Honey collection

Andrew working his way through the second honey super.
Excitingly, all the frames are capped!

Although we have over twenty hives in various locations around Canterbury, one in particular is my favourite and has been claimed as Mia's personal hive. The queen is named for my ex-boss, Benesia and is one of the healthiest, if not the healthiest, of all our hives.

Queen Benesia and her colony is one of two hives that are sited just outside our bedroom window and many an hour has been occupied by watching the bees busily working while we eat breakfast in bed.

One of the capped honey frames before the bees are brushed
off. The whitish colour is the wax that covers each full cell to
keep the honey in.

As an urban hive, the honey flow is both long and very fruitful with magnolia and cherry blossoms in early spring to daffodils then roses as we head into summer. Even in late autumn and early winter there is still a wide range of blossoms to occupy the bees.

It's important therefore to harvest the honey from the hive a couple of times a year. Today, all three honey boxes were full to bursting with only one frame out of twenty-seven that wasn't fully capped. Thankfully we'd already extracted honey from some of the hives located in Lincoln. The "wets", frames from which honey has already been extracted, were switched with the boxes we took off the hive today. The bees will clean up the emptied frames and reuse the cells for their honey production and storage.

Before collecting the honey.

The hive beside her, Queen Melissa, swarmed back in October. As a newly established colony they're still building up the honey store and there were no frames quite ready to take off today.

Benesia's hive, on the right of the photos, had one full height and one three quarter height brood boxes each with ten frames where the queen can lay eggs. It was topped with three full-height supers each with nine frames.

After collecting the honey.
We added one more honey
super after this photo was taken.

Once finished collecting the honey we loaded one full height and one three quarter height wet supers to replace the honey boxes. After I took the post collection photo we decided to add another full height super. This is to keep the bees busy for the next few months before we carry out autumn inspection, treatment and preparations for wintering over.

Twenty-six frames of honey will return us around 65 kilograms of honey. Not bad for one hive!

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