August: Harvest day

Today is the day!!

A whole year's patient bee keeping comes to a joyful conclusion; Today is harvest day.
Its an "all hands on deck" kind of a day and with 21 supers out on the hives in the apiary there was a need for military precision and efficiency to getting them all off the hives and into the extraction room without upsetting the bees too much!!

Some of the frames needed to be carefully examined to ensure 80% of the honey containing cells were capped...

 

 





Good job we had the refractometer on hand in case expert adjudication was needed....

So the process is simple and methodical...Take the frames one at a time from the hives, brush off the bees and get the frames into the spare super box, under the lid, without any lurking bees....

 

A final surge of multitasking (before the rain came) and we had the largest hive "K" on its way to the box as well....

 

 

 

Its been a while since "K" has been this small....

It took nearly 2 hours, but the old adage of "many hands making light work" is absolutely true....we now have 17 supers of honey waiting patiently to be extracted.  Are we happy about that?  I think a quick look at our trainees faces answer that question....

 

 

Queen Rearing Workshop

Our Queen Rearing Project at the Apiary has gone from strength to strength in recent years.  Many new and indeed experienced bee keepers have benefited from being able to buy nucleus colonies with a known provenance from experienced bee keepers who have selected and deliberately bred Queens from gentle but industrious stocks.

"How do they do it?", we all wanted to know...
"We'll create a workshop to show you", they said....and promptly  joined forces with our wood working guru to not only tell us about the Morris board method of Queen rearing, but also show us how to make one for ourselves...

It was too good an opportunity to miss.....we even sold some tickets to other bee keepers from across Surrey and London...

The secret is all in the modified brood box and Morris board....

 

 The picture below shows the bees 'crowding' the two chambers after access to the queen below was 'shut off'.  Its all about convincing the bees the queen has gone and in their over crowded modified chamber they start to create a new queen...

Its not something you can see much of from a distance...

What a good job there was plenty of space for everyone to get in close and see the inner workings of the modified box...

And we can go in close for a frame by frame explanation....

 

Look ...Happy bees....

Everyone agreed it was an absolutely fascinating day and many bee keepers returned home determined to raise their own pedigree queens next year.

July: Open day

 The displays were made....

The exhibits laid out...

The beeswax and the wild flower meadow seeds were ready...

 

Some rather tetchy bees were persuaded into the observation hive...

The honey tasting table was loaded...

 

The bee friendly plant stall did brisk business...

 

We had all sorts of people come to see us...

 

Including the Mayor of Epsom...

And if we say so ourselves a rather good day (if sweltering hot!) was had by all.

Same time, same place next year?

June: Dodging downpours....

It all started off looking promising enough....

There was even a glimpse of sunshine between the clouds...

We got on with the tidying up ...ready for our open day on 12th July....

 

But then the down pour came...

So we retreated inside to the workshop and in that ever -optimistic manner of bee keepers the world over made up some more frames for supers.  Five men and four hammers...it was an object lesson in coordinated team work!!

We got there in the end....

Now we can relax in the doorway, dream of sunny days and nectar flows ahead an watch the raindrops splash!!