Before you can take the super you need to get the bees out of it. There's various ways to do this: leaf blowers, unpleasant smelling chemicals or a variety of clearer boards that incoporate bee escapes that let the bee travel in one direction but not the other -effectively bee valves. There's umpteen types and I opted to use rhombus escapes because someone on the internet said they were fast -and as everyone knows if someone posts something on the internet then it must be true. I ordered a couple of plastic rhombus bits from Thornes and popped to B&Q for some wood then knocked up two clearer boards.
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| Rhombus Clearer Boards |
Basically the bee goes in the round hole at the top, wanders out the pointy end on the underside then can't find the pointy end to go back the other way.. Simple. Except bees aren't really that stupid and after a while they find their way back up so you can't leave the board on for long really. I came home at lunchtime and placed the clearers below the shallow supers then went back to work. I came back just after 4pm and found both shallow supers empty. Great. they work. and they work quickly! I took off the supers, jolly good.
Hive1 also had a 'National Deep' (brood box from a national hive) which I was also using as a super, albeit a great big one. I popped the clearer under it then waited a few hours before returning. This was a mistake. I hadn't realised that whilst shallow supers have a bee space below the frames national deeps do not as they depend upon the floor of the hive to create that space. Effectively any bees in the deep box that weren't above the round hole in the clearer had just been sealed up for three hours. Oops. That didn't put them in the best of moods.
I decided to get the super removed this evening anyway by using a bee brush (yeah there really is such a thing, it's meant to be made of pig hair though, not actual bees) to brush each frame clean of stinging insects and transfer it into another box. Actually I initially decided to try the leaf blower method using my housemate's hair dryer set on cold. She graciously lent me her dryer for the purpose, it's a Revlon if anyone was wondering, so I popped it on an extension lead and promptly found it didn't actually shift any bees. So yeah, the bee brush was Plan B really. I removed the clearer board, turned it upside down and laid it with an edge to the hive entrance so the bees would walk back in -yes this actually works, but back to the honey theiving.
I pulled out each frame one at a time brushed all the bees off it and placed it in a spare brood box. By the time I was half way through it was dark. Bees don't fly much in the dark, but they doo crawl. They do crawl a lot.They did crawl all over me. It was about this point that I discovered demin although hardwearing won't actually turn away a bee sting. Got one in my upper thigh Straight through the material. I could also hear a buzzing near my ears which told me there was a little bee party going on somewhere on the hood of my schmock. Not long after this I got an inkling that one had actually got inside my hood. Well I say I got an inkling. What I really got was a sting in the face. Right lower corner of my jaw which rugged as it is was no match for the barbed end of a bee. I recall exclaiming "By Jiminy, that most certainly smarts!" -or words to that effect. I downed tools ran to the house peeling of my gloves, wriggling off my schmock and veil which was actually buzzing quite a lot by then, flipped off the cap that I use to protect my shaven noggin under the rather thin hood and tore off the chavvy fleece I wear underneath as a bit of extra sting insurance. I grabbed the Aspivenin and toothpaste I keep handy for just such incidents and ran into the kitchen. Noticed a few bees in there so went upstairs to the bathroom. Bees in there too. Think I was probably carrying them round the house in fact. I went into another room with a mirror, no bees at last, and applied the Aspivenin.
Basically an Aspivenin sucks. Literally. It sucks the venom out of bites or stings. And it works :) After three minutes with the green syringe arrangement dangling from my face I removed it (the aspivenin, not my face) and applied a liberal finger of Arm & Hammer tooothpaste. The glycerin in the toothpaste dries out the area which apparently stops the venom working or something. I don't get the science behind it but it does work.
Anyway long story short, went back outside with a bicycle rear light to see by. Bees can't see red y'see. I found the gloves cap, schmock and fleece. Brushed a bee out of the cap then spent a good five minutes checking the schmock and fleece for bees and removing those I found before putting them back on and finally finished removing the frames of honey. I had to brush and transfer each frame three times to get the bees off and once I got them into the house I still had a handfull of bees to usher back outside..
As if the bees weren't angry enough by this point I started their varroa mite treatment tonight too. For this I use a product called Apilife Var. It's a few essential oils on a crumbly material which you pop in the hive and it magically kills the mites. Well apparently it suffocates them according to the blurb, believe what you like but either way they get dead. Oh it also seriously annoys the bees.When you're putting it in the hive you get a rush of angry bees charging at your hand. Yay. Once that was done I dropped a feeder onto the hive and having, already plonked one onto Hive2, filled them both with a 2:1 sugar:water syrup I'd made up and had been letting cool as I charged about getting stung, smearing myself with toothpaste and borrowing hair dryers. Now I have a shallow and a deep sat between two crownboards on the dining table waiting for extraction, I'll deal with them another day.
Remind me about aspivenin and glycerin in toothpaste please.
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