What happens after a harvest - giving back to the bees

Have you ever wondered why bees make honey?  It’s their food.  Food for now and food for winter. Okay so that leads to the next question, if we harvest honey, then what do the bees eat?

Well, that is where consideration of profits and the skill of the bee keeper (called an apiarist) comes in.  The more honey you take, the more money you make, simple.  But this leaves the bees with no food.  So apiarists who want to maximise their profits leave no honey and feed the bees refined sugar and water mixed together, called sugar syrup.  Sugar syrup doesn’t contain the same goodness as honey so hives that feed on it are less resilient and therefore less able to withstand any issues. 

We care very much for the welfare of our bees.  So, what we do is leave enough food to feed all the mouths in the hive, and we only take the surplus.  The skill of the apiarist is to work out how much we can take.  A typical hive needs around 20kg of honey to survive winter. We never aim to leave only sugar syrup, but we do offer it as a backup over winter just in case.

Imagine two boxes of frames, each is called a honey super.  In our imaginary example Super A is left for the bees and Super B is harvested.

Super B contains 11 individual frames.  The frames we use have a wire in them to support the wax and honey during harvesting..  Unwired frames are used for making cut comb honey to sell in small boxes.

We uncap the honey using a serrated knife.  The honey is removed from the uncapped frames using a radial spinner. Then we return the frames with what is left of the honey to super B and return to the hive.  The bees clean the frames and thus get to use the extra honey and wax.   

The uncapping wax is strained to get more honey but there is always some embedded in the wax.  We melt and strain the wax in preparation for candle making. The honey cools and sets and the honey on the outside of the wax is wiped off and fed back to the bees using a top feeder in the hive roof.

By taking a little and give back as much as we can we believe we are collecting yummy honey and doing the best for our bees.

Honey recovered from wax processing is fed back the hive using a top feeder in the roof.