Our second honey harvest

We took advantage of a rare fine day this week to harvest honey from our remaining hives.

Looking left to right in the photo ABOVE we have hives 1-4. Numbering hives and keeping good records of hive health and vitality and harvest is important.

Hive 1 showed a lot of activity, the bees were fiesty, very active and noisy. We harvested four frames from that hive and extracted probably around eight kgs of honey.

While we had the hives open we checked the small hive beetle traps and topped them up with Diatemaceous Earth. We saw a few beetles but the traps seem to be keeping them in check. We also cleaned up the hives as best we could removing built up wax on the tops of frames using a new paint scraper bought for the job.

You can see the hive activity in the image below and you can see the black trap between the frames to the right of the box.

We also took four frames from Hive 2, which in contrast was quiet, happy and cooperative, but still very strong with loaded frames heavy with honey. You need to be pretty fit and strong to keep bees, it's heavy work. We harvest probably 12kgs of honey from those four frames. Giving us a total of 20.5kg from one harvest of two hives.

ABOVE - here is our capping set up - frames are rested on the wooden bar across the top (as you can see in the photo BELOW) - and using a hot knife, the caps are removed to allow the honey to flow.

You can also see in the image BELOW that almost all of that frame is capped. Any frame with three quarters or more of the cells capped can be taken for harvesting. You can also see how the frame rests on a screw on that wooden board allowing you to keep it in place using just a couple of fingers while you use the hot knife to take those caps off.

We are only taking four frames from each because we don't want to strip the hive of honey - its the bees' food - and we need to keep the frames in even numbers as our extractor BELOW needs two frames at a time to work.

The extractor worked really well, but doing it by hand is hard work.

Today we went to our first meeting of the Sunshine Coast Beekeepers Association - which is a really well attended vibrant group by the way - and we saw one of these extractors set up with a motor - great idea!

And here is our bounty - 20.5kg of honey settling for a few days before bottling up.

We will endevour to set up a regular maintainence program for our hives and keep an eye on them.

Cheers,

Sonya

The Novice Beekeeper

Honey Harvest

We managed to find some fine weather between torrential rain and cyclones to harvest the honey from one of our hives. We took four frames from the hive and brought them to our honey house to extract the golden honey.

It was wonderful to be able to see our own home grown honey coming off the frames and into the extractor.

We then packaged it all up in shiny glass jars, added some labels and we're ready for our first local markets.

When we get another opportunity, we'll get out there and do the rest of the hives, but in the meantime we have our own honey in the kitchen and plenty to give as gifts to friends to celebrate our first batch.

Cheers,

Sonya

The Novice Beekeeper

A poem or two while we wait for the rain to stop...

The Bee Meeting by Sylvia Plath

Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the
villagers-----
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.
In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,
And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.

I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?
Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,
Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.
Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.
Thev will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.

Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?
Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?
Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors,
Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits.
Their smiles and their voices are changing. I am led through a beanfield.

Strips of tinfoil winking like people,
Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers,
Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts.
Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?
No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible.

Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat
And a black veil that molds to my face, they are making me one of them.
They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.
Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?
The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children.

Is it some operation that is taking place?
It is the surgeon my neighbors are waiting for,
This apparition in a green helmet,
Shining gloves and white suit.
Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?

I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me
With its yellow purses, its spiky armory.
I could not run without having to run forever.
The white hive is snug as a virgin,
Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.

Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove.
The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.
Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.
If I stand very still, they will think I am cow-parsley,
A gullible head untouched by their animosity,

Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.
The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.
Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.
She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.
While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins

Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,
A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight,
The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.
The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.
The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?

I am exhausted, I am exhausted -
Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
I am the magician's girl who does not flinch.
The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.
Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished,
why am I cold.


and...

The Arrival of the Bee Box by Sylvia Plath

I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.



The Apprentice Beekeeper

the bees are here!

We picked up our four new beehives last night!

Finally we have bees - and very (very!) soon we'll have our first harvest of honey.

It was quite an event picking them up - we packed our beekeeping suits, gloves and boots - bought plenty of straps and emlocks for the hives.

We charged the torches and headed off at 4.30pm. We arrived and helped wrap the straps around the hives, we waited until just on dusk and then the owner tacked in a block of wood over the hive entrance to lock them in for the trip home.

We packed up the trailer with four hives and we packed four wooden stands, two honey storage buckets and boards for the tops of the hives in the car.

Strapped in tightly so they wouldn't move, we headed off to try to get home while there was still a little light left.

I had also copied the phone numbers from the DPI Queensland site of local beekeepers who will come out and help if you break down or heaven forbid have an accident while transporting bees.

I was really pleased to see that at the place where we picked the hives up from that they had a native bee hive in among the European bee hives - and had done so since 1987! So they can co-exist - which was great to see as I was a little worried about our native bees being pushed out or attacked by the honey bees.

Anyway, we arrived home after a slow trip and suited up, lit the smoker and started unloading them. It took a couple of hours to do - each hive had to be strapped onto a sack truck and carefully transported cross country to the bee pad my husband had built for them.

They were very, very heavy - already loaded with honey so we'll be harvesting that soon.

We finally got back inside at 8.30pm, exhausted I must admit. I always find it stressful to move things like that - I worry about everything that could go wrong, but with some good planning (and emergency phone numbers in my pocket) we were fine and it all went well.

Although it was hard heavy work and had to be done by torchlight.

My husband only suffered one sting (on his hand) - which I thought was very good given we are absolute novices, it was dark, there were four hives and we had sweat running into our eyes within our suits - don't get me wrong, the suits we have are excellent and I've highly recommend them.

So our beekeeping adventures have begun in earnest. I'll keep you posted on our progress.

Cheers,

Sonya

Bees are coming!!

Well [finally] our bee hives are on their way - just waiting on time and weather now.

We were lucky enough to hear about some complete hives being sold by a local beekeeper who is reducing his hive numbers.

We've prepared a place for them in the garden, away from traffic areas and with morning sun.

And very soon I'll be posting images of our own hives in our own backyard.

I can't wait.

cheers,

Sonya

The Novice Beekeeper

Another day spent learning about beekeeping

Yesterday was spent doing some very hands on learning about beekeeping. My husband and I got up early and headed out to meet with the beekeeper and we were straight into it spending the day checking the hives and harvesting honey.

We got there early because it was going to be a very hot day with a storm predicted for the afternoon (this is mid-summer in the subtropics) and we needed to tend to the bees well before that started to impact on them. Apparently bees get cranky when storms are coming and we didn't want to be disturbing bees when they were cranky.

We suited and gloved up, got the smoker going, got all the tools and spare hive pieces ready just in case and headed out. (Can you spot the Queen in the photo above?)

We smoked the hives, carefully removed the lids, checked the small hive beetle traps, killed any live beetles we saw and gently lifted the frames to see what was happening - was there enough honey to harvest or not?

You can see in the image above that there are no capped cells - they are all open. So this frame was left in the hive.

BELOW - you can see in the frame below that some of them are capped - when about half are capped, they were removed from the hive, the bees gently brushed off of them and then put in a spare super (the top box of a bee hive) which was in a wheelbarrow with a lid put on them to keep the bees out of them ready to head to go to the honey house to extract the honey.

We were shown how to methodically number the frames to ensure they are returned to the same hives, systems are important in beekeeping, recording honey flow, strength of the hives (population numbers and bee-attitudes) what's going on with broods, queens, pests and bee-activity in general. It helps you manage your hives and also lets you know what to expect when you crack open that particular hive lid.

ABOVE - The landing platform for the bees to access the hive and launch themselves from in the search for honey.

A frame after it has had the caps removed. You can see (and you could smell) the golden honey within.

The uncapped frames are then placed in an extractor where centrifugal forces draw the honey from the cells. This was an electric four frame extractor - we have a hand driven two frame one for our hives when we get them. We bought it at a 'tip shop' from one of the rubbish dumps here.

And there it is - the beautiful sweet golden honey, ready for straining and bottling. No heating, no processing, just pure honey straight from the bees.

The cappings are also collected and these are melted down to produce wax for cosmetics, candle making and for other goodies like furniture polish.

We also learnt how to put our nucleus hive together (it arrived in a flat pack with no instructions - nothing like a challenge!), so now we'll assemble this, paint it, choose the perfect place to locate it in the garden, prepare the site and set it up for it's new Queen and her colony.

It was a bit of a puzzle when it arrived and we had an idea of how it might go together, but we weren't sure. On the day we do assemble it, I'll take lots of photos and post them here in case anyone else has the same problem we had.

We'll get our new bees around October, so in the meantime, we'll keep learning as much as we can about beekeeping, how to do it properly, how to really care for the bees and how to do it all organically and wholistically.

There is a lot to learn, but if we can get a quiet hive that will be tolerant of a couple of learners we should be okay.

We'll also work on creating a bee fodder calendar to ensure we have food for them year round on our block.

Cheers,

Sonya

The Apprentice Beekeeper

Australian Native Stingless Bees

Well, it's not entirely what we orginally planned... although we've always wanted to get some Australian Native Stingless bees... we just thought we'd get our European Honey Bees first.

Now I have it on good authority that both will live happily in our garden - provided there is enough food for them - which I'm sure there is. And I've already observed both native and introduced bees co-habitating and co-feeding on our vegetable, herb and flower crops.

So introducing The Trigs - Trigona carbonaria - native stingless bees.

We picked them up late in the evening and sealed the hole with some gauze for the trip home.

We fitted the hive to a pre-prepared star picket with a bracket attached - and in the morning we removed the gauze and they took off and spent the day working - settling in very nicely.

We've positioned their hive under a mango tree where it will get morning sun, but good protection from afternoon sun.

Like with honey bees, keeping the hive cool is a priority. And, like honey bees they don't like being moved, so put them in the right place first time.

Here is a close of up of their tiny entrance door to their hive. They are only the size of ants - tiny.

Another shot of them hard at work.

They quickly made themselves at home.

Our hive is an OATH design - an Original Australian Trigona Hive. It is able to be split too, so this hive can be propagated.

We look forward to learning more about these interesting little creatures and about bees in general. They are quite fascinating to watch and I can much time spent just watching and observing and trying to work out what it is they are doing.

Cheers,

Sonya