August 09- Honey harvest

Honey harvest time

This is one on the many honey combs

August is pretty much the end of the season and time to harvest honey.

I bough a triangle escape board to use to separate the bees from the top box.

 My bees went from just one box to three! The bottom box is the brooding box and the top boxes are where the honey is collected. Rule of thumb is to take only 40% of the honey, you want to leave your bees with enough honey for the winter.

The idea is to have the bees out of the top box, the one I was going to remove for honey harvest. I  placed the triangle escape board in between boxes and somehow it takes the bees 48 hours to figure out how to get back up. They can go down from the top box to the bottom of the hive where they exit but they can't come back up because their natural instinct is always to turn right so when trying to get back up to the honey chamber they can't because the triangle has all left turns. There is a window of opportunity for getting the honey box free of bees before they figure out the maze.

I wasn't sure this was going to work, but when I went to check, I was amazed, there were only about 5 bees which I carefully removed.

It was so easy to take the box that I felt really bad for the bees, I was a total dictator, tricking and stealing from them...But I was also so excited- I had a so much honey!!!

However, there was still a lot of work to be done.

I borrowed a centrifugal honey extractor from a co-worker and set it up int my kitchen to do the work

This thin knife is the main tool

So first thing to do is take out one frame from the box

Then very carefully I cut the thin layer of wax that cover the honey. Bees collect nectar from flowers that they then regurgitate and this become honey but it takes a while to solidify. Once it is honey consistency the bees cap it with the wax that they make. Which is the same nectar but it has gone through a longer regurgitating process and it becomes wax.

Here you can see  the cells full of honey after I cut the capping wax

At that point I placed the frames (3 at a time) into the centrifugal machine

I used this tray as I uncapped because a lot of honey dripped and I didn't wanted to waste any. I also wanted to collect the wax for candles

I poured all of that into the filtering, it is a double strainer. First one with bigger holes and second one is really fine, that way honey is completely free of wax or other particles

Once I was done with the extraction and all the honey was collected in the container, I filtered it

And this is how that looked. It was really exciting and the smell of the honey and the wax was truly intoxicating and delicious.

My kitchen, my jeans and my fingers were sticky with honey and propolis, which  is a very sticky resinous mixture that bees make to cover up small gaps on the hive, but I didn't care the honey was amazing and I was loving the process.

After all the filtering I got about 1 gallon of honey- not bad for a new hive started late in the season that only worked for about 4 months.

I love being a bee keeper and I'm looking forward to learning a lot more from my bees.

July 2009 - Bounty

From our friends the chickens

Garlic harvest

June 08 - Pure joy

May 09 - Bees

Some time in February I read an article about urban beekeeping. The article made it sound like it was a super easy thing to do only taking a few hours every few months. I got me interested, especially because of the bee colony collapse, I wanted to better understand what was happening with bees. Plus my classmates from graduate school Mike and Zach had built a hive that was not in use.

I told my friend Tom about it. Tom is the director of KyotoUSA 

http://www.kyotousa.org/

and he is the kind of person that you tell things when you want to make sure they happen. So he got on my case until I got the bees.

Turns out it is not that easy to get bees and it is an expensive start up cost. Plus I had to convince the land owners and the neighbors. But Tom would not stop asking me  so I had to do something.

I drove up to Sebastopol to beekind which WAS the nearest place to get bee equipment and bee starting boxes, about an hour north from the bay area. My friend David drove up there with me and it was really fun, aside from learning about bees, we took our bikes and went to visit Lutheran Burbank farm/

We meet the owner of bee kind who immediately gave me a beekeeping 101 hands on class. No suit or smoke required, he just got right in there.

This is a Kenyan stile bee box, developed by the peace corps for easier maintenance and less upfront cost

The bees build their own "frames"

This is a starter box, a small cardboard box with one queen and few hundred worker bees ready to start a hive.

You can buy this starting box for about $150 dolars 

So I was ready to buy it but turns out I could not do it then because you have to wait till the end of the day for all the bees to return to the box. But I got all my bee keeping equipment for about 300 dollars. We didn't have that much time so we came back to the bay. Time was running out for me because you must start your hive in the spring so bees can have enough food to establish themselves and be ready for the winter. I could not go back to Sebastopol so I ended up getting my starting box from Kalil a Saudi Arabian bee keeper in Oakland.

And here they are, my beautiful bees in the garden.

Also, I'm happy to report that now you can get all your bee need right in the mission in SF at Her Majesty Secret beekeeper.

http://www.hmsbeekeeper.com/HMSB/Welcome.html

If you find yourself in her neighborhood be sure to stop and check out her store it is beautiful and  try out some of her honey. She also offers all kinds of beekeeping and honey/ wax product classes. I took a honey wine class.

As the hive grew, which was pretty immediate, I had to add more boxes. The population went from about 300 bees to about 2000 in one weeks

It brought me so much joy to see the bees go crazy in the pollen of my flowers. They seriously looked like kids on a playground on the pollen of the sun flowers

I can never see things as disconnected any more. Having flowers in the garden had a whole new meaning now.

They loved the onion and leek flowers so much that I had a hard time taking and eating them 

Look at them, they are so beautiful. I love my bees!