Removed the 2012 Honey Crop

Seems like only last week when I was removing my first honey crop by torchlight whilst being stung in the face by bees inside my smock. This year went a lot smoother. Last year I'd had a national brood box on the hive as a super and the bees had been unable to escape through the clearer board, this year I had 2 shallow supers on each hive which being smaller were far easier to move.

Have I mentioned 2012 was a poor year for honey? Yes? Okay, well I had 2 supers on each hive. The bees were struggling to fill them (super = a box bees store honey in that the beekeeper removes), and on the rainy days had been eating the honey themselves so I decided to try and get them to move all the honey from the less full supers to the fuller ones. It'd mean less work for me as then I'd only have to extract from two boxes instead of four. To facilitate this I'd placed a crownboard between the supers and left small hole for the bees to access them. This should've effectively meant they were outside of the hive, bees will usually rob any honey they find outside their hives. Didn't work tho. To my surprise and contrary to popular expectation they seem to have had a work spurt and actually put more honey in the top supers. They still weren't close to full but they were better than they had been.

To remove the super you want you first need to pop a clearer board under it. A clearer board is effectively a bee valve, bees can pass down into the box below but hopefully can't get back up to the one above -in theory anyway. You can probably clear more than one super at a time but the bees streaming into the box below can get a little congested so I decided to do one layer at a time. Some people make clearer boards that leave a 2" gap below so there's room to manouver for all the bees pouring down, some have no gap at all. I made my boards with a 1" space below which I suspect is adequate for clearing one super at a time.

Hive2 with clearer board on it then left with Super replaced above it.

In the early afternoon I placed clearer boards under the top supers then returned three hours later to removed the bee free supers. They weren't entirely bee free but I was able to shake and brush off the stragglers. There were still a lot of bees still on the undersides of the clearer boards themselves so I placed them exit side up at the fronts of their respective hives. The scent from the hives and their queens attacts the bees so they gradually wandered back in.

The frames of these two supers varied from completely full to almost empty. Honey is basically nectar that the bees have dehumidified. When it's ripe it has a water content of about 17%, if it's not ripe and has a greater water content say over and can ferment. It's that low water content that means honey can last years -assuming it's properly stored anyway. The easy way to tell if honey is ripe or not is to let the bees decide. Once a frame of honey is ripe the bees will cap the cells. When a frame is about 75% capped it's probably ready for extraction.

Capped Honey

If the honey isn't capped then you have to check if it's ripe or not. There's 2 ways to do it. One is to use a clever sciency gadget called a hydrometer, you smear some honey onto the device and it takes a measurement of the moisture content. The low tech way is to gove the unsealed frame of honey a sharp shake and see if any falls out. Like I said low tech.

Uncapped honey. See the difference? Easy isn't it.

Some of the frames, like the one above, were nowhere near full containing just a little uncapped honey but they withstood the sharp shake test. The next day I repeated the process to remove the other supers which had the lion's share of the honey -it's heavy stuff to lug about in bulk.

Of course having effectively robbed the bees of a huge amount of winter food you need to give them something back so I popped a feeder of 2:1 sugar syrup on each hive -well it was really 1kg sugar:630ml water as last year I found 2:1 syrup crystalised.

Contact feeder full of syrup.

When you have bees living in your garden something you don't want is a load of honey sat in your house. It only takes one forager to find it and pretty soon you'll have thousands of bees and probably a contingent of wasps in your house fighting each other and stealing the stuff. I knocked up a couple of plywood crownboards to cover the stacks, sat the supers on hive floors with sealed entrances and left them in the dining room to await extraction.

4 Supers ready for extraction.