All tucked up

Well the bees are nearly all tucked up for the winter.  We have finished feeding now and we just
have to remove the reduced entrance blocks (which stops the wasps getting in) and put the mouseguard
over the entrances instead.  Apparently mice like spending the winter in beehives, its warm and cosy and there is food!  We have already wrapped the hives up in plastic to prevent unwanted attention from woodpeckers. So fingers crossed that they get through the winter in good shape.

Extracting the honey

Finally we got around to extracting our honey.  First you have to uncap the honeycomb here I am having a go with an airgun to melt the wax but on balance I think slicing it off with a bread knife was more effective.   Suzanne (my beekeeping partner in crime) Greg (her son who is doing beekeeping for his Duke of Edinburgh award) and my son Sam are operating the extractor.  You can see how the frames fit into the extractor in the next picture and finally empting the honey out of the extractor into our honey ripener (plastic bucket).  It was a very sticky business and we had lots of wasps for company.  I think the boys enjoyed the wasps getting zapped by the insect machine more than extracting the honey.  We had a great and productive morning.

The warming cupboard

So today I took our two supers (boxes with 10 frames of honeycomb each) to the extracting unit to put them in the warming cupboard so they will be ready for tomorrow morning when we extract the honey.

I also checked on the bees today.  I cleaned off the dead bees from the garden hive and took the empty feeder away.  The temple hive still have syrup in their feeder and the hive is feeling alot heavier so I left them alone.

Feeding the bees

I think I was supposed to stop feeding the bees by the second week of October - because there won't be enough time for them to drive the excess moisture off the honey before capping it over with a fine layer of wax.  Honey that is too watery can ferment and give the bees indigestion and tummy ache.
 But....
The hive that came back from the heather (We're calling it the Temple hive) feels too light and I am worried that they will not have enough to eat during the winter.   You have to grasp the hive and lift it slightly to work out how heavy it feels and therefore gauge how much food the bees have - its called hefting (not sure of my spelling though).

My other worry is that the Garden hive (so called because that was the colony that stayed in the garden) has a lot of dead bees on the crown board around the contact feeder - although I have left a space so that they can get back into the hive.  The amount of dead bees seems to grow everytime I go down there.  This hive feels good and heavy but I'm still worried about all the dead bees.  If it was because of robbing (bees rob each others hive and die trying to defend their supplies) then you would expect the other hive to feel heavier than this one.  Hhmmm.....

How it all started....

So the plan for this blog is to chart and follow my progress as a fledgling bee keeper.  

So this is how it all started - a cast swarm in Warwickshire that became our bees.  First we needed to be sure that the queen had mated (a cast is a swarm with an young unmated queen).  At this stage we didn't even have a hive to put them in...

The swarm went into our mentors garden to make sure that the queen got mated and then a couple of weeks later they arrived at the back of our garden.