After the buzz of summer

At last, the floor is done in my storeroom; it’s nearly flat and I am sure that the nicotine in the fag butts that Bill and Ben the builders left will help to deter the dreaded wax moth. I store all my drawn supers in Langstroth bags with a little bowl of 80% acetic acid in the top of them. I have found it is sufficient to just use a ramekin bowl half full of acetic acid; this is enough to deter wax moths and probably make them cough a bit.

 Old and manky brood frames are cleaned and recycled. I know a lot of beekeepers just throw them away and buy new ones. This brings on one of my allergies: spending money unnecessarily! (Just for the record, my other allergy is unnecessary pain - which does beg the question: why did I take up beekeeping?) 

Back to the frames: I have a lovely machine that I bought from Abelo, sold as an uncapping tray but it also has a lid with a big thermostatically controlled fan heater. Frames are just lined up in it, lid on and turned up to full heat. Given a couple of hours, all the old wax, frass, wax moth and detritus are melted out, and my frames are ready for rewaxing.

I did a simple time and motion study on this process; it was much quicker recycling the old frames than actually building new. For me, the big bonus was those tinkling shekels of honey money that remained in my pocket, plus some lovely wax solidified in the base of the machine plus quite a bit of honey as well. All right, the honey is no good to sell or to feed back to the bees, but my neighbour is an expert mead maker and knows to give me a couple of bottles at Christmas (sorry, I know I shouldn’t mention that until at least December).

Spare brood boxes and nucs are all scorched now; most of the frames stored in them are ready to have wax sheets installed in March. I never have enough boxes for all the frames, so the rest get stored in one of the ubiquitous Langstroth (Amazon) bags.

I suppose I should get ready for our club’s honey show, but I can never garner much enthusiasm for it. Years ago, when I lived in a far corner of Ireland, the honey harvest had been bad and three of the leading members of our association had nothing to take up to the national honey show in Dublin. Nothing daunted, they visited and bought jars of honey from the supermarket; this was decanted into their own jars and duly taken up to the show in the hope that they at least were not letting down what they perceived as the reputation of their club. Incredibly, they won first and second prize in their category; the third jar didn’t win anything as there was a small but visible bubble in the glass jar. When collecting the first prize, the judge was heard to comment that the honey was so good it would have won even if it was in a bucket!

I was sworn to secrecy, but this was forty years ago and they were in their eighties, so I am fairly sure they will not be complaining about me letting their secret out.