Oh yes my friends, it’s that time of year. The Oilseed Rape flower (Brassica napus) has nothing left for the bees and I had to work fast to get the honey from the hive - spun and put in jars before it sets. This is something I’ve never had to deal with before. I’ve heard about other beekeepers saying what a pain Oilseed Rape is but the amount of honey they harvest and the flavour it produces is worth every moment. Why is it such a pain? If the Oilseed Rape is left in the supers for too long after the flowers have died - about 10 days max - the honey sets so hard in the comb that it’s impossible to spin. You can’t even leave it for the bees because no matter how hard they beat their wings to control the temperature it will set and they can’t use it. If you leave it on there for them, they will more than likely starve.

With my work cut out for me, what worse thing could happen the day before I’m due to harvest all the honey? I strained my back. Therefore, under the strict instruction of my extremely nice Osteopath - oh he who must be obeyed if one is to get better - I wasn’t allowed to do any heavy lifting. No lifting? That’s what harvesting honey is all about. Lifting supers from the brood boxes and putting them in the wheelbarrow. Lifting them out of the wheel barrow and putting them in the car. Lifting them out of the car and carrying them into the kitchen. Now bear in mind each super - when full - will hold over 10kg (25lbs) of honey and I had seven of them. No lifting? So, to the rescue came my valiant husband who donned a bee suit and bravely entered the apiary ready to receive instructions from yours truly. I say bravely because he has a serious allergic reaction to honeybee stings. However, it was a glorious day, the temperature was up in the 20’s and my girls, all 350,000 of them - (this being an approximation as they’ve not been individually counted!) -behaved impeccably and not one sting was received by either one of us. Good girls.

See the images below.

Onward and upward to the extracting. In the past, when living in Buckinghamshire, I normally work with between two, max four hives. Here in Herefordshire I’ve ended up with seven! Suffice to say, my manual honey extractor proved to be extremely labour intensive! Do not be fooled by the video, R did all the spinning, I took the wax cappings off and I posed for the video. Let’s face it, he takes up the entire gallery above and it is my blog after all! Once the frames had been spun, we put them back into their supers and returned them to their respective hives. This is very important; you don’t want to mix up the supers and risk and spread of potential diseases to the bees. They can now clean these up, which they will… beautifully. They will take the honey we couldn’t spin out down into their brood box and store it there. This will be useful to them during the next few weeks when there’s a gap between the spring and summer blossom. Then, they have the supers there ready and waiting if they need them.

we invested in an Electric Extractor which arrived the day after we’d finished manually spinning. At least we’ll be ready for the summer flow, if there is one. Apparently last year, according to Challis, the bees produced lots of honey from the Oilseed Rape in the spring then nothing in the summer. If that happens again this year, fingers crossed it doesn’t, then we’re well and truly ready for next year! Sometimes it’s good to get ahead of the game!

The pictures below are pretty self explanatory except for the last two! The first odd one is R and I attempting a somewhat feeble re-enactment of the famous steamy, atmospheric scene from Ghost at the potters wheel, only with a honey extractor in broad day light! The only thing steaming was the pain from his elbow having been spinning for 6 hours! The next one is of me working on this blog while filling jars with honey. Multi-tasking normally being something we ‘ladeeez’ are good at. In this instance, however, honey has a sly way of sneaking up the jar and, just when you're not looking, overflowing, thus this section of the blog has taken a lot longer to write than usual!

Now we really decided to push the boat out. First we bought an electric extractor and then R decided to buy a wax extractor - oh yes, we’re taking this Herefordshire honey malarky very seriously! In the past, I’ve always borrowed the Chalfont Beekeeper’s Society’s wax extractor but based on how prolific the bees have been we’ve decided to fly solo! So here it is in all it’s glory. It’s an amazing machine, no beekeeper should be without one. You simply load up your old frames together with the wax and it melts the wax and steam cleans the frames and out of the tap pours fabulous clean wax ready to be recycled. The frames come out steaming hot so only need a scrape off with a sharp tool…Bish • bash • bosh!

As you can see the wax is ready, in cartons, to be recycled in any way I choose. I can return the wax to Thornes of Windsor - http://www.thorne.co.uk/ - who will sell me wax foundation at a reduced price as they will recycle mine. I can use it to make candles or I can melt it down into 1oz bars to be sold to whoever wants/needs wax!

On to my queens. As you know from my previous blogs four split hives became 8 and a Nuc. This is the first time I’ve ever had to deal with so many hives so thank you to all my sympathetic fellow beekeepers who leant me the various bits of equipment I needed to perform all these splits! This exercise left me with four hives with old queens, four hives with queen cells and the Nuc had a collected swarm from who knows where! And again, as you’re aware from last months blog, just as soon as I’d performed this exercise, the rain came down and it didn’t stop for a month. The surprise wasn’t the rain but the fact that I’d had to split hives so early on in the beekeeping year. As if the long wait for a mated queen to start laying isn’t stressful enough, now I had the worst possible weather for this to happen. Chances were it wouldn’t. Not too bad a problem. You simply re-unite your hives and you’re back to square one - four hives. However, my clever bees had indeed produced 3 scrumptious queens and one hive had an open queen cell but no sign of the queen, so I made the fatal error of waiting another week and then the following week giving the hive one more week and that my friends, as the wonderful blogger The Apiarist (check out his blogs they’re brilliant https://www.theapiarist.org/blog/) said that a two week wait “can only end in tears'“. And it did.

If you leave a colony too long without a queen, some of the worker bees take it upon themselves to start laying. The problem with that? They’re not fertilised and therefore only lay drone eggs. The problem with that? Drones don’t do any work and soon all the females will die off and that’s the end of that hive. It’s a horrible thing to happen but easy to spot. The worker bee has no set pattern of laying. They lay the eggs in worker cells and usually you see two or three eggs or maybe more in one cell. See the images to the right which I screen-grabbed from ‘The Honey Bee Suite.’

It’s an unhappy state of affairs and you have little or no choice but to either let the hive dwindle away or you can shake out all of the bees onto a sheet, a good distance from their hive. The flying bees will return to the hive and some of the house bees, among whom are the laying workers, cannot fly and therefore will perish. What a choice aye? Horrible. Either way a lot of bees die which is not what any beekeepers’ want. I’m pleased to say this is only the second time it’s happened to me in 11 years of beekeeping.

The story doesn’t end there. This week, I went to check my hives and two of my gorgeous queens had gone AWOL and not a queen cell in sight. Really, things are happening to me and my bees in Hereford that I’ve never experienced before! Recalling Bill Fisher’s words, Bill Fisher being an excellent beekeeper and former Chairman of the Chalfont Beekeeper’s Society, “You’re better off with one strong hive that will produce honey than 2 weak hives who won’t” I decided to unite the hives and not steal frames of eggs from other hives to produce more queens. Thank you Bill! I united two hives with the remaining two queen right hives and now I’m back to four hives again. The Nuc, incidentally, I’d found a home for. Seven colonies were too time consuming. This is a hobby and seven colonies were taking over my life!

On a more cheerful note, here is one of my remaining queens who rather naughtily and somewhat unusually was on the queen excluder when I lifted it up for inspection. Note to all beekeepers, always check your queen excluders before you place them next to the hive while you do your inspection.

Lockdown is gently easing and the bookings are starting to come in for me to go to schools, communities and businesses to give my talks. A big hoorah to that! My first booking for a year was a return visit to Chalfont St Peter CofE Academy in Buckinghamshire. Betsie Valentine, my virtual hive that I take to my talks, has had a revamp and if I say so myself is looking rather gorgeous. I honestly don’t know who was more excited about my first talk in a year to actual people, myself, the children or the teachers! What a fantastic day it was. A massive shout out to Ms Brenda Meek who organised the entire day with absolute precision. It went without a hitch and everyone, and I mean everyone had a great time. Thank you Brenda… I’ll definitely come again in a couple of years if invited!

This has been such an amazing and busy month with the bees, the weather on the whole has been kind and the bees have worked hard. We actually spun about 140 pounds of honey. Clever girls. They deserve a little rest before the summer flow kicks in but honeybees don’t rest. They never sit back and say “well girls, we’ve worked hard, we’ve plenty of stores, let’s take a break for a couple of weeks,” they just keep going. It’s what they do. They make honey and produce wax. At this time of year you have to be careful as pollen and nectar flow is scarce so it’s important to keep and eye on the colonies to make sure they have enough stores to feed the brood. Sometimes you have to help them along with a little sugar syrup solution to help them get through. The picture to the right is the bees supping up some honey that’s been left behind when the brace comb splits from the top of the frames when the queen excluder is removed. Remember, they waste nothing.

And so, as this blog comes to a close, with all the trials and tribulations that beekeeping sets before me I’d like to share with you just a few of the things I love about my new apiary. Its setting • Challis • the sheep that follow me, playing “peep behind the curtain” as I wheel my barrow up to the bees and the fact that I can wash all my sticky equipment in the fresh water river that runs through the grounds! Beekeeping is a wonderful hobby. You get so much out of being a beekeeper, not least of which is giving something back to our gorgeous planet and looking after our wonderful endangered honeybees.

What will July bring? I cannot wait. Hopefully, lots of sunshine and flowers! Wherever you are, whatever your doing remember our wonderful honeybees are out there working hard thus ensuring we have flowers in our garden, fruit on our trees and in our woodlands and food on our plates. Thank you girls. Meanwhile my garden’s been inundated with honeybees feasting on the clover, so watch where you tread not only because of the honeybees but you may also get stung!

And I will leave you with this lovely press cutting sent to me by a friend of mine. Ask me why I love honeybees…

Thank you for reading and see you next month.