Creaming Honey

As I suspected, the honey I took off in May and June was mostly from Oil Seed Rape which crystallises quickly.  After a couple of months it was pretty much rock solid and very gritty to taste.  

Solid OSR Honey

So I decided to have a go at creaming which means beating it until the crystals break apart rather than being locked together, giving it a much smoother consistency.

From Ebay I bought a heavy duty drill attachment “paddler” (an interesting google search) and set to.  First off, you have to warm the honey gently – until it’s just soft enough to get the paddler in rather than completely runny.  Unfortunately I don’t have a proper honey warming cabinet so just stuck the buckets in a hot car for a couple of hours which seemed to work perfectly!

The Smoking Drill with Paddler attachment 

Then get paddling.  This was quite a challenge, and at first the bucket flew across the floor with the drill motion.  It’s very hard work to keep the bucket still and hold the drill.  My drill is pretty ancient and after just a couple of minutes was billowing smoke!  I had to keep letting it cool down between beatings, although it only needed about five minutes or so in total.

Getting Smoother

The honey is now a lovely pale colour and much more pleasant consistency – almost like double cream although still with crystals.  I’ve heard about someone who markets this as “crystal honey” so may adjust my labels to make the grittiness sound more appealing!

Bottled up ready for labelling

Swarm Livens up Abingdon Barbecue!

My friend Virginia phoned on Sunday evening to say she’d spotted a swarm on the communal green outside her house.  When I got there I found a group of residents enjoying a barbecue just a few yards from a lovely little swarm about 8 foot up in a tree.

This was the first outing for my super new skep – no more floppy cardboard boxes for me.  It worked beautifully too; I sent Ian up the ladder and he shook the bulk of the swarm into the skep which we put onto a sheet on the ground.  

Quite a bunch of stragglers remained in the tree so I had to use a floppy cardboard box (doh!) to scoop in this lot and put them into the skep with the others.  It was about 8pm by now but there were a lot of flyers still so we left the bees and the barbecuers to settle down.
  

Bees around the skep entrance exposing Nasanov glands

and fanning to encourage other bees into their new home

All was quiet on our return so we tied up the sheet around the skep and took the bees off to Burcot.  I thought my house was too close to the swarm site and they may drift back.  The idea is to bring them back to Abingdon in a couple of weeks.   I ran them into my polystyrene nuc. box, but it was pretty dark by then so we didn’t spot the queen.

Bees running into polystyrene nuc. box

The barbecue party seemed keen for me to keep a hive on their communal green area – it’s a lovely field in the centre of a big residential lovely spot with no public access so could be really nice.  Not sure if I could manage three apiary sites time-wise though at the moment, so this lot will probably be coming to join the other two hives in my garden.

First Honey from Burcot Bees

After all the cold wet weather this spring, followed by sudden swarming problems when the weather changed I have been feeling a bit stressed out by my bees this year – it certainly has been a lot more challenging than last year when I just had my little nuc. to deal with.

But this lovely hot spell has seen the bees inundated with a fabulous flow of nectar; the hives are all full of stores and the honey supers have been filling rapidly.   This is particularly so in the Burcot hive, which is a ridiculously strong colony since the swarm which left it went back to re-join the others.   Not only do the bees here benefit from the village gardens, they are only about 200 metres from the River Thames and all the lovely trees and wild flowers along its banks.  There is also farmland surrounding the village with fields of oilseed rape also just a couple of hundred metres away which is still in flower.

Yesterday I took off the first super full of big fat frames of Burcot honey!

Lovely fat frames

The honey is a lovely pale colour with a delicate taste.  I am assuming it contains a high proportion of oilseed rape nectar which is prone to crystallising quickly and solidly so we put it in buckets to allow the natural crystallisation to take place before we process it to make it more palatable – I think this involves gentle heating and “creaming” which is pretty much mashing/mixing until you get a soft-set type of honey. 

Uncapping the honey enabling it to spin out

Liquid gold!

I did jar up a couple of samples – including one for a boy at the school where I work who is suffering horribly with hayfever.  He lives in Burcot and I’ve read that consuming unheated, coarsely filtered honey containing pollen grains daily can desensitise hayfever suffers to the effects of the pollen (see this article from The Telegraph).  I think you should ideally begin using it before the hayfever season starts to build up resistance.  I’m not sure there’s any firm evidence for this, but it certainly won’t hurt (plus my honey is DELICIOUS!) 

Burcot Bee Bother

The colony at Mum's in Burcot has been building up beautifully and has one super pretty much full of honey but having found some queen cells last week I realised swarm prevention was urgently needed so on Friday 11^th May I performed another text book artificial swarm - or so I thought.  Lack of equipment meant I had to use my smart new polystyrene nuc. box to put the queen into which in hindsight may have been a bit small.   

Two days later I popped in to check on them – parking my car next to a massive swarm hanging about 6 foot up in a tree!  

Lovely calm swarm

Yet again my swarm prevention had failed!  They were very calm and easy to shake into a box and transfer into a proper brood box – this time with a queen excluder on the bottom to stop her from clearing off again.  

Sadly, I was wrong yet again as a couple of days later they were off again, this time just swirling around without settling.  Then the weather began to change for the worse – wind and a clap of thunder.  The bees shot back down into the hive – but unfortunately the wrong one!  Instead of heading for their nice new empty hive they went back into the over-crowded original hive.   Driving hail meant I had to abandon any rescue operation so next day I went into the hive to try to figure out what was going on.  

I couldn't find a queen so decided to take out three frames of brood including a queen cell and knock out all other queen cells in the hive in case there was a queen somewhere who might swarm again.  Taking out three frames of brood and bees would also alleviate the overcrowding slightly.  I put these into a nuc. box and took them back to Abingdon.  If the big Burcot colony turns out to be queenless then I'd hopefully produce a back up queen from the queen cell in this new nuc.  

I might be useless at preventing my bees from swarming but I’m getting really good at swarm collecting with all this practise!

Swarm Prevention: How NOT to do it!

Swarming season started early this year – I presume because of that lovely warm weather we had back in March which prompted the bees to breed early. 

Following the artificial swarm I did on my colony (see last entry) the little devils swarmed anyway – I think I must have missed a queen cell on the frame I put into the new box with the queen.  Luckily they didn’t go far; just over the fence into David’s garden inside his raspberry nets where there was a cluster of bees less a foot off the ground and another bunch of stragglers perched on a sun-warmed brick on the ground.   

Swarm just inside David's raspberry netting

I didn’t have time to write it up here as my son’s wedding was just a few days after and quickly constructing a hive and frames was really the last thing I needed!  Fortunately I got the bees boxed up and took them over to Mum’s in Burcot, where they ran into the hive as good as gold.  

I managed to forget about bees for a few days and enjoy Joel's wedding!

At Joel's Wedding (20th April)

Early Artificial Swarm

After rain and hail this morning, it cleared up to quite warm sunshine this afternoon so at last I got a chance to properly inspect the bees for the first time this year.  I wish I’d done it during the warm spell a couple of weeks ago, I did have a quick peek then and they looked a bit crowded so I put a super on above a crownboard to give them a bit more room if they needed it.  Then the weather changed and I’ve been itching to have a proper look ever since.

Plenty to see when I did open them.  The first thing I noticed was that they’ve been building drone cells on the queen excluder – these all broke open when I took it off exposing the immature larvae.  Quite pleased to see that there was no varroa mite on them – they are usually found on drone larvae.  Fortunately this hive’s varroa count has always been very low so far.

Drone Graveyard

Inside the hive there was plenty of brood, looking to be in a nice normal pattern.  Unfortunately I found plenty of queen cells too, usually a sign that the bees are soon to swarm - which more usually happens in May or June!  The first one I spotted was open with a nice little fat grub surrounded by royal jelly.  I also found four sealed and two opened (although they were possibly ripped when I moved the frames).   I wasn’t really sure what to do as the bees usually swarm as soon as a queen cell is sealed (this happens eight days after the egg is laid).  I’m pretty sure they haven’t swarmed as the hive was very full of bees.  But with the terrible weather in the last week or so, they may have been delaying swarming until a nice day (like today!) 

Fortunately I found the queen.  I was tempted to mark her and clip her wings but with so many queen cells in evidence there was the possibility that this was a newly hatched queen who had not yet flown out to mate; if I clipped her wings she never would.

Spot the Queen?  In centre, spidery legs.

I decided that an artificial swarm asap would be my best bet.  I moved the hive a couple of feet to the side of its original position, putting a new hive containing ten new frames of foundation in its place.  Then I found the queen again and put her and the frame of brood she was on into the new hive, putting the super from the original hive on top.   Flying bees will return to the new empty hive with the old queen and (hopefully) crack on with drawing out the foundation.  Essentially it fools them into thinking they’ve swarmed and have to work on building a new home.    In the next few days, one of the queen cells in the old hive should hatch and mate and this can then be built up into a new colony.   I wasn’t sure whether I should knock a few of them out and just leave maybe the open larvae but decided to let the bees sort it out themselves.  

Frame with queen/brood in new hive with new frames

Spring Photos

The lovely sunshine over the last few days has enabled the bees to get out and about to enjoy the spring flowers.

Honeybee tucking into a Hyacinth

(I assume Hyacinth pollen is yellow from the pollen already on her legs)

 

Honeybee enjoying a crocus - a brighter yellow pollen

which gets dusted over quite a lot of the bee

Not just honeybees in evidence but also butterflies and some whopping great bumblees:

The hive was really busy yesterday with the bees bringing in lots pollen so I removed the mouseguard to give them easier access and to prevent it knocking the pollen off their legs.  I could see balls of it underneath the hive that had fallen through the varroa mesh floor of the hive - what a waste of all that work!

Great balls of Pollen!

One "mouseguard" still in place though - (although not very efficient!):