Something I’ve always been interested in is beekeeping. It’s one of those pastimes that I’ve never had much opportunity to explore further. However recently we met friends of my parents who keep beehives on their property nearby, and after expressing an interest I was invited to help collect honey today. Forewarned is forearmed and I dressed with a couple of layers of clothing to minimise the risk of bee stings.
Robin is a good instructor and talked me through each part of the process. Two of the three hives housed pale Italian bees which were pretty docile. The third hive housed a darker, more aggressive bee which required more smoke, more caution.
The photo at left was taken afterwards, so the hives are a few boxes shorter than when we started.
The cover is lifted off the top box of the hive and bees gently smoked out with pine needle smoke. Each box of the hive contained 8 – 10 vertical frames on which the bees build their wax honeycomb and fill the honeycomb cells with honey. 
The bottom box contains the queen bee and her drones and the box above it typically is left alone as a food supply for the them. At this time of year another box or two of honey-rich frames is left in place for the winter food supply for the bees.
So today we collected three boxes of honey. We also removed another three boxes which didn’t have much honey to speak of, but the frames had pretty well-developed honeycomb. These boxes will be sealed for the winter to provide the hives with a head start in spring by giving the bees an established honeycomb.
Each hive contained about 30,000 bees. I felt pretty secure in my multi-layered clothing and beekeeper’s hat. But when I bent over to pick up the smoker, or to carry a box over to the trailer hitched to the back of the quadbike, I suddenly felt a bit vulnerable when I realised that bending meant my layers of protective clothing were stretched pretty tight over my skin. Which when bending over presented 30,000 bees (per hive) with the sizeable target of my backside. Fortunately no bee stings!
The top box on each hive was fitted with a cover board. We picked up all our paraphernalia and left the bee hives alone.
The three honey-rich boxes and the three honeycombed boxes were carried over to the trailer where we smoked out the bulk of the remaining
bees. By this stage the bees leaving the boxes were already starting to work on the scraps of discarded honeycomb that had been scraped off the top of the uppermost boxes to allow the cover board to fit snugly. It was incredible to see how the bees immediately got started on their next job. And I was pretty happy that they were not dwelling on the prospect of trying to sting me in the ear or somewhere up my trouser leg. In the photo below you can see little clusters of bees on the edge of the trailer, working on drops of honey and pieces of discarded honeycomb.
Once we were ready to go, we drove the trailer a few hundred metres up the road and back again to shake loose a few more bees. We drove the trailer back to the shed to leave the boxes overnight, allowing the last few hundred bees an opportunity to fly back to their hives. In the morning the boxes will be sealed until a hot day next week when the honey is easily extracted from the honeycomb by hand-spun centrifuge – my next job!
Being my first lesson in bee keeping, a lot of this blog post is probably factually incorrect. But today was a fantastic experience and I’m looking forward to more of the same. Thanks Robin!
Eloise has done a school project on bees and knows a lot more than I do about the lifecycle of the bees and the different dances they do.