Catching a Buzz

I have a beehive although I know nothing about bees or beekeeping.

Everything I know on the subject I learned here.

This spring when it warmed up I checked the hive and there was a nice bunch of surplus honey. Beekeeping for Dummies and most other sources say you harvest honey in the late summer or early fall when there’s plenty of pollen and the bees have filled the hive. But a lot of these sources also say you should feed your bees a sugar syrup solution in the late fall and early spring, because you may not have left enough honey to get them through the winter until the plants start to flower in the spring.

Another source I read said you should harvest honey in the spring. What is left in the hive in the spring is surplus that the bees didn’t need. That way you can avoid feeding them sugar water, which you’d have to think isn’t any better for a bee than it is for us.

Here’s my honey super full of frames of honey.

If you know more about beekeeping than I do, you’ll instantly see my mistake. All sources say not to harvest your honey outside because bees will be attracted to the honey and you’ll soon be engulfed in clouds of bees. That didn’t happen to me. There were a few bees about, but not enough to be a distraction.

Here’s two frames of honey ready to be extracted. If you look closely you’ll see there are empty cells, they’re not entirely full of honey. The bees may not have filled them up all the way last year, or they may have eaten part of it.

Mom and Dad got me a honey extractor for Christmas last year.

You put the honey frames in the extractor. The extractor has a crank on it and you crank like crazy and the honey is flung out onto the sides of the extractor. It runs down the sides and then you drain and strain it.

There’s lots of bits of wax, dead bees, and assorted debris in the extractor when you get done. I strained it once coming out of the extractor, and I’ll strain it again through cheesecloth to get it clean.

After draining the honey out, the extractor is quite the mess, sticky with honey, wax, bee carcasses, and unidentified gunk. I was considering how to sneak it into the shower without Debbie noticing to rinse it out, when I thought to check the splendid source of all knowledge; Beekeeping for Dummies. Sure enough, it came to the rescue. The author said to just put the extractor near your hive and the bees would come and clean it all up.

I already had enough of a mess of wax and honey all over the kitchen, so I thought it was worth a try. Sure enough, 24 hours later the extractor is almost spotless.

I haven’t weighed the bounty yet, but it feels like I have 10+ pounds of honey, and a couple of pounds of beeswax. Now what to do with the honey… I’m thinking mead!