Collecting Rent

At last, it’s that time of year when we steal the fruits of the bees’ labour. I like to think it’s not as bad as that; it's more of a symbiotic relationship where we provide the house and health service for free, and the bees just get to pay us rent in the form of honey. The trick is to take what we want but leave the bees what they need for the winter.

It is rarely as easy as just taking the boxes of honey. I have had bees refuse to leave a super of honey even though the clearer board had been on for two days. It turned out that the idiot beekeeper (me) had put an old wire excluder on the hive, which the queen had marched through to lay some eggs up in the super; bees will not leave brood. The solution was fairly simple but brutal: a Makita battery-powered leaf blower. I tipped the super up on one edge and then blasted all the bees out of it. The super was quickly cleared, leaving a lot of young, confused bees flying around the apiary wondering what on earth had happened, and which was their house. (Most of the bees will be young bees that have not done an orientation flight yet, so they can be totally lost.)

Other problems occur, like the bees robbing through the ill-fitting edge of the super. This can be the downside to wooden hives. When you made the super in the winter, it was all lovely with clean, well-fitting edges; six months later, when it has been prised apart once a week, the rain has poured on it, and the sun has then ripped the moisture out, some supers just don’t fit any more, looking more like a Kentish clapperboard house than a beehive super.

A big problem to be aware of is robbing - and not just by the bees. Last year, I was inattentive to an apiary as I was too busy congratulating myself over a bumper harvest and spinning honey out. When I returned to my apiary, it was mayhem; wasps had started robbing a weak hive, quickly joined by European hornets. Having stripped out one hive like Viking warriors, they moved on to the next and the next. The farmer who owned the land said it was funny because he had not been troubled by wasps at all. Of course not - they had been too busy robbing my hives to worry about a spoonful of jam in his kitchen. I lost five of the six hives at that apiary.

I never know which is the best way to bring honey supers back to my honey room. I can get about twelve supers in the back of my car, but it can be a bit problematic driving with a cloud of angry bees flying around the inside of the car. I open the sunroof and all the windows and hope that, with a bit of speed, I can lose most of the bees. Apparently, driving along in a bee veil is frowned upon by the police. Back at base, it is just a case of getting the supers into the store before my hives at home (all twenty-two of them - I told my wife there were only ten) smell the honey. Then, at last, it's spinning time and the collection of that yearly rent payment.