Spring Cleaning the Beehives

There are signs of life from the beehives on sunny days and as honey season approaches it's time to get prepared. It's important to clean any hive parts to prevent the spread of any diseases that might be lurking in the build up of the previous years wax and propolis. Large scale beekeepers sterilise hive parts by dunking them in baths of caustic soda solution. I only have two hives so I use a blowtorch to clean boxes, roofs and floors. Once the weather warms up I'll be swapping the cleaned parts into the hives, then I can clean up the parts I've replaced ready to expand with new colonies in fresh hives.

I've also been making up new frames of foundation. Sheets of beeswax can be bought with a hexagonal imprint. This is slotted into a wooden frame (Beansprouts clearly describes how). When the frame is put in the hive the bees begin building up cells happily using the imprint provided. This means that the bees very conveniently store their honey in the frames rather than building unmanageable wild combs in haphazard directions all over the inside of the hive (as they do in the wild). The frames can be easily lifted in and out for inspection and harvesting.  On this frame of foundation you can see a wire embedded in it. This adds strength, preventing the wax from collapsing under the combined weight of wax and honey in the hive, and especially during spinning of combs in the honey extractor at harvesting time.

Once the bees have drawn out the foundation into cells the frame can be used again and again. In these modern times of bee disease management frames are generally changed every three years, but in previous generations beekeepers often used the same blackened comb for decades.  When the wax is first drawn its almost pure white, but as the years pass by the wax darkens with age from bee traffic. This is a frame of drawn comb in its first year.

Making up new frames of foundation in front of a winter fire is a delight. Tapping away and enjoying the delicious aroma of beeswax makes it one of those jobs that's a real pleasure.

Comments

[Lizz]

The aroma of beeswax is pure bliss!

[Christina]

It must be great to have your own source of honey. Do you sell it too?

[Caoimhin]

Where do the bees come from? Do you keep some over the winter or do you bring new ones in all the time? :)

[industrial poppy]

Beautiful blog-you are living the life I have always dreamt of, the one I see when I close my eyes and the hustle and bustle falls away. Thanks for this reminder.

[Lucy @ Smallest Smallholding]

Rich and I have thought about beekeeping - Rich did a bit of it when he was a teenager (I think it was just over 10 years ago) and really enjoyed it. Unfortunately I think we're surrounded by overprotective semi-suburban mothers that would freak at the prospect of even just the minimum of 2 hives, so plans are on hold. We might look at having a couple of hives rented out with other hives, but as with so many things we aspire to, this has to go at the bottom of a very long Wish List we're moving through at a snail's pace.

Hope you have a plentiful harvest from your hives this year!

[Rebecca (Sallygardens Smallholding)]

Hi Caoimhin

The bees hopefully survive over the winter as long as you've taken steps to minimise disease and parasites, and made sure they have been left enough honey stores to last until spring so they don't starve. See a previous post here
http://sallygardens.typepad.com/sallygardens/2008/01/bees-in-winter.html

Christina, this is only my 2nd year with the bees. The harvest was small last year so no surplus to sell. If its a bumper year this year we might have surplus, but I want to keep enough to replace any sugar I use in cooking with honey, and some for making mead and also enough for all of us to have a teaspoon every day all year ... so thats quite a lot of honey!

[Kim]

I am just starting my beehive and looking forward to it, hopefully I will do a good job for the bees sake! I am so new to it, I am scared to death I will kill them all! Looking for a mentor if you are interested! Kim at [email protected]