Today is The North London Beekeepers annual honey show for members. For fun I decided to enter a few classes. We’ve never even been to a honey show before, so I’m not really sure what to expect.

The schedule is very exacting about the type and size of jars and containers to be used and there are different classes for light, medium and dark honeys. You have to enter 2 1lb jars in each class, and the pairs should be as similar as possible. When I dropped them off this morning I had to get the colours checked against a special grading glass to see which class they should be entered into. I also entered a box of cut comb.

This morning M and I polished up the jars and replaced the scratched lids before packing it all up in newspaper for the bus journey. I was nervous about the cut comb leaking and we kept checking that it was upright in my bag. Fortunately everything survived the journey.  I’m really excited to see the other entries this evening and to see how we get on.

As well as delicious honey, another product of the hive is wax. When we remove the super frames to extract honey we check that most of the comb has been capped. This means that the bees are satisfied that the honey trapped inside has a low enough water content that it won’t ferment and will store until it is needed. Exploding jars of honey would be a disaster!

Before putting the frames into the extractor we have to gently remove these wax cappings so that the honey is free to run out.

After much washing and filtering this wax can be used for all sorts of things like candles or polish. Cappings wax is considered to be the highest quality and is a beautiful pale golden colour.

I was watching the hive entrances earlier to make sure that there weren’t any wasps getting in, and noticed that rather than wasps getting in there were drones being thrown out!

The smaller workers were frog marching their brothers out of the hive and viciously attacked them if they tried to return. At this time of the year the drones are evicted – the colony has no use for them over the colder months, they would just be extra mouths to feed.

My parents visited recently and brought a box of delicious Discovery apples from their garden. A and M have been asking to have them drizzled with honey for pudding most evenings since and I’m happy to oblige!

Today we have been extracting the last honey that we will take from the hives this year.

We tipped the extractor right over so that every drop of honey came out!

We will be starting treatment for varroa this week. The treatment that we’ll be using taints the honey, so any left in the hive now will be for the bees. It is important that the bees have enough stores to last them through until the spring. We prefer to leave them some honey rather than feeding loads of sugar syrup in the autumn.I’ll be checking the stores in a few weeks and will feed them if necessary. I noticed that the ivy has just started to flower, so with luck there won’t need to be too much additional feeding.

As well as our home hives I’ve been running two more hives in Hendon this season. They are about 4 miles away from where we live, so the bees are exposed to some different flowers to forage on. I have been hoping that is would give us some differently flavoured honey.

Today we went there to check on the hives.

Everything looked alright in both hives. One of the colonies was very weak when I first took them on in June, but they seem to be gaining in strength all the time which is encouraging.

The second hive has a colony that I took there after doing an artificial swarm earlier in the season. I hadn’t expected to take any honey from them this year as it was a pretty small colony when I moved them. However, they have been doing so well that I was able to take a few capped frames full of honey today.

J and his dad helped us out today and were rewarded with their first taste of honey straight from the hive!

Back at home we quickly got to work extracting the honey. It has an amazing flavour – almost orangey and quite different to our home honey.

Our bees have been very busy over the summer, yesterday it was time to take some more honey from hive #1. We took off 16 frames that were ready and were amazed by the difference in colour between them.

They varied between this really pale one,

to this treacly dark one.

The blend tastes divine!

Extraction was aided along by some honey beer…

Today was the first time that we made cut comb from our hives.

First I cut the comb out of the wooden frame.

Then I used a special cutter to slice up the comb.

And carefully, into the box…

… it goes. Some people drain their comb before boxing it up, but we decided that extra honey was the way to go.

Just look at that golden deliciousness! This is a messy, sticky process – the best bit is mopping up with fresh bread at the end.

This weekend we will be taking honey from both our home hives. The main nectar flows have slowed right down now and we need to start reducing the sizes of the hives so that by the autumn they will be compact and able to keep warm through the winter.  We like to keep the honey from each hive separate, so today it was hive #2.

I put special clearer boards under the super on the hive last night and by this morning most of the bees had moved down into the super below. I used the brush to gently remove the few stragglers before I took the box inside – we really don’t want a load of angry bees helping with the extraction!

Today’s honey was really dark and has a wonderful flavour. I’m looking forward to seeing what it looks like after it has settled and been bottled.

Last night we bottled the honey that we extracted earlier in the week.

We filled some of these 1oz jars, which look really sweet – they’d make great party favours.

It is interesting to see the difference in colour between this honey and the batch from our other hive from the start of the month. They taste quite different too. The jar on the right is this lot.