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!

Maintaining hives is a lot of effort: making and repairing frames is a time-consuming activity and something which takes a lot of hours out of the year. Building and repairing honeycomb is even more effort for the bees with seven times the energy required to make wax than honey!

So it's sensible that when we extract honey we rarely slice up any honeycomb despite several of our family and friends asking if they can nab some. We prefer instead to return emptied honeycomb to the bees to reuse and recover any honey that hasn't been removed from the extraction process.

Occasionally little mistakes - such as leaving a 3/4 height frame in a full-height box - means that the bees make honeycomb without foundation board and we have to cut it away anyway. Friday's extraction found a frame in just that situation. To the beekeepers goes the spoils! 

The honey run is on so Andrew enlists our friend Lei to help with some hive inspections and checking for frames that are ready to extract.

Andrew checks each frame as he moves
them from one box to another.
In this case he is looking for the
queen bee who is distinctive
for her long body and bright colour.

Apologies to the more knowledgeable for this rather simplistic explanation.

The physical hive is made up a a number of basic components: large or small you need a floor, a lid, a cover and at least one box with a number of frames inside it. Each frame is made up of a wood surround with wire across on which is supported a wax base. The bees will eventually build a comb on the wax in each frame and fill each hexagonal cell with honey.

The frames in this super box are distended
 with cells full of honey. The cells are
capped with wax (hence the whitish colour)
to stop the honey from flowing out.
This indicates that the honey is fully
processed and ready for extraction.
This capping will be removed or
broken up before each frame is spun
to extract the honey. 

As the hive matures and grows bigger, more boxes, each filled with, in our case, ten frames, is added to the hive structure. At this point a wire mesh is added to separate the queen bee who is significantly larger than the other bees in the hive. The mesh is referred to as a 'queen excluder' and the position of a box above or below the excluder defines whether it is a 'brood' or 'super' box.

A brood box is one to which the queen has access to lay eggs and is therefore useful for growing the hive but not for extraction of honey. Brood boxes are kept at the bottom of the hive. Super boxes are above the excluder (hence the name) and are basically honey boxes which, once filled, can be spun for honey extraction. It's part of the beekeeper's responsibility to balance the growth of a hive for productivity with the amount of extractable honey. Restrict brood space and growth will be limited and the hive will struggle to fill the honey boxes, however having too many bees and not enough space for honey storage means the bees will struggle to maintain the correct temperature within the hive (and bees are temperature sensitive).

Amazingly, a mature, productive hive can have between 30,000 to 60,000 bees so having the right amount of space is important for a healthy hive.

The video on this entry shows Andrew and Derek as they add a new queen to one of the mature Croziers Road hives. Apologies for the children making ringing noises in the background!