Going to the Pub!

Been a little too busy to update the site lately, however the bees have also had a busy year and the honey crop is in! I shall be at Larkins Bar on Saturday 2nd December 12:00-17:00 selling honey, ticture, honey dippers and polish. That's to the miraclke of technology I also accept card and contactless payments too :-)

If you do pop into Larkins the range of bottled beers
is definitely worth a look too :)

Hull Bees Honey now on eBay!

I've had a few enquiries to the Hull Bees Facebook Page from people wanting to buy my honey who live outside the city so finally I've put some on eBay. There's  454g/1lb and 250g/8.8oz jars of both set and liquid honey.

Hull Bees Honey, now on eBay!

It does mean charging a little more per jar and getting a smaller return per jar than selling locally but allows me to reach a bigger customer base and puts in in the reach of people who can't pop down to West Hull for a jar or twenty. I'll add a link to the banner above at some point.

In other news my Honey is still available at The English Muse on Newland Avenue and I've recently dropped off a batch of Propolis Tincture at Broomsticks, also on Newland Avenue.

Hull Bees Honey for Sale on Newland Avenue!

There isn't a huge amount for beekeepers to do in Winter, so blog posts are a little thin on the ground however here's an advertisement which should be good news for some of the folk who've asked about buying my honey. :)

Right now my honey is for sale at English Muse, 81 Newland Avenue, Hull, HU5 2AL. If you've walked up Newland Avenue you've probably seen The English Muse with it's distinctive Edwardian shopfront. Check out The English Muse - Coffee & Art Facebook Page for some images of the place.It's an interesting place to visit with an ever changing display of local artists talents on display as well as friendly staff and good food.

Go here! :-D

Buy this! :-D

 So if you're after something to go in your hot toddy or on your toast give them a visit, the paninis are excellent :)

2016 Honey Crop

This years honey crop has been removed from the hives. Contrary to what some people seem to think thanks to Flow Hive advertising removing and extracting honey doesn't actually kill bees. There's different ways to do it but I use a clearer board which is basically a board with a big hole in the top and a couple of smaller holes underneath. It sits under the Super and the bees go down through the big hole, exit the the smaller ones below into the hive below and can't find the way back up. You then return and remove the Super which now has no bees left  in it. Actually there's often a couple of bees still in the Super but they're not a problem. I remove the supers in the evening when few bees are flying and stand the supers on one end, after a few minutes the remaining bees fly back to the hive -any that take too long are poked out with a blade of grass and once displaced also fly home to the hive. It's simple, bee friendly and easy to do.

A Worker Bee taking an interest in my boot.

Once removed from the hives the supers were hauled home and put on my purpose built trolley so I could wheel them into the utility room. The honey buckets and extractor were cleaned in anticipation and I covered the floor in newspaper bought specifically for the task -next year I'll probably put a plastic sheet or tarpaulin down first too as spilt honey is awkward stuff to clean up.

Supers ready for extraction

The last batch of supers included uncapped honey. It passed the shake test indicating it's probably ripe but if you leave uncapped honey sitting around it's likely to draw in water from the air so I bought a dehumidifier and sat it in the room behind the Supers with a few bits of wood to seperate them letting the dehumidified air circulate in the stack.

Frame of capped honey.

On the first batch of supers I used a hot air gun to remove the cappings but on the last lot I reverted to using an uncapping fork. Whilst the air gun works it means you have no wax cappings to harvest. I've also found with practice I can get almost the same speed with an uncapping fork as the heat gun anyway.

There's a lot of videos of people using uncapping forks on the internet but I'm not sure they're all doing it the best way. A lot of people use the fork going up the frame (from bottom bar to top bar) which takes  lot of passes, some keep lifting the fork off the cappings every inch or so which must take them forever and some people seem to be pushing the cappings so they come off dark which means they're taking a lot of honey off with them.

Using and Uncapping Fork.
Bit of Tiger Army playing in the background

I prefer hold the frame at about a 30-40 degree angle and remove the cappings in two passes going across the comb without pulling the tines away until the end of the pass. I keep the fork almost parallel to the frame so the tines aren't going very far into the comb and use a rocking motion to help pull the cappings upwards as I go. In the video you can see the removed cappings are very pale which indicates the air gap below the cappings is still empty rather than having had honey pushed into it.

Other ways to remove cappings include using a large knife or heated knife to cut them off although looking on youtube I'm seeing a lot of people cut their comb so deeply a lot of honey is being lopped off with the cappings. Probably gives you nice flat uniform comb for next year though. This year I also tried an Uncapping Roller. It's a spiked roller on a wooden handle that looks a bit like a WWI Trench club. The idea is you run the roller down the comb and the pins make holes or cuts in the cappings for the honey to come out of when it's spinning in the extractor. My experience with this was that it was a waste of time. The roller left some cappings intact and those it did cut the edges of the cuts seemed to be closed up by the sides of the cut wax and the pins rolled out. It took a lot of passes with the roller to make an appreciable difference but that left loads of tiny wax particles to come out in the extractor and clog up the filter.

Bit of a wast of time.

After spinning frames I'd used the roller on I noticed they still felt heavy so wound up going over them again with the uncapping fork and spinning them a second time to get the honey out. I was quite surprised how badly the device performed in use and shall be popping my roller on eBay at some point.

Spinning honey in the extractor.
Listening to Green Day now.

My two frame plastic extractor performed excellently as per usual. Thornes no longer sell this model but at the time of writing it's stocked by Maisemore Apiaries. As some of the frames had contained uncapped honey the water content of each bucket has to checked individually with the refractometer.

One of several buckets of honey.

I extracted a little over 80 kilos of honey this season. Best yet. Next step is to covert some to set honey then get it all into jars asap.

Honey Extraction

A few days after removing the honey from the bees it was time to extract it. Last year I crushed the comb and strained out the honey. Whilst that works it does mean losing the comb so the bees had to remake it this year. Not a problem if you're also harvesting the wax but if you're more interested honey yield it's better to try and reuse the comb next season. Around 1850 an Italian chap invented a machine allowing him to do just that, and it's a machine we're still using. The honey extractor uses centrifugal force to remove honey from comb which has had the capping cut off. I acquired one last year and it's been sitting in a huge box in my roof space since then. It's essentially a large bin made of food grade plastic with a big tap at the bottom and a rotating plastic cage spun by a hand crank. When extracting honey you want to make the honey more runny so I turned the heating right up.

Uncapping honey with a capping fork.

The bees make a wax cap over cells containing ripe honey. This capping needs cutting off. There's various tools to do this with including heated serrated blades, machines with spinning abrasive brushes and heat guns. I decided to try using a heat gun as it seemed the least messy. Well I say heat gun what I mean is my house mate's hairdryer. She was all packed up for her move to London Metropolitan and it was sat on a box on the landing so I decided to borrow it. Unfortunately it failed completely. The idea is the hot air melts the cappings over the honey so they recede to the cell walls. What actually happened was the honey below the cell cappings dissipated the heat from the cappings but the walls of adjacent empty cells melted. Having learned that wasn't going to work I put the dryer back and chose Plan B. Plan B was a capping fork. In fact the capping fork would've been Plan A if I hadn't seen Yazz's hairdryer out a decided to give it a whirl. Anyway a capping fork is a fork about 2 inches across with a number of sharp round needle-like tines. To uncap honeycells you just slide the tines under the caps trying not to push too far into the honey and lift them free. It's also used to pull developing bee larvae from brood cells when checking varroa levels.To uncap the shallow frames took quite a while, but as I'd never actually done it before so there's probably some room for improvement in technique and speed gains to make.

Honey Extractor and a couple of food
buckets I'd readied optimistically

The extractor took two frames at a time so I was uncapping them as they went into the machine then extracting from them before uncapping the next two. There's two kinds of spinners: tangential and radial. With a tangential extractor the frames are held so a whole side is facing outward from the cage, in a radial extractor the frames are held with the tops facing outwards. With both types the honey is flung outwards to the extractor sides and flows to the bottom where the tap can be opened to decant it. Mine is a tangential extractor so I popped in a couple of frames sideways and turning the handle soon had the frames spinning. I couldn't see any honey flying out but when I checked the comb was empty so I then did the other side. You actually have to spin the frames slower at first so the weight of the spinning honey on the side you're not extracting doesn't make the comb collapse then after extracting the second side you turn the comb round again and spin the first side a second time faster to get the last drops.

Two Shallow Frames in the Extractor

It took a little experimentation to get the speeds right and initially I was evidently spinning the combs too fast as the empty cell walls were bearing an imprint of the cage. I started extracting with the emptier shallow frames and whilst I couldn't see any progress happening initially as I'd started extracting from the emptier frames at one point realised there was an inch of honey sat in the bottom of extractor. Shortly after that I opened the honeygate and started decanting it into buckets every few frames.

Letting go the golden flow
-the other golden flow!

Honey is pretty viscous stuff so after extracting all the frames I had and pouring it into buckets I closed the honeygate (door the honey comes out of) and turned the extractor almost upside down over a bowl for a whole day for the last of the honey to slowly dribble out, I gave this to my housemate as a little leaving gift as she was going to soon for the rest to have settled. This years crop was 17 kilograms, more than last years  but less than hoped, after the dual setbacks of losing a swarm and the unusual weather.

I'd never used an extractor before and I have to admit it was really easy to do. I also think I managed to extract more of the honey that I'd managed by crushing and straining it last year. The honey still had to settle in the buckets so air bubbles and bits of wax and whatever else was in there could rise to the top for skimming off. I don't have a warming cabinet for that so I just left them in a warm room to settle. Meanwhile I was left with a load of sticky honeycomb. Some beekeeper prefer to store their comb wet as it apparently deters wax moth -yeah wax moth doesn't like honey but lives in honeycomb, on the other hand wet comb attracts prettymuc everything else including bees and wasp wanting to rob it -I've even heard of wasps gnawing holes through the wooden sides of stored supers to get at the honey left inside.

Wet Honeycomb

In the same way you can depend on a light fingered chap in tatty sports casual to have away with the knackered fridge freezer you've hauled into the front garden and don't want to pay the council to remove the bees' habitual honey thieving can be put to good use. As I've mentioned before any honey not within the hive itself is considered fair game -just like the copper pipes in an empty house for the afore mentioned light fingered fellow. I previously tried to use the bees thieving tendencies to manipulate them into consolidating all their honey into the one one super by putting a crown board below the more empty super and so moving it out if the hive proper but that failed. After a little research (yeah OK a couple of minutes googling then) I discovered that a bit of space between the crown board and the honey to robbed means less of the queen's pheromones reach the wet supers making them seem less part of the hive and so more likely to get robbed out. I added an empty super with placed two wet supers above it on each hive. Five days later I checked to find them picked clean and dry as a bone.

Dry Honeycomb -cleaned by bees

Last thing to do was jar up the settled honey. Despite having had over a week to settle including some time in a sink full of warm water it was really tricky to remove the bits of wax from the top of the honey. I removed a lot but a little managed to get past me. Not a problem as I'll be selling it as raw, unfiltered and unprocessed but next year I'll probably give some thought to filtering. Just need to label the stuff come up with a price and I'm done!

My 2012 crop.

Consolidating Honey

Having had a dry Spring and a wet Summer honey harvests across the UK are down by a huge percentage, the figure I've seen bandied about is 60%, and quite a few people in the forums are reporting no harvest at all. The season should be pretty much over by now except for any migratory beekeepers moving their bees to the moors for heather honey. However the temperature has been about 23 degrees celcius in Hull and the bees have been flying so what's actually going on is anybody's guess. There is a temptation to leave the supers (the parts of hives honey to be harvested is stored in) on the hives to let the bees carry on adding to them whilst the weather lasts but there's two reasons not to. One is after removing the honey crop the bees need time to stock up their own stores for the winter, be it from nectar or syrup they'll still need time to dehydrate it. The other reason is that ivy flowers late and we really don't want ivy honey, it crystalises in the honeycomb making it hard to remove and it smells pretty bad too.

Nine frames in a shallow Super, July 2012

In the brood box where the queen lives and lays her eggs beekeepers want as many cells as possible so the more eggs can be laid and more bees reared. In a Commercial like mine there are 11 frames giving 22 surfaces (one each side y'see) of cells to lay in. In a super we want more honey and less wax. Whilst a National Super can hold 11 frames it's more normal to use 10, 9 or even 8 frames instead. The bees then draw out the cell walls making them deeper so they store more honey in them with less space given over to vertical bee space, foundation and cappings. Unless you have frames already drawn out to the desired width it's normal to start with 11 frames per super and then remove excess frames as the middle ones get drawn out to fill the space in the box, otherwise there's too much dead air in there which the bees need to keep warm.The bees generaly draw out the frames in the middle first as the bees cluster in the centre of the brood box below and the warm air rising makes wax easier to work.

Almost fully capped frame of honey

A lot of people out there seem to think bee hives are always full of nice ready to eat honey, however that's not the case the only place I know of with ripe ready to eat honey all year round is a supermarket and if you buy the cheap stuff it's probably cut with syrup anyway but I digress... The honey needs to be ripened by the bees reducing it's water content over time, if it's not ripe then once you've extracted it the water content will be too high and it'll ferment. It's easy to tell when honey is ripe as the bees will seal the cells of ripe honey with wax. The capping over honey is white and smooth, unlike the thin brown cappings over deveoloping bees. Once a frame has 75% of it's cells capped the honey in it can be harvested. You can remove individual frames if you like but it's easier to just wait till the whole super is 75% or more capped and then remove the whole lot.

I had actually been expecting a huge honey crop this year as the mild winter meant more bees survived the winter than expected so the colonies were more populous in Spring than usual. More workforce equals more work right? Unfortunately after a winter that was a blessing the Spring and Summer were a mixed up meteorological mess and plants weren't flowering at the expected times and weren't producing enough nectar to suport our huge spring colonies, then the Summer rain meant bees couldn't go out foraging anyway. After starting the season smiling beekeepers were suddenly having to emergency feed their colonies to stop them starving ..and I gather quite a few did starve, it was a significant enough problem to prompt  reporting in the mainstream media as well as prompting DEFRA to issue starvation warnings. I also managed to lose a prime swarm from Hive2 which was unfortunate and temporarily reduced their workforce. Going by what I'm seeing reported in other parts of the country Hull seems to have done better over the summer weatherwise than other parts of the UK and I was able to to put two supers on both hives. There were a couple of false starts when I had to remove the supers and feed the bees again but eventually the season started moving forwards.

Hive1 has been happily filling up 2 supers both of which I'm planning to remove very soon, probably this weekend. Hive2 however managed to nearly fill one super but the other is only about 20% full and I really don't see the bees being able to comlete it in time for harvesting before winter preparations or the arrival of ivy nectar. So I hatched a simple plan to consolidate the honey from the nearly empty super with that of the almost full one -or into the brood box if the other super gets fully capped. At the top of the hive under the roof is another lid, the crownboard. The crownboard has a few holes in it for feeding and a few other things. When not being fed it's common to close the holes up, to the bees if you leave the feeding holes open just enough for them to get through they will consider anything above the crownboard to be outside the hive, and any honey outside the hive is fair game as far as they're conerned. So I moved the nearly empty super above the crownboard and hopefully as I'm typing this the bees of Hive2 are busily robbing the honey it contained and storing it in the Super I'll be harvesting, failing that they should be storing it in the brood box for themselves to use over Winter.

Hive2 with a crownboard between the two supers

The bees propensity (good word that, think I'll try to use it more) for stealing honey from anything above the crownboard is actually quite useful for beekeepers. After extracting honey with a spinner the beekeeper is left with frames of honey comb which have honey residue still stuck to the wax, these can be stored 'wet' but there's always the change the honey will attract pests so many prefer to store them 'dry' with this removed. The simplest way to dry your wet frames is to pop them back into your hives above the crownboard and let the bees removed every last drop for you.