Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the queen excluder and move up to the top super to unload their honey. With a hole in
the super they can go straight to the storage area, unload and return to the field. Some
beekeepers who don't want holes in the woodwork stagger the supers slightly so that the
bees can enter the top super immediately upon return.
If you have only a couple or so of colonies, it is easy to experiment with these ideas to
gain experience of your bees during this heavy workload time.
Let's assume that your colonies are well and packing in the honey and that you have
given your bees more boxes in which to store honey. (Problems that may, and probably
will, arise are dealt with in the next chapter.)
Honey can be harvested as the season progresses or at the end of the season. This
decision is usually based on the existence of the honey flows in the area. For example, if
you have an early flow of, say, dandelion and then a later flow of thistle, you may wish to
sell the two honeys separately. If you are not bothered, then you can let the honey build
up in the hives and extract the lot in one go.
Knowing when to harvest
Honey can be extracted when it has been capped over by the bees on the comb. At
this stage, the honey will have been 'matured' by the bees, sealed up and is ready to eat.
Often, when you want to remove the honey, not all will have been sealed. I always use
a rule of thumb here: if three quarters of the honey is sealed, I am happy to remove it
from the hive. This is an important point. If you extract honey that has not been sealed,
the water content will inevitably be too high, and the honey will ferment in storage and
explode if sealed in a jar or tank. It will also taste foul if this happens. You must remove
honey, therefore, only if the majority of it has been sealed over by the bees.
Equipment for honey extraction
Later in this chapter we discuss analysing your honey, and you will see from this the
various factors that go into producing a good jar of honey. But before you think of
