AUGUST NEWSLETTER. Other ways to harvest honey

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1 ICIRNCSTR & DISTR CT B K P S R AUGUST NWSLTTR Other ways to harvest honey Chris Strudwick organic beekeeping operation in Australia, uses Warré management methods and if you have Warré or top-bar hives you will know conventional extractors are of no use to you. Until recently I managed up to thirty conventional hives without owning an extractor and managed the bulk of the harvest without using one. Here then are a couple of options. As we approach the end of Summer we are all hoping to reap the rewards of being a beekeeper and harvest some of that lovely honey. stablished beekeepers with several hives will probably have invested in an extractor, but what do you do if you only have one or two hives? Pressed comb Comb removed from top-bar and Warré hives, also from conventional hives that have collected jelly-like heather honey, can simply be put into a suitable fruit press and crushed. This requires a stainless-steel basket or all-stainless construction, so that ancient cider press lurking in someone s shed will not do. A suitable press is not inexpensive but is robust, dual purpose, and costs less than an extractor. They are also easier to clean and smaller to store. Hiring an extractor from the club, or borrowing one from a fellow beekeeper, is one option. xtractors are often not so good if you only have a few frames to process. They are expensive to purchase, though recently less so thanks to Chinese manufacturers whose many and various models and variable quality unfortunately make selection difficult. xtractors are also laborious to clean and entail the sacrifice of a certain amount of honey that clings to the machinery. It is best for small producers to pool their effort to extract a reasonable number of frames in one go. As the number of your hives increases a basic manual extractor quickly becomes hard work and electric ones are even more costly. The decision point comes at around ten hives if you are doing everything yourself as an electric extractor will get on with the job as you prepare the next load of frames and thereby saves a lot of time, not to speak of the sweat of your brow. There are alternatives. Malfroy s Gold, a large The image is one of a series from

2 net/2012/03/26/new-press-for-crushing-wildhoneycomb/, the teaching arm of Malfroy s Gold. This is a large press but smaller 6 litre versions are available. If you follow the link, you might have an opinion about the dark additions to the honey, which will come from both pollen and larval cocoons. Warré hives do not separate brood and honey comb and will result in darker honey, as will extracting conventional frames previously used for brood. Most of the dark residue seen collected with the wax is from larval cocoons. micron conical honey filter. The strainer will hold the remains of about six to eight combs, depending on how much is cut and how much chopped. When I ve finished processing, which takes an hour or so, the draining honey is covered and left in a warm place for at least 12 hours. Cut and chopped comb My own method is to encourage the bees to draw new honeycomb each year in the supers, starting from narrow starter strips of very thin foundation. This ideally results in snowy-white comb with thin wax walls. It can also result in a mix of worker and drone cells, random comb and other inconveniences! The best of the comb is selected, cut and boxed, and all the remainder poor combs and trimmings - is chopped fine and the honey drained. Comb can be cut with a sharp knife or a standard comb-cutter. It is usually allowed to drain a little, on a rack, before being placed in boxes. Prepared boxes are then stored in the freezer. Cutting comb is quick and not too sticky. It can also be done a few frames at a time, as convenient. You can harvest frames as they are ready. I place comb for cutting or chopping a frame at a time into a large stainless-steel caterers oven tray. The comb is then cut free with a knife and the frame is removed. Any good comb is carefully cut free and removed to a rack before it is boxed. The remainder is minced with a semi-lunar chopper and the whole mass of honey and wax is scraped with a plastic bakers scraper into a double strainer positioned over a clean, food-safe honey pail. You can easily buy ready-made double strainers but I use a stainless-steel sink strainer (from Aldi) over a 200 After draining, the filtered honey goes into a pail with a honey gate for ripening and bottling, while the sticky wax goes into a clean seed tray and is returned to the originating hive, above the crown board, along with the sticky frames. This is best done at dusk or early morning. The bees will diligently mop-up any honey I have missed and put it to good use. What about wax? Chopping comb results in a lot of high-quality wax. After retrieving the cleaned wax from the bees, it is allowed to soak in a pail to remove residual honey, then carefully heated with water in a large stockpot. Mine came from a charity shop, and please do not use anything precious because it will forever be useless for other purposes. The wax must be melted and simmered gently for several minutes. Any dead bees or debris can be skimmed off but the wax should be pretty clean. At this point I cut the heat, cover the pot with newspaper for insulation, and let it cool overnight. The wax disc can be removed and stored for final cleaning, but that is another story.

3 Pros and cons Any system that requires bees to draw new wax should result in less stored honey, although I find my hives perform surprisingly well. It is not always easy to get the bees into the supers without the lure of some drawn comb, especially early in the season, and some colonies are more amenable than others. There are always a few combs that are better extracted than minced, although there are ways around this. Have you got a digital projector? Chris Strudwick is looking to borrow a digital projector next month for a talk on beekeeping. Please contact him on if you have one he could borrow. A big advantage is the production of a very special hive product. Honey from fresh cut comb is honey at its finest. The drained honey is also of the best possible quality, having been taken from new comb with the minimum of handling. A low-tech, not too laborious and inexpensive method to harvest honey from a small number of hives is appealing. Bee Science Although there is plenty in the press on the possible effects of neonicotinoids in diminishing sperm viability, and some interesting research on how queens suppress the growth of worker ovaries, I think more will be interested in a recent paper published in Apidologie: Barbara Locke (2016), Natural Varroa mite-surviving Apis mellifera honeybee populations, Apidologie, 47: DOI: /s A search on the DOI link takes you to the openaccess paper. This is a readable review of all studied cases where bees have naturally developed mechanisms to co-exist with Varroa and its viruses. While there are some common threads, such as a tendency to smaller colonies, each resistant population has found its own set of solutions. The author suggests that apicultural practices may themselves contribute to the problem. Paul Page et al (2016), Social apoptosis in honey bee superorganisms, Scientific Reports, 6:27210, DOI: /srep27210 On a related theme, Apis cerana has several ways to combat Varroa. One newly-discovered method is for infected pupae to die, causing mite reproduction to fail. This is analogous to the process of apoptosis in cells, where a cell will die if it is likely to be faulty and thereby helps to protect the rest of the organism. ach bee in the superorganism formed by the colony can be regarded as a cell and social apoptosis helps protect the colony as a whole at the expense of the individual.

4 Plant of the month - AUGUST Victoria Summerley The fashion for prairie planting, or the New Perennial style as some designers prefer to call it, may not be universally popular with gardeners, but it s very good news for the honey bee. Prairie planting is all about letting plants do what comes naturally. You don t have to stake them, or prune them, or deadhead them. You choose bee-friendly things like asters, or rudbeckia, or echinacea, that will establish massive colourful clumps that sway in the breeze without collapsing in a heap every time it rains. Most prairie planting schemes incorporate lots of tall grasses, such as miscanthus, or pennisetum, or panicum, and as summer ends and autumn begins, their bleached flowerheads add movement and texture. So what s not to like? Well, some gardeners don t like grasses - they think they look scruffy, or weedy, and will run riot in the borders. I ve never understood the anti-grasses thing, because I m a lazy gardener and evergreen grasses such as carex, stipa and acorus form a year-round framework that saves me having to think of anything else to put in their place for half the year. They look just as good with tulips and daffodils in spring as they do with Michaelmas daisies in late summer and autumn. To be fair, not everybody s garden is suitable for a prairie planting scheme, because this sort of planting work best where everything gets its fair share of light - in an island bed, say - rather than in conventional borders around the boundaries. However, you don t have to have acres and acres of space or, indeed, a prairie. One very good example is the High Line in New York, the converted overhead railway line designed by Dutch plantsman and prairie pioneer Piet Oudolf. The plants themselves tend to be on the big side - a metre-plus in height on average, if not more - and one of the most impressive is upatorium maculatum, known as Joe Pye weed in America, where it is a food source for Monarch butterflies on their long autumn migration south to Mexico. In this country, you will see upatorium maculatum Atropurpureum Group and upatorium purpureum listed in nurseries and catalogues. You may also see the name utrochium maculatum, because the botanists have just reclassified this plant, and in their usual fashion have come up with something that is even more difficult to pronounce. utrochium sounds more like someone clearing their throat than the name of a plant. My friend Matthew Wilson, a regular on the Gardeners Question Time panel, is a fan of upatorium purpureum because it is a good plant for blurring the boundaries between garden and surrounding countryside. Whatever the name, however, most eupatoriums look vaguely alike - dark green leaves arranged in a star shape around dark red stems, topped with domed clusters of pinky-lilac flowers. And they are all big. They form a clump of up to two metres in width and height, so definitely a choice for the back of the border, or at least somewhere they have room to spread out. Some

5 varieties are more compact: Gateway, for example, which is stocked by Knoll Gardens, the grasses specialist in Dorset. However, compact is a relative term in this case - even Gateway can grow to six feet, and the dwarf varieties such as Little Joe and Baby Joe will form clumps a metre high. Despite this, they are not overbearing, in-your-face plants. Although they form big clumps, the subtle colours of the flowers produce a smoky, misty purple effect that recedes rather than intrudes. So who was Joe Pye and why is eupatorium called Joe Pye weed? There are almost as many legends about the name as there are species and cultivars of eupatorium, but the generally accepted story seems to be that Joe Pye was a Native American, who used eupatorium as a remedy for typhus. Other stories say that Joe Pye is a corruption of jopi, or jopai, a Native American Indian name for typhus. Whoever or whatever Joe Pye was, eupatorium was also used as a cure for gallstones or kidney stones (hence another of its common names, gravel root), and rheumatism. Traditionally the plants were dried, and put into to hot water to make a kind of bitter tea. Herbalists often added cayenne or ginger, and honey to make the drink more palatable. It is tempting to wonder whether it was the hot water or the ginger or cayenne that was really responsible for making you sweat, but eupatorium is still used by homeopaths as a remedy for fever. Victoria Summerley is the author of Secret Gardens of the Cotwolds. Her garden in Bibury is open for the Cirencester and District Beekeepers Garden Safari on Saturday 20 August, and in aid of the National Gardens Scheme on 28 August from pm.

6 ICIRNCSTR & DISTR CT B K P S R 2016 ANNUAL HONY SHOW Bank Holiday Monday August 29th 1.30pm till 5pm

7 Honey Spice Buns (best eaten the day after baking) 250g/9oz Plain flour 5m/1tsp Ground Cinnamon 5m/1tsp Bicarbonate of Soda 125g/4.5oz Butter softened 125g/4.5oz Soft brown sugar 1 Large egg separated 125g/4.5oz Clear local honey about 60ml/4tbs Milk Castor sugar for sprinkling Preheat oven to 200c/400f/gas 6 Lightly butter a bun tin or line with paper cases Sift the flour, cinnamon and bicarbonate of soda into a large mixing bowl Beat the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy Beat in the egg yolk, then gradually the honey With a large spoon and a cutting action, fold in the flour mixture plus sufficient milk to make a soft mixture that will just drop off the spoon In a separate bowl, whisk the egg white until soft peaks form With a large spoon and a figure of 8 movement, fold the egg white into the cake mixture Divide the mixture among the paper cases Bake for minutes or until firm and springy to the touch and golden brown (keep a watchful eye - recipes with honey as a major ingredient can burn quite quickly) Sprinkle the tops lightly with sugar keep in an airtight tin until the next day