I’m trying not to write about my bees at the moment, after all this is a gardening blog and apparently I’m obsessed. But the truth is my bees are part of my garden in every sense and have already been integrated into my daily regime. I’ve got over my sting.
Turns out what I thought was half a dose was the full amount and what I thought was the sting hanging out of the bee’s backside was more likely to be its intestines, which is why it dies after stinging, poor thing.
This means that the stinger was still in my head, pumping venom and it’s pretty amazing that I didn’t get stung again by the other bees, because the sting also emits an attack pheromone that tells the other bees to attack whatever it is that the first bee has stung, which is why someone can get stung a few times by several bees.
Anyway, I digress.
My conventional beekeeping mentor has been harvesting her honey, something I will not be doing this year, as my bees need every drop to get them through the winter.
The number of people that don’t know that the honey is the bees’ winter stores amazes me. Beekeepers take what they believe to be the excess but also feed their bees with a sugar solution as a replacement. I don’t want to do that as I believe that the honey is better for them and contains what they need to keep them healthy, so my plan is to only take a small amount of honey in the spring, if there is some left after the winter and probably not next spring.
So I went to help spin the honey from the frames belonging to my conventional beekeeping mentor. A messy business involving cutting off the wax caps that cover the combs, placing the frames inside a very expensive centrifuge, spinning them, turning them round, spinning again, draining off the honey, and straining it into buckets.
The result was a delicious, but sticky sweet mess that took all afternoon. It’s also something I won’t have to do with any honey harvested from my hive. All I need to do is to take one bar and comb out of the hive. Cut it into chunks and use it as honeycomb honey fresh from the hive. Honey doesn’t go off. The comb from my hive is all beemade, and although I can’t claim it is organic, as far as I am concerned it will be as good as, and as I don’t plan to sell it anyway it doesn’t matter.
And that’s the other thing; honeycomb honey has a much higher commercial value that runny honey, so why go to all that bother??
Fascinating. I will definitely be sticking to my back garden beekeeping methods and I will not be investing hundreds of pounds in complicated, food standard honey harvesting systems.
