Bee-keeping and Honey Harvesting by Michelle Styles

As regular  readers of this blog will know, I keep bees. It started as my husband's project back in 2000. It became mine. And the garden became better for it. When momentous things happen, I go and tell the bees. It is a legend but somehow it feels right. Bees help maintain the integrity of the garden. We were without bees for a few years and it didn't feel right. This is the first year, we have harvested honey since 2009.
My husband does the hard physical stuff like making the frames. Me and hammers do not necessarily get on. (This was a big disappointment to my  paternal grandmother who thought all women should be proficient with tools)

One of the bee hives in my garden

 I do other things like harvesting the honey and inspecting the bees. We sometimes argue over other bits as there is no real right way to do certain things. My husband is certain that his is the correct way. I know mine is. In bee-keeping there are a lot of correct ways. The trick like writing a novel is to find the correct way for you.
Early September is the end of the bee year. It is about taking the honey off the hives, giving them their anti varroa medication and generally getting them ready for winter. As the weather turns colder, the queen lays less and the brood nest contracts. They need to have enough stores to see them through the winter. This is where late flowering plants such as ivy, Michaelmas daisies and others come to the fore.

The honey comb on the super ready to spin

When the weather turns bitter, the bees don't fly, they stay in a bee ball, effectively hibernating. They do need some stores though. This is why it is important to take off the honey early enough to give them time to rebuild. Some bee-keepers if they feel the hive hasn't built up enough stores, then feed a solution of sugar-water. I prefer not to feed in the autumn but wait and see if they need fondant (a sugar paste) in late January. Then as the weather grows warmer, the queen kicks into lay and the whole cycle starts over again. Provided you have got them through the winter. Small colonies can get too cold. There might not be enough food or mice might get in (this happened once and all the bees died)
Before harvesting the honey, I put Porter bee escapes in. This allows the bees to exit the supers where the honey is store but they are prevented from returning. And then very early in the morning before the bees are flying, I go and retrieve the supers which in theory are bee-free. If they are not bee-free, it make things a bit exciting as bees dislike anything robbing their honey.
When harvesting the honey, the wax covering the honey is removed so that the frames can be spun. After allowing the cappings to drain for a few days, I feed the remaining honey back to the bees.

Freshly spun honey being filtered

This helps give them enough food..
The summer was poor in Northumberland this year so from 3 hives we got about 25 lbs of honey. In good years, we can get 100 lbs. But the taste of honey from your own hives is something extraordinary. Honey gets everywhere when you are extracting the honey from the comb. And it is worth sampling. Every year depending on the pollen and nectar mix, the honey is a slightly different shade. Heather honey is very caramel. This year we didn't have much heather honey. Instead the honey was a pale straw like colour and very runny which makes for easy extraction. Heather honey is a pain. It sets like jelly and refuses to move.
After being spun and filtered (to remove dead bees etc), the honey is bottled. Commercial honey is often ultra-heat treated. This removes all the antibiotics and pollen, rendering it little better than sugar water. One reason the big commercial companies do the ultra-heat treatment is that it makes the honey stay runny. If you do get crystalised honey, you can rapidly make it liquid again by gently re-heating. I do this on the back of the Aga but putting the jar in boiling water will do the trick.
The reason for medicating the bees after taking off the honey is the varroa mite which has weakened a number of colonies over the years and is why there are so few wild honeybees left in the UK.

My cat inspecting some of this year's jars

In a few weeks time I will put the mouse guards on. Once the mouse guards go on, it is hard for the bees to clean the hive. But they need to be on before the bees hibernate. Mice will not go into a hive while the bees are awake and flying. Bees do not hesitate to sting if they feel any creature threatens their honey supply.
So my fingers are crossed that this honey is the beginning of many more years of taking the honey. Bee-keeping is a fascinating hobby and I would urge anyone who is interested to get in touch with their local beekeeping association and take a class. The world needs more beekeepers because without bees, the world as we know it can not survive.

When not beekeeping, Michelle Styles writes warm, witty and intimate historical romances in a wide range of time periods. Her most recent Summer of the Viking was published in June 2015. You can learn  more about Michelle on www.michellestyles.co.uk

Michelle Styles: Bee Aware

Michelle Styles explains the importance of bees and why we individually need to do more to help them.

Bees are a theme through out man’s creative endeavours reaching back to the beginnings of time. One of the first paintings ever discovered was of a man gathering honey. Bees have been all around humans ever since, but generally quietly working in the background.

Think of bees and mostly you think of honey or possibly wax (besides candles, beeswax is used in many cosmetics). Honey is proving more and more useful in the fight against disease as it does have certain antibacterial properties. While both of these products are excellent, they are hardly life-changing. Bees actually have a much more important role to play.   Bees are responsible for much of the pollination of our food stuff, particularly fruit. Life on this planet would be very different if the bees were not there to do their job.

 HOWEVER, the bee population has declined significantly in recent years (along with the butterfly population).  One reason has been loss of habitat and another reason has been the chemicals we spray on plants, in particular a group of chemicals called neonicatiniods (neonics for short). They have been implicated in the decline of bees and butterflies.  Gardeners may think they are just killing pests, but they are killing the beneficial insects as well. It is very easy to fall for the need to have the roses looking good without any thought to what is actually happening to the planet. Equally it is easy to plant exotic flowers which are sterile hybrids. If a flower is sterile, there is no food for the bees. Without food, bees starve.

Without bees, we starve.

So what can the average person do? What can one person do?

Simple Actions to help save bees (and butterflies)

First  consider the use of chemicals in your garden. Read the labels and refuse to use  any containing  acetamirid, clothianidin, dinotefuran, imidacloprid  or thiamethoxam. A recent study from Harvard showed that these chemicals do harm bees. Monsanto's roundup has been implicated in the disappearance of the Monarch butterfly. The website beeaction.org has a list of US popular brands which contain these chemicals. Let your hardware or gardening centre know that stocking products that contain neonics means they are contributing to the decline in the bee population. Beeaction.org has a campaign to get Ace Hardware and True Value to stop stocking these products.

Second consider planting bee friendly plants, rather than sterile hybrids. Bee friendly plants set seed.  One plant that is often overlooked is the  fuchsia in lists about what to plant for bees. A little fuchsia nectar adds a certain depth to honey – one of the premiere beekeepers in the UK told me this when I was starting out beekeeping and I have no reason to doubt her word. Fuchsias, particularly hardy fuchsias, are great plants for bees. Sunflowers, penstemons, cone flowers, sweet peas, alliums, wild roses (the kind that give rose hips) are also great. Butterflies love buddleia  and lilacs. Herbs such as thyme, rosemary or chive are also good with the added bonus that you can use them in the kitchen. Fruit trees such as apple, pear or cherry (not ornamental)  Honeysuckle however is not useful to bees, despite its name. It is pollinated by moths and butterflies.  You want flowers, rather than ever greens. So consider have a mixed border. Swathes of closely trimmed green grass is not helpful in the least. Clover though is a good bee plant when it flowers. When beneficial insects thrive in gardens, gardens thrive.

Third try to buy raw or local honey. Most of the honey you buy in the big supermarket is ultra heat treated. This is often little better than sugar water. Ultra heat treatment preserves the honey but at the expense of the pollens and other antibacterial qualities. Local raw honey can help fight against allergies and can help to keep colds at bay.  Supporting your local beekeeper means that bees are more likely to be in your area. A healthy bee population means more flowers and fruit in your garden as plants need to be pollinated. And as the population of wild bees (including bumblebees) decreases, we need the domesticated honeybee more than ever.

Finally consider keeping bees. Beekeeping was traditionally done by men.  Among the reason they gave were that women were unclean and therefore unfit to collect the pure wax that was in church candles. For many years they didn’t realise that bee hives were 90% female.  Women can keep bees  just as well as men. There can be some lifting involved when you are removing supers but nothing that is heavier than say lifting a large sack of dog food.  Hives, if properly sited do not cause any trouble. The bees get on with their thing and you look at them about once a week. There is a sort relaxing pleasure looking after  bees. You have to slow down. At various times of the year, you take the honey harvest. Some beekeeping associations run schemes where they match people who want to keep bees but have no space with people who have space but don’t want to fiddle about with hives etc. Generally the beekeeper pays in honey.

If lots of people take  little pieces of action, positive change can come about. We need bees. Our planet needs bees. Albert Einstein predicted without bees, our planet would be dead within four years. For more information about what you can do visit www.beeaction.org

Michelle Styles writes warm, witty and intimate historical romances in a wide range of time periods. Her latest Summer of the Vikings was published in June 2015. You can read more about Michelle and her books on www.michellestyles.co.uk  She has kept bees since 2000.