Welcome back to the seventh installment of the Beehive.
As August winds down, the honey flow is coming to an end. The bees are busy searching for what nectar they can find. At the end of August and early September, the bees are able to find nectar in the goldenrod flowers in this area.
The honey that is made from this nectar is much darker in color than the honey they have been producing all summer. For this reason, I like to take the surplus honey from the bees during this period and then let the bees store all the darker honey they make, from this point on.
Therefore, my job as a beekeeper this week is going to entail taking the surplus honey from the hives. I will then take the honey back to my honey house where I will heat the building up to 85 or 90 degrees. I will leave the honey supers in the building overnight where they will heat up to room temperature.
This will cause the honey to become thin and runny, which allows it to flow easily out of the honeycomb in the extractor. This sounds rather complicated, but it really isn't. I will take pictures of this process, so I can show you folks in the next column.
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As I was looking through my beekeeping pictures, I ran across a couple I just have to share. The first picture is of me using a beevac that I made, to help capture swarms. The crazy thing about this swarm is that it landed about 25 feet up in the tree. It was away from the trunk of the tree, so I couldn't climb the tree to reach it. So as they say, necessity is the mother of invention, I glued two pieces of 1 ¼" PVC and connected them to my beevac. I was able to suck the bees out of the tree, down 20 feet of PVC.
These next few weeks are going to be very busy ones for all beekeepers. Like I said, I'll take lots of pictures and report back you. Thanks for your interest.
