Tomorrow: Vintage Makery Do

Where else would you go on a cold November afternoon?

It's the Vintage Makery Do 2016 Winter Craft Fair tomorrow. 1-3pm Saturday, 26th November, at St Ninian's Church, Chanterlands Avenue, Hull. I'll be bringing along a lot of local honey as well as propolis products and a few other things.

Flying Visit(or)

I was relaxing at home this evening when I heard a loud banging and buzzing above me. Looking up I could see something large and going by the way the light was being moved with each crash fairly heavy was flying about below the ceiling rose. Given the noise I thought maybe it was a drone but the shape looked a bit off and it was moving very fast. Eventually it went behind a picture (Dali's "the Elephants, 1948, in case you were wondering) so I used my phone camera to sneak a look. I could only see the silhouette but it was clearly something cleaning it's antenna. I figured it was probably a wasp as I've seen them doing the same thing so often. Definitely looked a bit big though. I pulled in a bee jacket and some rubber gloves then removed the picture (it's a print, not an original -I don't sell quite that much honey yet). Before I got a good luck it took flight and went into the light shade. I tried knocking it out but only succeeded in damaging the paper globe. Doh. To get a better look I decided to  stick my phone in there with her.

Vespula Vulgaris in my now to be replaced lightshade

That was her. A Common Wasp , Vespula Vulgaris. She looks a bit on the chubby to me though. I can't be sure but I think she may have be a Queen who'd been woken up early from hibernation by the heating. It took a while to catch her and my light shade is a goner but I managed to get her into an old honey jar and take a couple of photos for posterity.

Those wings look longer than her body

Head shot

I then took the jar lid off and flicked her into the back garden. I think she may have been a bit dehydrated as once in the jar she wasn't doing much apart from staying still and posing for photos.

Mouseguard time

Cold, dark and windy days.

Now the temperature's dropping and nights are unpleasantly cold mice will be looking for someplace warm to shelter and despite the presence of a few thousand stinging insects a beehive is a perfect place for them. It's warm and full of food after all. If a mouse gets into a hive it can cause a lot of damage eating comb, depleting stores, crapping in the hive, eating bees, whatever, it's never good news. I gather the bees at Pearson Park Wildlife Garden were lost to bees which is a shame because it's actually very easy to avoid by attaching a mouseguard to the hive keeping the critters out. A mouseguard is basically a metal cover for the hive entrance with hole that are too small for a mouse to get it's head through. Typically this is a strip of metal with holes drilled in. Other options are entrance reducers with nails at intervals forming bars too close for a mouse to get through or metal mesh with holes too small for anything furry.

One of my early home made mouseguards, still in use.

In my first season I made my own mouseguards from wooden batons, an aluminium strip and some nails. I still use them on the floors they fit. Unfortunately when I started beekeeping I didn't realise that whilst there's a standard specification for hive components, hive floors seem to vary a lot depending where you get them so my home made mouseguards only fit specific hive floors. Luckily commercially produced mouse guards are actually very cheap and I got a few from an eBay seller a while back.They're usually a metal strip with a couple of rows of 8mm holes for the bees and some smaller holes for nails or drawing pins. Ideally you then pin it to the hive for winter. It's not hi-tech but it works.

Typical mouseguard pinned across a hive entrance

This year it occurred to me that putting drawing pins into the hive body and hive floor every winter is going to reduce the working life of the wood so I decided to try a different approach using nails permanently attached to the floor that I could then wire the mouseguard onto.

Mouseguard wired to a couple of Gimp Pins at either end of the entrance

Simple stuff but it works. Well on some hives anyway. On hives with a landing board like the one in the second photo above I couldn't do this and the mouseguard had to be pinned to the brood box. I've attached little landing boards to most of my hive floors so wound up having to pin guard to the broodboxes. My idea with the gimp pins and wire I only actually managed to do with two of my eight hives and I think three  used my old home made guards. Next year I might try to give it a little thought in advance. Putting nails into the floor of an occupied hive isn't really much fun and at one point a contingent of workers came buzzing out to see me off on the hive above, but over Summer I'll think about doing it on unused floors and with any new floors before they go under the hives.

Mouseproof!

I've read that mice can actually chew their way through the wood if they really want to get into a hive but a metal guard on the entrance should stop them just wandering in. You also need to make sure you fit them before the mice are in the boxes otherwise you're just trapping them in your hives..

Setting and Bottling

With the year's honey crop extracted and sat in buckets it wasn't quite time to kick back and relax. The honey bottling and half the crop needed turning into set honey too. The easiest way to make set honey is to add existing set honey to your liquid honey and mix it. I'd saved a few jars of last year's set honey for that very purpose.

Mixing set and liquid honey

After warming the set honey a little I added four jars to a bucket of liquid honey and stirred it with a honey creamer -a huge corkscrew type thing that you attach to a drill. It takes a while for the honey to mix properly. In the photo above the set honey's just been added and you can see it's very different in colour from the liquid honey that was already in the bucket. basically you keep stirring till it's all  the same colour. Once mixed it goes into jars and I gave it a week in the fridge to finish setting. Doesn't need to be in a fridge really just somewhere not warm. The first batch of set honey was then used to turn a few more buckets of liquid honey into set honey.

As last year I decided to do two sizes of honey jar, 454g jars which is the traditional 1lb honey jar and some smaller 250g jars. The 1lb jars came from Freeman & Harding just like every other year. The 250g jars I ordered via eBay from Compak South Ltd who were selling 96 jars for £26.48 which is a pretty good deal. Unfortunately when they arrived two jars were smashed in the box and two had faults in the glass rendering them unusable and Compak South didn't respond to emails. Eventually eBay offered a refund if I returned the jars but by then I'd used most of them so it wasn't feasible to. As a result I left them some negative feedback and a review on Trust Pilot. Looking at their feedback I can see I'm not the only person to have had a similar experience with them. Shame really as I've bought from them previously.

I'm no glazing expert but one of these doesn't look quite right to me.

Bottling honey is a simple process. Just pop a scales under the honey gate, sit a jar on it, zero the scales and pour out the honey till you hit the desired weight then close the gate and remove the jar. Inevitable this leads to a slight over filling of each jar but better to be over than under. Here's a quick video of some freshly mixed set honey going into a 250g jar, whilst I listen to The Rumjacks.

..and that's how it goes into the jar.

I've fitted honey gates to most of my small honey buckets but hadn't got round to fitting them on the larger buckets yet so I had to decant some from the buckets without gates into those that had. This led to some spillage as I'd actually left pen the gate on the bucket I was pouring it into. Ooops. Luckily I had my buckets standing in some great big plastic Garland Trays which meant clear up wasn't a problem, on the downside they're not food grade plastic so the spilt honey couldn't be used.

There were over 200 jars in total. Like last year I printed my own labels on a Brother QL-570 thermal label printer. I got it on sale a year or two ago and never looked back. Being a thermal printer there's no ink involved and it has a built in cutter so you can make labels any size from a continuous roll. I'd been thinking of making a jig to put jars in to line the labels up but in the end I just used a spare frame top bar to line them up doing a few at a time. I pulled out about 80KG of honey from the hives. After spillage and minus a few jars there's about 73KG left to sell on.

2016 Honey Crop

Wet Storage

With the honey crop extracted the supers need to be stored over winter. I used a couple to house feeders but most of them went to the out apiary for storage.

Behold: The sticking power of propolis

You can store supers dry or wet. This refers to whether they still have residual honey in the combs (wet) or if the bees have picked them clean (dry). What you choose is up to you but the advantage of storing them wet is waxmoth don't like honey whereas the advantage of storing them dry is they're less messy to handle although the honey may attract other pests. Obviously you can't sterilised wax honeycomb with a blowtorch. The usual method is to use acetic acid fumes. You pop a plate with a pad soaked in acetic acid at the top to the stack then close them up. The acetic acid evaporates killing pretty much anything living in the supers.

Acetic acid pad

I stacked up 16 supers in two lots of eight under a lean to I'd attached to one side of my shed. The hive roofs on each stack protrudes from under the lean to a bit so I used plastic shopfitting material I pulled from a skip to direct rain away.

Won't open these for a few months.

Reviving the Burco

Since it's purchase for low sum if £11 at the 2012 Beverley Beekeepers Auction my Burco boiler has served me well. I had intended to use it to boil frames and render wax but never got round to those things, instead it's been used to make up gallons of syrup to feed in the preparation for Winter, blanch a huge crop of sweetcorn cobs and make gallons of sterilising fluid. This year it died unfortunately.

Using a multimeter and very little know how I was able to identify the element was the problem. Wasn't exactly rocket science, there's only two components in these boilers -the element and the thermostat/switch unit thing. I don't really know ho old the unit is but it's probably knocking on a bit as Burco have altered the design slightly over the years and I'm sure the element has had a few knocks from the drill powered paint stirrer I use to mix syrup so it's probably done well to last this long. When I took a closer look at the contacts below the element I could see some molten plastic. That's rarely a good sign.

Something's melted there. Probably not a good sign.
I hadn't noticed the dead spider till I loaded the photo for cropping.

Removing the element proved tricky. It's held together by 3 screws, two came out easily enough but the one nearest the molten plastic was going nowhere. Eventually I got out the Dremmel and using a cut off disc simply cut the screw beneath the head going through the plastic housing too -it's all part of the element so it'll all get replaced anyway.

Cutting out the stuck screw

Sorted.

The original element had had a little stud to hold a washplate that kept anything in the boiler from direct contact with the element. After some Google searches it appears Burco dropped that feature a long time ago and nobody seems to make replacement elements with them on now. I gather people used to use these boilers for washing clothes and cooking back in the day but as washing machines have become more available and people cook less it's probably become a redundant feature.

Original Burco element with stud for Washplate

The washplate

The 1 9/16" hole Burco adopted seems to have become something of a standard size for boiler elements so it turns out there's plenty of replacement elements out on the market. However actually getting one proved a little tricky. The first eBay seller I tried to buy one from simply didn't post the item. I think they tried to rip me off really but I got a refund from eBay. The second one I tried to purchase had shown an element with the same shape as the original Burco element but the one that arrived was a cheap unbranded knockoff with an element that less surface area than the original. Who'd've thought the appliance spare parts market was such a dodgy place?

Cheap no name knock off element on the left, original element on the right
The original element is about 135cm long, the knockoff about 95cm

I contacted the seller who claimed it was a like for like replacement, but gave me a refund after I pointed out the element they sent me had far less surface area and also no CE logo or anything else to suggest compliance to any relevant electrical safety standards. I'm pretty sure the original element was 3Kw and this one is stamped 2.5Kw however as it's eventually turned out to be free I'll go ahead and use it. I'd be a little wary of leaving one of these cheap elements running for long unchecked but I usually use my boiler outdoors anyway.

Whilst there were no instructions with the replacement it was easy enough to fit. It had a red hard plastic washer which I left in place to go between the element and the boiler floor, a large black rubber washer and a big nut. I figured the rubber washer was probably supposed to go between the nut and boiler floor above it. I tightened it all by hand and a quick test filling showed it was watertight. I haven't got a clue what the red wire included with it was for so I've not used it.

Whilst the contacts were different to the original and not marked I figured polarity wouldn't matter so  hooked up live and neutral. Actually the contacts seemed dangerously close together so using two pairs of pliers I bent them away from each other. Don't want the thing arcing after all. There was a screw contact for ground so I just cut the end of the connector off, jammed it in and tightened the screw.

The new element contacts after I'd bent them away from each other

The new knock off element in place

When I originally got the boiler it was missing one of its three rubber feet so for four years I've been sticking a bit of wood under it. Whilst it was out of commission I figured I may as well replace that too. At 25mm tall and 20mm in diameter nobody seems to sell them so I decided to replace all three with the closest I could find. I managed to find some the same diameter that were slightly shorter SwanFlight a company that sells flight cases and flight case parts. The existing feet use counter sunk 25mm screws and with a little checking against a screw thread gauge I figured they were metric 0.8 pitch so ordered a bag of 25mm M5 bolts  from eBay for just over a pound. May as well replace the old screws with new as well.

New bolts and boiler feet, the old two are at the top

New feet fitted with no help from Toby.

The Burco sticker was long gone but as it has some info about power and model number I printed a new one copying the info from an eBay advert for the same boiler. I stuck one on the side and another underneath and a third underneath and on the inside in case wear and tear loses me the other two.

At some point I'd tried to clean the aluminium lid with something that'd stained it leaving a darkened area that nothing since had ever shifted. The  only thing for it was to sand it. A bit of work with some 400, 800 and then 2000 grit wet and dry paper improved things considerably.

I was back to a working Burco. :) 

One working Burco Boiler

Actually with all the faffing about with the first eBay seller wasting my time I couldn't wait any longer to get sugar syrup made and into the bee feeders so between this boiler dying and being resurrected I'd had to buy a replacement boiler. They're pricey things but I found a 6 gallon Burco on Gumtree for thirty quid. So at the mo I've got two working boilers and the capacity to make up 10 gallons of syrup at a time. As well as making syrup and boiling frames they can also be used for brewing beer.. there's a thought.