Smoking The Bees. A Bumper Honey Harvest!

Hey folks, I have been an active, practising bee-keeper for around two years now and with this new platform @hive I thought what better than to do another Bee-Post? My first on hive and here it is.

We recently did an end of season super down, basically this entails taking off the top part of the hive (supers) where the bees store the honey in a high nectar flow, from which we harvest our honey.

Last year during Winter we did not do this and learnt a few good lessons, we lost a few swarms, reason for this was bees need to regulate the hive temperatures and because they lower their population during cold seasons less bees to keep the hive warm. With larger space ie Supers still present this has dire consequences and generally bees abscond, as happened to us! We wont be making that mistake twice!

Here I took a quick pretty cool video illustrating the importance of smoking bees. It pacifies them as well as when one needs to replace the lid, chases them down into the hive as not to squash any on putting the lid back on the hive....

Pretty neat right? Below pics after we harvested from the hives had some lovely multiflora honey in the frames ready to be spun off and bottled!

I like to add some of the un-capped honey/nectar to the mix, this prevents the honey crystalizing too quickly and is much easier to manage!

All our hives are Langstroth Hives: More here as per wikipedia.org:

In modern beekeeping, a Langstroth hive is any vertically modular beehive that has the key features of vertically hung frames, a bottom board with entrance for the bees, boxes containing frames for brood and honey (the lowest box for the queen to lay eggs, and boxes above where honey may be stored) and an inner cover and top cap to provide weather protection.[1] In a Langstroth hive, the bees build honeycomb into frames, which can be moved with ease. The frames are designed to prevent bees from attaching honeycombs where they would either connect adjacent frames, or connect frames to the walls of the hive. The movable frames allow the beekeeper to manage the bees in a way which was formerly impossible.

The key innovation responsible for the hive's design was the discovery of bee space, a gap size of between 6–9 mm (1⁄4–3⁄8 in) in which bees would neither build comb nor cement closed with propolis.

Modern Langstroth hives have different dimensions from L. L. Langstroth's beehive that was originally patented in 1852 and manufactured until approximately 1920, but retain the main features of allowing bee space as well as easy access which works well for the bees but also makes management of the beehive easier for the beekeeper.

The standard beehive used in many parts of the world for beekeeping is based on the Langstroth hive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langstroth_hive

That white layer over the segments are raw capped honey and the 'shiny' segments mostly uncapped nectar, we spin it all off and bottle!

This was really a bumper harvest for April in this area. Last year April we had literally no honey at this time of year. Blessings on top of blessings!

Nature the Incredible.
Be sure to stay tuned for more of my epic bee-keeping adventures!

Love and Light, be blessed.
Cheer$;)