Today we were thrilled that we were able to take some frames of honey from our hive #1. It tastes delicious and quite different from the honey we took earlier in the month from hive #2. It is amazing that even though the hives sit just a few metres apart the bees must have been foraging on different plants to create the difference in flavour.
It is now filtering and then we’ll let it stand for a couple of days before bottling it.
I glanced out of the window earlier and was alarmed to see thousands of bees in the air. My first thought was “SWARM!” and raced up to the roof to look at the hives. (I have absolutely no idea what I thought I was going to do though…)
When I got there I realised that rather than swarming – where all the bees pour out of the hive, the opposite was happening – all the bees were racing into the hives. About 10 seconds later there was an enormous crack of thunder and torrential rain began. I must have seen all the foragers dashing for cover before the storm began! These tiny creatures really amaze me.
Within a couple of minutes of the rain slowing they were back out, hard at work again.
Each time we inspect our hives we gently remove any wax comb that the bees have built where we don’t want it. We have been saving this wax and filtering it in our solar wax extractor to remove any debris.
We have finally collected enough to make our own candles.
The smell is amazing!
We were really thrilled to have a completely capped super ready to harvest recently. I was especially excited as I was eager to try out my birthday present – an extractor!
The wax cappings have to be scraped away before loading the frames into the extractor.
Look at those golden droplets flying out of the wax combs.
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Running the honey out of the extractor, into the filter. Once the honey had been filtered we left it to settle before bottling it.
The finished product.
We’ve had some fun designing labels. A came up with a couple of her own designs.
She was feeling enterprising, so set up a little stall on our drive. Of course the honey with her labels outsold mine!
It is useful to have at least two colonies of bees – one can be used to “help” the other if there are any problems. Once we had got our new bees settled this spring I had my eyes out for another colony. I was very excited to hear about a swarm in Kentish Town late one night that needed collection. I kept my fingers crossed that they would stay put over night and went down there at the crack of dawn to see if I could retrieve them.
They were still there – tightly clustered about 8 feet up in a tree.
After a bit of ladder climbing and tree shaking most of them were happily getting into the nuc. Later, after dark I went back to pick up the nuc. There weren’t any bees about then, but when I put my ear to the box I could hear a reassuring buzz.
Since then the colony has built up steadily, and has recently given us our first capped honey of the season.
Unfortunately our single colony of bees didn’t survive the 2013/2014 winter. This spring we bought an over wintered nuc from Paynes Bee Farm to replace them. They have done really well so far this year, expanding rapidly and are now packing honey into the supers.
Here is a short film of them arriving home after a slightly nerve wracking car journey around London. The mesh lid is a special travelling lid to the nuc box to reduce the chance of the bees overheating.