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.