohn via a funnel along with the tea I'd made. To help mix it all up I alternated a ladle of one with a ladle of the other. Then after letting it cool enough that it hopefully wouldn't kill the yeast I poured a little water into a bowl, warmed it in the microwave briefly then dropped the yeast and a teaspoon of yeast nutrient into it along with a teaspoon of pectolase. -Cranberries are high in pectin and pectolase  is an enzyme that breaks this down. Gave it a shake to mix it all up, slapped in a bung and airlock then sat the demijohn to ferment out of the way. It looks like a demijohn full of blood.

Demijohn full of gore

I originally used some bread yeast in this batch but a couple of days later after reading up on alcohol tolerancess of yeasts I added some wine yeast too. The main difference between wine and bread yeasts seems to be the level of alcohol tolerance, bread yeast which will probably have a lower alcohol tolerance than a wine yeast will and so die out when the alcohol is content is relatively low whereas the wine yeast should carry on making alcohol far longer giving you a stronger drink. In theory one yeast will eventually dominate the must and I'm assuming it's going to be the one with the higher alcohol tolerance.

When I made mead before I boiled the must but there seems to be mixed ideas about the merits of boiling the honey pror to using it. Obviously boiling will kill the majority of bacteria in the must however it's unlikely there's going to be any in the honey anyway what with it being hygroscopic and all -meaning any bacteria or yeast trying to set up house in it is going to die of dehydration pretty sharpish. The downside is that this boiling may loose some of the properties of the honey we want to keep -although brewers seem a little vague about what these are referring to flavours and aromas rather than chemical constituents. I did boil the cranberries and their sugar up as I although I'd washed them I'd still expect some bacteria to be hanging out on them.

I didn't use as much of the water as I'd expected as I hadn't really given any thought to the volume of the honey (D'oh!) and the cranberries themselves will have also taken up a lot of volume too. After a couple of days I could see tiny bubbles rising as the yeast does it's thing converting sugars to alcohol.When the fermentation was in full flow I could see the pulpy part of the fruit moving to the top of the liquid. This can form a cap causing CO2 and heat to build up under it which isn't particularly good for the yeast, and it can go mouldy, so whilst this was happening I was giving it a bit of a swirl on a daily basis to dissipate it.

After 2 weeks the bubbling slowed to about one every 3 or 4 seconds so I decided to remove the fruit pulp. For this I just poured it through a seive into a funnel in the top of the empty 5 litre waterbottle, cleaned out the demijohn and popped it all back in again. This isn't the best way though as it means the liquid gets more aereated than you'd want. I also topped up the liquid level with some springwater and now the liquid is bubbling away again without the cap of fruit matter on top

As I poured it through the seive I noticed there was some stuff the consistency of jam so I added another teaspoon of pectolase whilst I was at it. I actually gave the liquid a taste as I reracked it and can report it tasted excellent but semed more like a port tye thing than than a wine drink. This may change as I rerack it to remove sediment and add a little more water each time and the yeast continue to turn the suger to alcohol. Now I'm going to leave it a couple of weeks in the corner of a room before reracking it with the syphon to remove it from the sediment -or lees as they're called. If I read it correctly the sediment is dead yeast and can affect the flavour of the finished product if the mead is left in with it for too long.

A note on demijohn's for the more thrifty out there.The water I used came in a 5 litre bottle from for £1. The bottle is food grade plastic and can be used just like a glass demijohn.Ok so it may not be as aesthetically pleasing as glass vessel but it's more or less free and probably a bit more robust if pressure builds up in it than a glass one would be. Just get an airlock grommet from a homebrew supplier, drill a hole in the lid and stick an airlock on. In fact whilst looking for the grommet online I found homebrew suppliers selling the same bottle but with different colour lid and handle as a plastic demijohn for considerably morea than I paid for this one full of water.

Beeswax Polish

Since deciding to start beekeeping I've found there's a lot of peripheral activity which doesn't directly involve being up to your elbows in colonies of eusocial stinging insects. Aside from heavy lifting, cleaning, sterilising, and more heavy lifting there's carpentry (of a sort), extracting honey and wax, cooking syrups and fondants for the bees, paying attention to the weather, and now to the list I'm going to add polish making. Having extracted and filtered my beeswax I'd originally planned to swap it for new foundation, but later decided to try doing something else with it instead..

Basically there's a huge number of uses for beeswax, if the mood takes you you can use it to make chapsticks, handcreme, moisturiser, soap, lip gloss and a load of other personal care type stuff -however I don't wear lipgloss and I'm seriously not about to launch my own line of cosmetics. Traditionally beeswax has been used to make candles since the year dot, however this is the 21st century and I don't burn that many candles in a year. Another thing people use beeswax for is making polish. And it turns out it's actually really easy. Just dissolve an amount of beeswax in an equal amount of turpentine and that's it. You can alter the ratio of turpentine to wax to make the final polish softer (more turpentine) or harder (less turpentine) and you can add canuba wax to make it easier to use.

I worked out that three of my beeswax bars was half a litre of wax (lucky) and purchased a half litre of pure turpentine -it has to be real turpentine though, none of that turpentine substitute or white spirits malarky. I was pleasantly surprised to find real turpentine doesn't give you the banging headache and nausea that the substitutes and white spirits tend to, which is a positive when you're heating a jar of the stuff in your kitchen. An obvious point to note here is that turpentine and wax are both pretty flammable substances and so there's an inherent risk in heating them up. In fact when I did firebreathing I ruled out turps as a fuel because I felt it was too flammable to use safely, insofar as exhaling a cloud of burning fuel is ever going to be safe -don't try that at home kids it'll probably kill you. So, anyone who wants to follow these steps bear in mind that you do so entirely at your own risk and when they pull your charred remains from the burnt out ruin of what was your house I take no responsibility

All you need to make polish

To speed the process up a bit it's best to melt the wax first. Of course the wax blocks wouldn't fit in my jar. Turns out it's actually quite hard to cut up blocks of beeswax, people talk about using a hot blade or wire but I suspect that's based more on theory than practice and you'd actually need a really hot blade with a built in heat source to do the job and it'd probably just set again once the blade had passed through anyway. I gather the easiest way is to grate the stuff, but I persevered with a large knife and cut the bars up just enough to cram them into a large jar.

Beeswax, still looking a lot like fudge.

I then stood the large jar in a pan of boiling water -yep an improvised baine marie. As I mentioned earlier wax is pretty flammable stuff so it's best not heated directly, unless you have a burning desire for the company of firemen anyway. Once it had started to melt I popped the jar lid on (it's a Sarsons Pickling Vinegar jar if you really want to know) and leaned the jar on it's side to reduce the amount of contact it had with the pan's bottom, I really didn't fancy the company of firemen at all.

Molten Wax and Turpentine

Once melted I added the turpentine, stuck some plastic under the lid, swirled it around, turned off the flame and left it sitting in the hot water whilst the turpentine dissolved the wax and I watched The Big Bang Theory, which was jolly entertaining. I reheated it a little bit afterwards but then got a big bored and decided to pour it into the tins. You can get polish tins from various beekeeping supply shops and I'd got ten from Thornes. They hold 100ml which worked out just right for my litre of polish.

One litre of freshly made furniture polish

I used heavy gardening gloves to hold the hot jar and a funnel to pour it into the tins. Didn't really fancy trying to clean up spilt polish so I placed the jars on a tray -luckily there were no accidents anyway. When it had cooled to a uniform pale beigey sort of colour I decided to test it out. Rather than starting a tin I scraped off some of the polish cooling on the side of the jar. I soon realised I don't really have much unvarnished or unlacquered wooden in the house to test it with and wound up applying it to the first thing that came to hand which was the wooden handle of a machette I use for green coconuts. It sees a lot of use in the garden and the kitchen (as multitools go a decent machete is a lot more useful than a pocketfull of Swiss Army Knife) so the handle needed a little attention after a couple of years use and exposure to water and various food related liquids. The polish was very soft I smeared it onto the wood, left it half an hour whilst I had a frothy coffee and unsuccessfully attempted to engage the cat in a conversation about our differing philosophical standpoints. After this I let the cat out, she wasn't very conversational anyway, and using a some kitchen roll removed the excess wax and buffed up the remainder with a polishing cloth leaving the wood looking better than it ever did when the tool had arrived brand spanking new from some wierdo online survivalist supply shop.

New polish

The really difficult bit was coming up with a label. I ordered some round labels from a stationers on tinternet who also supplied a template for label design. I fired up G.I.M.P. for Windows, an excellent free image editing package, and started faffing about with fonts and images till I wound up with something I liked. Getting it printed onto the labels themselves was a bit hit and miss. I'm not sure if that was the fault of the labels themselves or my five year old HP Photosmart 3010, either way for every six labels printed per sheet I seemed to get four good ones. The last thing to do was slap the labels onto the tin lids.

First batch of Beeswax Polish

Between typing up all that and publishing the post I ordered some more tins and turpentine and turned the rest of the wax into 33 more tins of  polish. I decided I wasn't happy with the bee on the original label so made a few changes and redited the image. The bee isn't really anatomically correct, but I think it'll do for now.

Finalised label art

Finally happy with my label and out of beeswax I now need to find some buyers for 43 tins of polish. Actually I've already bartered one for some windfallen apples so that's one down and 42 to go..

Fondant for Winter

Well after the other night's freeze it's warmed up a little and the pond has unfrozen for a while. Still too cold to give the bees anymore syrup though. Provided the bees have stored enough food for the winter they can now be left alone to eat it. If they have't got eough food stored yet you can still feed them. What I'm planning to do carry on feeding them untill they stop taking anymore food. It's too cold for syrup now, so it's time for some solid food. The solid food for bees is fondant. Yep, christmas cake icing.

It's easy enough to make: just 6 lb of sugar and 1 pint of water add a teaspoon of cream of tartar and boil till melted. It's quite nasty stuff if you get it on you as it sticks like glue and stay hot for a long time.

Making fondant. Don't get it on you.

Once melted you need to whisk it up to get some air into it. I popped it into my trusty food mixer, a handed down Kenwood machine that doesn't see much use. As the fondant gets more air in it and cools it becomes harder for the machine (or you) to whisk and before finishing my batch it burnt out the motor on my blender. Oops. I used a hand blender to finish the batch which seemed to do okay. I then spooned the white gunk into some cleaned takeaway food boxes.

It's not mashed potato.

The finished product looks a lot like mashed potato. I made these last month and left them in the fridge till they were needed. When I cut the space board insulation for the tops of the hives I made a hole for the fondant boxes to go in.

Dinner is served.

The fondant goes onto the crownboard over the feeding hole and a half depth of the insulation goes over that to keep the heat in. It's not airtight so some heatloss probably still occurs but the bees can glue it down round the edges if they feel the need.

Bees of Hive1 and Hive2 enjoying some nutritious candy.

The bees in Hive1 started eating their fondant from one end of the box, whereas those in Hive2 started from the middle which as they progressed gave them more surface area to nibble. Today I replaced the boxes with new ones and was able to see that whilst Hive2 only had a little fondant left from the the corners of the boxes whilst Hive1 had about a third left. When I checked them today I lit the smoker just in case but didn't smoke the hives -better to have the smoke avaiable if i needed it than not available if I needed it. The bees in Hive1 remained in their cluster whilst I removed the box and popped a new on in it's place, looking in the hole I could see them moving about a bit but they didn't seem in a hurry to come and meet me. I had set the smoker down nearer to Hive1 than 2 so it may have been that they managed to detect the smoke I guess. Hive2 was a different story, they were very active and I had to drop their new box on in a hurry as they started to come meet me. One managed to fly out before I got the box in place. There was about 8 or 9 dead bees outside the mouse guard of Hive1 which I flicked away from the entrance. I think they're probably dead bees that the colony pushed out, in the summer they'ed normally carry the dead bees out and drop them off away from the hive. During winter given the number of bees that do die off there's a good chance that dead bees dropping from the cluster to the floor can build up enough to block the entrance so it's good practice to get a wire and now and then poke it through the mouseguard holes to clear the way.

It's Freezing

Cold weather in the UK in December isn't really newsworthy, I know. However it's something new for my bees so I felt it blogworthy. Last night the temperature in Kingston-Upon-Hull hit zero degrees celcius and the wildlife pond in the middle of the garden froze. It's still frozen and I expect it'll remain so for a long time. The other one in the corner wasn't iced over today but I don't think I'll be hopping in to test the temperature anytime soon.

Frozen pond

As I said this is the first winter for my bees. Given the normal lifespan of a bee the only bee in a colony likely to live through more than one winter is the Queen but both of mine were born this year so it's a first for them too. Today I had a look under the hives with my trusty BeeSpy 3000 but there wasn't really much to see. So I went back inside and returned with my stethoscope. Doesn't everyone have a stethoscope? Putting this to the hive wall I was able to hear the bees merrily buzzing inside. They sounded a happy bunch and knowing they're still alive makes me a happy chap too. Of course there's a lot can happen between now and Spring and a lot of colonies don't make it so fingers crossed.

Something else I've just had to do is check the levels of varroa in the hives. I previously treated the mites with a course of Apilife Var in October but no treatment gets rid of all of them and in the hives of the complacent beekeeper they can rebuild their population. So first thing to do was check the numbers mites still in the hives. Both hives have wire mesh floors so mites that fall, or die drop out of the hive. To check the number of mites we monitor the number of them that fall out. Because beekeepers like to name things this is called "mite fall" fairly self explanatory name really. To measure mite fall you place something sticky under the hive and, hopefully, when a mite falls through wire mesh floor it'll be stuck there when you come to count them later. I used greaseproof paper sellotaped to correx boards and smeared with petroleum jelly.

Setting a trap for Varroa Destructor

After a few days with the sticky paper in place there were no mites visible on them at all. That doesn't mean there's no Varroa in the hives, it just means there's probably not enough of them at present to need further treatment. If there had been the treatment would have been to drizzle the bees with a 3.2% Oxacylic Acid solution. 5ml of the stuff between each frame where the bees are. Sounds pretty harsh pouring acid onto your bees doesn't it? It kills something like 97% of the mites, and whilst it has a negative effect on the bees too it's believed to be far less harmful than the impact of the Varroa themselves.

The Drones

The Drones were a mancunian punk band in the late seventies. In 1977 they released a 7" bearing the songs Bone Idol and I Just Wanna Be Myself. In the 80's a mate of mine bought a second hand copy of this at a market someplace and I still have a recording of it on a C90 somewhere, unfortunately I don't own a cassette player anymore so it's unlikely I'll be listening to them in the near future. They knocked out two studio albums and appeared on a couple of compilations before fading into obscurity so you can be forgiven for not having heard of them prior to reading this, shame really as Bone Idol was a pretty decent song and I'd've liked to have heard a bit more from them. Anyway this entry isn't really about them. It's about the other drones, male bees.

Looking at the comb over summer it was easy to spot several larger looking bees ambling about amongst the workers. I'm sure I'm not the first new beekeeper to have spotted a drone and thought it was the queen only to then see another five happily wandering about on the same frame and realise it's not her.

Workers and Drones on new foundation.

The drones are the two larger ones in the picture. Apart from being bigger than the workers they have a wider thorax and the abdomen has a rounded end whereas the worker bees are more pointy and wasplike. Whilst not quite so visible in the image drones have huge eyes extending from the sides of the head right over the top whereas workers have smaller ones on the sides of their heads. The reason for the drones' huge eyes are so that they can spot queen bees on mating flights. As the name suggests they make a very loud noise as they fly -well loud for a bee anyway.

Worker and Drone

The above pair were happy to pose together so we can compare the worker (on the left) and the drone (on the right). You can see the top of the drone's head is covered with it's compound eyes so it appears to be wearing a little bifurcated helmet. Honeybees actually have five eyes, the two large compound eyes that you can easily see and then three very small simple eyes in the middle of the head. The simple eyes seem to measure light levels. You can also see the worker has an abdomen tapering to a pointy end which houses a sting whereas the male has a very rounded end with some fuzzy hair just visible in the image. There's no sting on the drone. You can also make out that the legs are different on the drone to the worker, they're longer on the drone, presumably for hanging onto the Queen during matin.

The role drones play in a bee colony remains something of a mystery. They have some obvious jobs to do but  most of the time they just appear to be a burden on resrouces. Drones don't forage, they don't make wax, they don't draw wax, they don't feed larvae, they don't clean the hive, they don't do door security, it appears that they don't really do a lot -they don't even feed themselves if they can help it! Their most obvious role is mating with queen bees, given the number of queen bees in a normal colony (one) compared to the number of drones (a few hundred) the odds are seriously stacked against any individual drone ever performing this task -which may be just as well as they die with a ruptured abdomen shortly afterwards anyway. They quite probably have other roles that we just don't understand at present. What is known is that bee colonies seem to want to have a contingent of drones in their numbers. It has been suggested that given their larger size and noisy flight they may act as decoys to birds and other predators when a colony swarms. A potential predator seeing a swarm will probably go with the biggest fattest looking bee in the swarm which without the drones would be the queen. So perhaps the drone is a self sacrificing decoy. The loud noise they make could also be to attract predators.

To mate drone bees from different colonies go to congration areas, how they find them is quite a mystery bearing in mind that no drone lives longer than a single season so there's nobody passing the location along to next year's drones. Anyway the guys hang out at these congregation sites waiting for a queen. Eventually a virgin queen will emerge from a colony and fly over to the congregation zone too -maybe she hears the drone's noise? Once there she'll mate with about 17 drones, somehow they avoid mating with any from their own colony -no inbred two headed, three legged bees for us thanks. The reward for drones who have successfully mated with a Queen is a fatal ruptured abdomen, the queen goes back to her colony to spend the rest of her life in the dark laying eggs.

Drones that haven't mated live happily in the hive till it gets a little cooler at which point the worker bees stop feeding them and drive them out into the cold to die of hunger and exposure. Either way it's not a happy ending for the drone.

It's a bit of a mystery how the bees decide how may drones they need but it's something the worker bees seem to dictate rather than the queen. I read somewhere that a typical strong colony has between 400 and 600 drones. As drones are bigger they need slightly larger cells in the honeycomb. When the workers want drones they will make the larger comb if there is room but if there isn't the space they'll tear down some existing comb to make the larger cells. As the queen bee lays her eggs in empty cells she'll normally lay an egg in a worker cell and fertilise it which makes the egg female, when she reaches a  larger drone cell she lays an egg and doesn't bother to to fertilise it leaving it with half a set of chromosomes. Wierd eh? This will then hatch into a drone.

Normally drones make up a small portion of the colony population, however sometimes things go wrong and drone  numbers increase. Sometimes a queen will start laying only or mostly drones -this is called a 'drone laying queen' and can be rectified by removing the queen (squish!) and replacing her with a new one. The other instance when a drone population will increase is when there is no queen and worker bees start laying eggs. Worker bees never get to mate so their eggs are never fertilised which means theirs always hatch into drones. At this stage the colony is pretty much knackered and the normal thing to do is empty the colony on the ground in the hope that non laying workers will find their way into other existing hives to bump up their workforce.

Worker cells above, drone cells below.

As the drones have bigger cells this makes them useful in the fight against the Varroa Destructor mite. The mite's prefer to lay their eggs in drone cells as there's more room ion the cell and a bigger larvae for the mites to feed on. Beekeepers can take advantage of this by encouraging the bees to make drone comb on a specific frame then when the drone larvae in their cells have been capped to begin the metamorphosis into actual bees the keeper can take away the comb and all the mites it contains. This is a technique usually referred to as "Sacrificial Drones" or "Sacrificial Drone Comb" as basically the developing drones are sacrificed to cull the mites.

Whilst the workers will tear out worker cells to make drone comb they can also be directed to make drone cells where the beekeeper can more easily access them. It's very simple to do. The beekeeper places at one end of the brood box a frame of foundation which is only half the height of the brood box. The bees then make their new drone comb hanging from the bottom of this frame.

Drone comb being made underneath a shallow frame.

This means that not only can the beekeeper easily locate the drone comb but it can be easily removed. Once removed it goes into the freezer to kill the larvae and the mites alike so they can later be counted giving the keeper some idea of scale of the the colony's mite problem. Killing them in the freezer is actually far more humane than it sounds. Bees aren't hot blooded like we are, in the evenings stray bees in the garden can be seen to grind to a halt as the temperature drops, if it doesn't drop too low they can be seen moving again in the mornings.

Meditation And The Art Of Beekeeping

I recently finished reading Meditation And The Art Of Beekeeping  by Mark Magill so thought I'd write a quick review. I'd not previously heard of the author but  he also wrote wrote Why Is Buddha Smiling -I'm guessing the answer probably isn't because Blink 182 named their 1998 album after him, but I've not read it so I can't be certain.. He's a contributor to Tricycle: the Buddhist Review amongst other things, wrote the film Waiting For The Moon, which won an award at the 1987 sundance Film Festival but really doesn't look like my cup of tea, and produced Far From Poland, a 1984 docudrama about Polish exiles from what I can gather -sounds almost as exciting as this blog. He also keeps bees, and meditates.

The first thing that strikes you about this book is the presentation. Leaping Hare Press have given it an attractive textured hardback cover, spared no expense on the quality of the paper and graced it with attractive endpages. Before you start on the contents the the book is already an attractive object in it's own right. A quick look at their back catalogue shows they've produced a number of books on the themes of mindfullness and meditation twinned with other topics such as Zen and the Art of Raising Chickens and The Art of Mindful Gardening. They also market seedbomb kits and a book on the subject for any budding guerrilla gardeners out there. Interesting. I suspect I may be making a couple more purchases there.

Meditation and the Art of Beekeeping

Having admired the book I then proceeded to read it. Obviously. Meditation and the Art of Beekeeping is an unusual read. It's a blend of autobiography, philisophy, history, observations, advice and information, interepersed with extracts from beekeeping texts,poems, plays, philosophical and religious texts from various Dalai Lamas, Shakespeare, Reverend Langstroth, Virgil, Emily Dickinson, Lao Tzu and Buddha amongst others.

Magil writes with a laidback easygoing style -just as you could reasonably expect from a proponent of meditation. He also keeps it interesting, so much so that I read the whole this cover to cover book in about 4 sessions, that said it's not the longest book in the world, weighing in at 135 generously spaced pages. He explains the ancient practice of 'bee lining' which was how mankind used to locate honey from wild bees -and no doubt something I'll be slipping into an entry about on here at somepoint. He also explains why honey keeps so long and why bacteria and yeast can't live in it. He explains that darker honey has more antioxidants in it than lighter honey which I found particularly interesting given the two very different shades of my harvest. He tells us of a chance meeting with an old beekeeper that led to work. There's an explanation of the bee politics used in colony descision making -yes they had democracy long before we did. He tells us of losing bees over winter and how he has to order new colonies annually  -something I'm hoping to avoid but time will tell. There's also the problems of black bears and New York City Health Code's article 161.01.

Something else Magill writes about is Brother Adam's Paradox, quoting the old monk's own thoughts on the topic. Something I'd not heard mentioned anywhere else so far. Since Brother Adam's hybridisation programme which successfully created the Buckfast Bee  following the decimation of the United Kingdoms native black bees, by tracheal mite, hybrid bees are now replacing the original breeds of bees all over the world meaning an actual reduction in bio diversity.

As the title suggests the book isn't solely about keeping bees, it's also about meditation. Magill outlines the differences between concentrative and mindful meditation and a little about how to engage in them. However the book isn't really a "how to" for meditation, or in fact beekeeping, so assuming it caught your interest you'd need to do some further study to become proficient in either.

It's hard to say who this book is actually aimed at but I'd say it's interesting read for anyone already interested in keeping bees.

Elephants.

There's less to write about on the beekeeping front at this time of year so I thought I'd post about a recently reported bee story - well, it was that or write another book review.

The problem with elephants, well one the problems with elephants, is that they need to eat. And on account of having very inefficient digestive systems they need to eat an awful lot, we're talking between 140 and 270 kg of food in a single day -it says so right there on wikipedia. The problem with people is they also need to eat, and whilst they don't each as much as elephants there's a lot more of them.

Over in sunny Africa this has caused numerous problems with elephants raiding farmland to eat crops. Not much irritates a farmer more than finding a three and a half ton migratory pachyderm and it's clan chomping away on his crops. It also isn't really that great for the elephants with them being chased off, pepper sprayed and sometimes shot. The stresses of these confrontations lead to stressed elephants and can result in displaced people. Of course this is just one of many problems caused by the overpopulation of humans all over the planet and their effect on the ecologies we live in but I don't imagine that anybody is about to cull our species,  return farmland to nature and limit our population growth so another solution is needed.

Enter stage right zoologist Dr Lucy King and her team of ..er.. other zoologists or whatever. They've developed a way to defend crops from elephants that doesn't involve human/elephant confrontations. Well done Lucy! It turns out that although honeybees can't sting though the skin of an elephant  they can deliver a nasty sting to the inside the animals trunk, unsurprisingly this means bees scare the bejesus out of elephants. So Lucy's team proposed using beehives to fence off farmland.

Great plan. Along comes Babar the bull elephant thinking to himself "I'm feeling a mite peckish, and I do believe there is a field full of ripe sugarcane just over yonder." He then saunters over to have a sweet feast. Normally he'd get to a fence, break through it and eat his fill. However, unknown to Babar this wire fence has a beehive dangling off it and his efforts to gain entry are seriously annoying it's residents. Out boils a horde of angry bees and Babar flees the scene leaving the field unscathed.

The award winning project was piloted on 17 farms in Kenya and succesfully turned away 31 out of 32 attemped elephant incursions. Now it's also being implemented in Tanzania and Uganda. Another benefit to the farmers is suddenly there's a lot of honey being produced which means more income for them which is an incentive to install the bees instead of more elephant guns. I assume it also makes their fences last longer now they don't have elephants flattening the things. I'm somewhat surprised this wasn't discovered and implemented locally as apiculture and elephants have both been in Africa for a long time. Perhaps the beekeepers and the farmers never thought to compare notes. But then I must admit I hadn't really given any thought myself as to why I've not seen any elephants in my own garden since the arrival of the bees either.

Filtering Beeswax

Hold on to your hats, there's pictures of pans in this entry!

Having extracted a load of beeswax I needed to filter it to clean it up a bit -to remove any bits in there and make it look a little nicer. The wax I had extracted actually had very little detritus in it but some smaller bits had managed to make it through the grid of the Easi-Stem. My plan was to melt it then pour it through a filter into a mould to make a nice yellow beeswax block.

Someone on a bee keeping forum said he'd managed to filter his beeswax by pouring it through a layer of kitchen roll. I have kitchen roll so I decided to do that too. It's in the kitchen which is handy as that's where the cooker is and I'll be using that too. Wax is flammable stuff. That's why candles work. So melting in on the flame of a gas cooker isn't the safest thing to do. Instead you need two pans. A big one and a less big one. You put your boiling water in the first pan and then pop your less big pan with the wax in it into this. Apparently this arrangement is called a bain-marie which I unless I'm mistaken is French for "Hey, let's use two pans instead of one!"

Hey, let's use two pans instead of one!

It's not a great plan to use the pans you prepare food with to faff about with beeswax so I used an old pan that's been kicking abut in a cupboard since my student days for this. It's non-stick or it was originally anyway but a few years of student life in the days before I was any good at cooking has scratched away a lot of that teflon coating, however I don't think it's going to matter hugely. So with the water boiling in the large pan the wax melt merily in the smaller one.

Once it was melted I then pulled out another pan dedicated for wax use. This was a saucepan from B&M I'd bought specifically for the purpose. It was cheap, like everything at B&M. It's also non-stick. Onto this pan I popped a seive that hadn't been used before -possibly bought in error some time ago. Lined the seive with a piece of kitchen roll and stuck the lot in the oven to warm it up. I then poured the wax into the kitchen roll and popped it back the oven on a low heat to stop it cooling as it filtered through.

Once this was done I poured the wax into some child's baking moulds from Hobbycraft.

Some of these images are a bit unecessary really

And let it cool. I did wonder how I was going to get the cooler wax out of the moulds but after cooling I found flipping them over and giving them a bang made the wax drop straight out in a block that looked a lot like toffee.

There were a couple of points where I lost some wax during the process, one was when I accidentally got water into the bain-marie and decided to bin the wax and water in it and the other was when I knocked the bain-marie and spilt wax into the water. Oops. What I ended up with was 1650g of wax in blocks and a 428g foil container of wax I'm giving to a mate who's going to use it to make some guitar polish or something.

One lump or two?

I had originally planned to swap the wax for new foundation for next season but now I'm thinking I might have a go at making some furniture polish from this as that seems relatively simple (famous last words) and I can possibly flog a bit of it or perhaps give it to people as one of the world's crappest xmas gifts ever. Being a waste not want not kinda guy the kitchen roll I used to filter the wax got torn into strips or quarters and scrunched up into balls. These make good fire lighters and will be handy when I next decide to fire up the barbie or chiminea.

128g block of Beeswax

Extracting Wax

Back in September I extracted the honey I'd harvested earlier by cutting the comb out of the frames then crushing and straining it. This left me with a load of frames with a lot of wax stuck to the edges as well as honey and propolis. Not enough propolis or honey to be particularly useful to me but the wax I can certainly use. Next year I'll be needing new foundation for the supers and some of the manufacturers have exchange schemes whereby you give them your wax and they exchange it for new foundation. Some people make their own foundation from their reclaimed wax, others use it to make candles or beeswax polish -actually that looks fairly simple so I might give it a whirl at some point, I'm sure I can find a use for it. Another use for the wax is treating the wood of the bee hives -you melt the wax and pour it on, it's bee friendly and waterproofs the wood. My housemate tells me some people apply beeswax to dreadlocks which strikes me as a great way to attract bees to your noggin. 8^O But whatever rocks your boat. Once at a party I had a go on a didgeridu. The mouth hole had a circle of beeswax on it that you could reshape to fit your mouth. There you go. Another use for beeswax that few of us can imagine being without.

So I've got these grotty frames asnd I want to reclaim the wax stuck from the edges of and I've also got 3 supers worth of shallow frames complete with comb from an auction that've been sat in bin bags since my buying them at a clearance auction. The wax from these frames I can't let my bees come into contact with because they're from another apiary and there's always the chance they may harbour some bee disease or virus which could get passed on to mine. It's also for that reason you shouldn't ever give honey to wild bees btw, no matter where you bought it.

So how to remove this wax then? Well I could spend a few hours carefully scraping off what I can and melting and straining it. But I won't. I'm a busy chap with things to see and people to do. What I did with the frames that came with the first hive was boil them in hot water then pour the water and molten wax into a bucket, as it cooled the wax which had floated to the top solidified into a disc which I was then able to remove, melt again and strain through cheesecloth. It worked okay and I did a similar thing with the remaining squashed wax from the honey extraction. It was a pain cleaning the wax and other crap from my large pan afterwards though so I don't plan to repeat that exercise. I've recently acquired a steam wax extractor, specifically a Thornes 'Easi-steam' -actually it's half an easy steam as I decided not to buy the steam generator seen as I already have a wall paper steamer and figured I could use that. Bee keepers are a thrifty lot.

The unit is basically a metal floor with a sort of spout bit on one side and a metal grille above that to catch any bits of crud, then there's an 'eke' (think of it as a quare empty wooden frame) to raise the box above a couple of inches from metal floor, and a metal roof skin with a hole in it that has a nozzle for a steam hose to attach to. You place a national wooden floor below the metal floor and a national super or brood box with all your grotty frames between the roof and the eke. The steam melts the wax and it runs out of the spout bit into your receptacle -in this case poundshop aluminium food containers -8 for a quid. Good Plan Batman!

I hauled out my steamer and discovered the hose end didn't really fit the Easi-steam's connector. Bugger. So a minute with some snips and I'd removed the offending thread from the steamer's hose, a few more minutes and a trip to the hardware shop on Chanterlands Avenue and I'd secured it with cloth tape and cable ties. Ace. 8-D

Cloth Tape and Cable Ties hose modification

Next problem was the floor I'd got with my initial hive, ordered via eBay from some idjit in Driffield, turned out to be the wrong size. It's commercial sized on the outside but the batons making up the sides are too wide for the tray doesn't sit in it properly it. If it'd been correctly made to either Commercial or National measurements I'd've been fine but that's the kinda chance you take if you buy things on eBay from people who use lots of capital letters and exclamation marks in their listings. Using a few random bits of wood to plug gaps I was able to bodge it anyway. I could've just made a new floor, it's not really rocket science afterall -seriously it's only three sticks and a square, and I think that'll be the plan next time I use it.

Easi-Steam Floor

I added the super -a Thornes super I'd bought unassembled from another eBay user. I figured different manufacturers probably have a few millimeters difference in size tolerance so go with the same and I should be fine. Although the super was cedar wood I'd painted the outside a rather natty shade of green Shed & Fence paint to match the hives and the rest of the boxes.

Easi-Steam Floor with Super and some sticky shallow frames

I loaded the super with sticky shallow frames that've been cling filmed and boxed up in the dining room since September's honey extraction, turned on the steamer and popped the metal lid on.

I mean tried to pop the metal lid on. Removed the metal lid, turned it 90 degrees and tried again, removed it again and tried refitting it a number of times. Went to the shed dug out the rubber mallet I used when I laid the patio a few years back and with a few carefully aimed and gently applied wallops managed to get the lid on properly. When Thornes said the lid fitted snugly they weren't kidding. Actually after doing the first batch I found the lid easier to remove and replace than before so the problem might've been that it'd contracted due to the cold and having warmed up it'd expanded again. In use the contraption has quite a steampunk feel to it with wood and metal surfaces, a hose and, of course, steam coming out of it. A bit of Raspuina playing in the background wouldn've been just the right audio accompaniment to the bubbling and dripping.

Easi-Steam in use

It worked a treat. within minutes there was some very clean pale yellow wax dribbling out of the spout into my foil food tray, accompanied by some brown looking water but TBH not as much water as I'd exected. I'd started in the early evening and as the temperature dropped the wax started to set on the spout and stopped coming out. Next time I'll do it earlier in the year whilst the weather's warmer, in the meantime I finished extracting the following day whilst the sun was up and it was still warm, I also did the second hand shallow frames too before sterilising them.

Loading up with used frames

The first thing I noticed about using the Easi-steam was the odour. It smelt fantastic. The super I used was made of cedar which normally has a fairly pleasant but faint odour to it anyway but with the heat and steam going through it the aroma was really strong and really pleasant -actually it was a lot like a sauna but without the unpleasant knowledge that all the wooden seats are steeped in other peoples' sweat. Nice :) The second thing I noticed was the wax dribbled out and cooled it looked like a fried egg with the molted wax in the middle and the paler set wax at the outer edges. The third thing I noticed was that the steam partly melted the plastic runners on the super, so next time don't use plastic runners. They cost almost a pound per pair so obviously I'm pretty devestated about that particular faux pas. The other thing I noticed was that not long after firing up the steamer a few bees came to investigate probably drawn by the smell of wax. They didn't stick around long enough to be a nuisance.

Molten Beeswax

Get Started In Beekeeping

The first book I read about Beekeeping was Get Started In Beekeeping  written by Adrian and Claire Waring, from the Teach Yourself series. The Teach Yourself books cover pretty much everything from learning widely spoken languages such as Bulgarian and Tagalog to business skills like Project Management and Stand Up Comedy, so it's no surprise they have a book on beekeeping tucked in there.

Teach Yourself

Get Started In Beekeping eases you into the subject with, first, a one minute overview, written in large letters across two pages. This tells you in the briefest of briefness basically how a bee colony works. If you're still interested you can then read the five minute section which is two pages of normal size print. This tells you a little more about bees, honey and the approximate commercial value of beekeeping in the UK and the USA. At this point assuming you've not attracted the ire of Waterstones staff by brazenly standing reading a book you haven't paid for there's a ten minute section to read.

The ten minute section is three pages of text. The more mathematically able of you are probably thinking this doesn't add up. If two pages of text takes five minutes to read then surely three pages should equate to seven and a half minutes -maybe the Warings need to invest in a copy of Basic Mathematics from the same range. Anyway for the ten minute overview if you're in a Waterstones I suggest taking the book to the in store Costa franchise and ordering a great big latte, then grabbing a comfy seat and table. Then you can read the ten minute overview at your leisure as you sip that frothy combination of cow juice and the world's most popular addictive stimulant. The ten minute section tells you a bit more about what bees actually do and how they do it (hint: it sounds like "making money" has to do with "honey").

After this you've probably finished your latte and can either buy the book and take it home to bore your housemate with interesting honey bee facts or pop it back on the shelf, whip out your smartphone and order a copy from Amazon for just over a fiver -or try your luck with eBay the worlds biggest poundshop.

Written in 2006, this book does pretty much what it says on the metaphorical tin. It's got enough info to get you started in beekeeping, from how to hive your bees and keep them alive all year to harvesting the honey. At the end of each chapter is a section called "10 Things To Remember," whilst you might not remember them all they certainly make it easy to locate points again later on. The last part of the book is a glossary where you can look up things like gimp pins or tropilaelaps without having to wade through the text. It's written in a very accessible way packed with information and diagrams. There's also some colour plates in the middle of the book showing you things like bees, some more bees, another load of bees, a waxmoth larva, various bits of bee feeding stuff, even more bees, honey comb, a bee keeper, some parasites, some bee hives and oh it's another bee. Towards the end is a month by month breakdown of the beekeeping year. I'd reccomend this easy to read tome to anyone wanting to start beekeeping.

Mead

Having harvested a modest 11kilo of honey this year I needed something to do with it. I don't eat that much of the stuff really, sometimes drop a spoonfull in a jasmine tea, use a little in cooking and have the occassional honey sandwich but I'm not really going to use 11 kilos of the stuff in a year. I had planned to flog some of it but instead I've given away about half of it and figure I'll leave that venture till next year. This year I decided to make mead.

Mead is basically a fermented drink made from honey. People seem to think of it as a honey wine and I'm happy to go along with that. If I'm in York I occassionally buy a bottle from the Jorvik Centre. Apparently mead was a popular drink amongst vikings as any viking metal fan will attest -just go to a rock night and look for someone hairy drinking lager from a plastic cows horn, he'll tell you. A quick look on Wikipedia tells me that mead production seems to go way back to 7000 BC China. I gather it was a popular drink in Olde Englande and if I was going to make up a plausible sounding theory as to why from the top of my head, based on no research at all, I'd assume that the climate here is better suited to farming honey more than vinyards.

I did a little research on the net (where else?) and looked at a few mead recipes. From this I cobbled together my own recipe based more or less on what was to hand. Here's my mead recipe for your delectation:

Mead Recipe
Ingredients:
Roughly 1360g of honey
4 pints of water (and then more later)
1/2 teaspoon of allspice
1 cup of strong black tea
One peeled and mashed up orange
Yeast

Method:
Boil up the 4 pints of water with the honey, throw in the allspice and mashed up orange. Make you cup of black tea -I used 3 bags in a coffee cup for this, no messing about there, pour it into the mix, boil it for ages -well one hour at  least. Pour it into a sterilised Demijon. Realised there's loads of space in the demijon so boil up some more water to top it up. Let it cool. Throw in the yeast. Pop on the airlock and sit back. When the bubble slow to one per second or less filter it into bottles, slap a cork in and leave it a few months before drinking.

Why tea? The tea is added as a source of tannins. Apparently the tannins are important for flavour, given that tea didn't reach England till around the 1650's I'd assume something else was used for that -or maybe olde meade in the UK never had tannins at all.

Equipment you'll need are a Demijohn, an airlock, wine bottle, corks, something to sterilise the demijohn and bottles, funnel, something to filter the mead, you'll also need yeast. I got all the wine making stuff from Wilkinsons in town. The airlock sounds a little scientific but it's just a plastic tube with a u-bend in it that you add some water to, this lets ait out as the yeast releases CO2 but doesn't let it back in. It's simple but works.

So with my recently sterilised glass and plastic ware I boiled up the ingredients and popped it into the demijohn. It took a very long time to cool and eventually I resorted to running cold water over the sides of the demijohn to take the heat away. This seemed to do the trick and I added the yeast. About ten minutes later I touched the demijohn and found it still seriously hot though so I figured my using water to draw heat off had only affected the outer mead and the glass rather than cooling the whole lot. I suspect the heat will have kiled most of the yeast so after letting it cool I added some more. At this point it was too late to pop out for brewing yeast but a biology teaching mate who used to make wine and mead herself told me yeast is all prettymuch the same so some baking yeast I'd had in a cupboard for years got dropped into the mix, actually the proper name for the mix seems to be 'must' -now you can impress friends, family and colleagues with your knowledge of mead making jargon..

The 'must' promptly turned bright orange and started to bubble. I was quite surprised by the intense orange colour, it looked very chemically -like some kind of industrial waste or a kids drink from the 80's.

Fermenting Mead. It went the colour of Kia Ora.

I set it to ferment next to a windows where it would be warmed by the sun. After a week or so the colour calmed down. Whilst the mead was fermenting you could seeand hear bubbles passing through the water in the airlock. When the bubbles slowed to one buble per second or so it was time to remove it. There's different ways to do this, some people filter it into another demijohn to sit some people put it straight into bottles. I opted to bottle it. By the time fermentation had slowed there was a layer of dead yeast at the bottom of the container and I think it's this that you want to get the mead away from.

There's all kinds of clever filtery type stuff you can use and ideally the mead shouldn't be areated so the normal method seems to be to siphon it from the demijohn into the next stage. I decided to use coffee filters for this. I sterilised a plastic bottle to filter the mead into so I could then decant it into wine bottles later. Initially I used Melitta 1x2 micropore coffee filters simply because that was what I had to hand. However it took hours to filter thorough. I decided to get a second funnel and some Melitta Original 1x4 filters so I could have two loads of mead filtering at a time. The mead shot straight through these filters and came through all cloudy. So I used two of these filters at a time which worked rather well -albeit rather slowly. The process was so slow that I wound up filling the filters then putting clingfilm over the tops and around the bottle necks and leving them over night. It took literally days to filter my demijohn. I then decanted the now surprisingly clear mead into wine bottles and corked them. Obviously this way isn't ideal as the mead gets exposed to air which I gather isn't a good thing but it's new to me and seemed to work. Oh and apparently it's not called 'bottling' it's called 'racking' -I think people just make up terminology for the sake of it.

Hivemind and Me Mead

Looks pretty good doesn't it? For the first batch I used the very pale honey and for the second batch I used the darker stuff. In the second batch I also added Rooibos teabag to the tea just for variety -well it's good tea so maybe it'll be good mead. I sampled the meads whilst bottling -I mean racking- them and found the mead made from darker honey was very dry whereas the pale stuff was really sweeet. For the first batch I'd used plastic corks but my pal with the mead making knowledge advised me they're not always as good for keeping air out as a cork cork so for the second batch I acquired a corking tool (Wilkinsons again) and some corks made from trees. The real corks also look more aesthetically pleasing.

Mead

After racking the bottled mead is then place in a wine rack or someplace else out of the way for a few months to improve. I'm not entirely sure of the chemistry or biology involved in this ageing process but I gather that there may still  be some fermentation going on in the bottles if  any live yeast made it through the filtering but eventually the alcohol level will kill anything living in there, hopefully anyway. the bottles are meant to be stored on their sides to keep the corks damp -the wet cork expands, doesn't really matter with the plastic corks, and any sediment in the bottle will sink and adhere the the side of the bottle. I've noticed that more sediment seems to have made it into my first batch, I'm also not entirely convinced of the airtight seal of the plastic corks. In a couple of months time I'll give it a try and see how it's worked out.

Worker Bees

Green Hive Roof mk.II

When I first set up my hives I had the intention of giving them green roofs. I posted a blog about the green roof on Hive1 back in June 2011. It looked good, I'm pretty sure it insulated the hive below nicely, was aesthetically pleasing, helped my hive look a little less obvious to bee paranoid neighbours and even gave the hive proper a little more shelter from the rain. However it was heavy, especially after a rainfall. My solution was to replace the large box with two smaller ones. I was initially considering using aluminium as it's light weight and fairly strong. The two problemns there were I havn't got a clue who could make the items from aluminium and as someone pointed out on a BBKA forum plants don't fare too well in aluminium containers -possibly to do with heat and cold I guess.

Stage one. Not quite done yet.

I opted for a material I've used a little bit before and know where to source. Wood. Specifically gravel board, a treated peice of wood meant to go at the bottom of a wooden fence to protect the fence from the damp ground. I still don't have a decent work surface so once again I got out the mini vices and used a double hive stand weighted down with breezeblocks and a cat.

Stabilise wobbly worksurfaces with breezeblocks and cats as required.

With my still worryingly unstable worksurface I cut the boards to size. My plan was to have three sides of the box hanging over the edge of the metal roof skin and somehow magically join them together once the boxes were in place then unconnect them when I needed to remove them so I could lift of half a green roof at a time.

Testing the fit.

As you can see I used mortise and tenon joins on the corners and a handfull of nails to hold them together. What you can't see is I also used some wood glue on the joints and to hold the pieces together as they dried I used a few staples too. With my prototype green roof it had orignially had a solid marine ply floor but I quickly discovered it was too heavy and cut out most of the floor to leave a frame around the edge to support a two layer lightweight plastic floor. I decided to do the same thing with these to help keep the weight down. I figured I could just use one layer of correx on these as they're so much smaller too. Satisfied with the fit on the hives on the roofs I added a shelf along the long side of each box held in place with yet more glue and nails. Next step was painting the boxes to match the hives. I decided to cut a corner at this point and poured a few litres of shed and fence paint into a bucket then dipped the submerged box ends in using a brush to work the paint across the long sides that hadn't been submerged. It worked okay giving me a pretty good coat of paint. It was also incredibly messy and took days to dry. As the wood was already treated the paint was just an aesthetic touch really.

Green Roof boxes. They're now green.

On the shelves I put a single layer of correx board with the internal walls running the short distance across the gap for support. Correx is the type of plastic FOR SALE and SOLD signs are made of. You can buy the stuff, but if you're lucky you can sometimes find it in the street or in a skip. The black plastic liner was just an offcut of pond liner. I folded the liner into place and used brass drawing pins to secure it. Once they're filled with the growing medium and the plants the contents will hold the liner in place so I'm not too concerned about the pins falling out later in their lives.

I then had to give a little thought to how I was going to joing the boxes to keet them in place. In the end I got some hasps from B&Q, they were the priciest part of the project and I needed one per box. I glued them into place then used the supplied screws to secure them properly. There was nothing to secure the hasps so I just drop a nail into each which seems to work adequately.

Green Hive Roofs Mk.II

The last stage was to add the growing medium and some plants. Once again I opted for mostly perlite as it's lighter than soil, and planted a mixture of sedums, some rockery plants and a few other things I felt might survive in the green roof boxes -over the course of a year they'll probably experience flood and drought conditions. I also transplanted all the plants from the original roof garden into these. It's not really the best time of year for plants to be getting used to a new container but I figure nature will take care of it and whilst some of the plants will quite probably die back others should survive and grow to fill the gaps left. They look nice enough, as the perlite settled I added some vermiculite to the top. Regarding further development I may at some point think about adding a mechanism to allow running off excess rain water, but for now I shall wait and see how they fare.