Show Us The Honey

7/25/2016 02:30:00 pm 0 Comments

Delighted to report that, excitingly, we extracted the very first batch of honey from one of our original, and very full, Honeydale Farm hives (known as hive 1) this weekend.

A few days prior to extracting honey, it’s necessary to reduce the number of bees in the supers that are to be removed. The bees always return down to the brood box each day so in order to stop them going back up to the supers again, we put 'porter bee escapes' into the hive last week. These are small one-way valves which are fitted to the crown board which is positioned below the filled supers, and above the brood box.



On Sunday, I collected the three filled supers to be extracted, which equates to 30 frames.

The process for extraction is as follows:

1: Each frame has its two honeycomb faces 'uncapped' using a special 'uncapping knife' which is heated to make the process easier. The wax cappings melt in the uncapping tray and flow off to a separate bucket, where all the molten wax is collected later. This is very hot and sweaty work because the tray is heated by boiling water!

A super frame being 'uncapped'
Wax from the uncapping process before being melted by the tray
The wax capping melts and runs off into a bucket
2: Once uncapped, each frame is placed into a centrifuge extractor. When full, the centrifuge is carefully switched on and the speed is increased so that the honey is spun out of the honeycomb and runs to the bottom of the drum.

Centrifuge extractor
Almost full!
3: The tap at the bottom of the drum is opened and the honey runs out into a bucket.

Our first drop of Honeydale honey!
4: The honey is then sieved into a settling tank where, once settled, impurities rise to the top and the honey is decanted into jars from the tap at the bottom.

There was some crystallisation of the honey in some frames, probably because this was early season rapeseed honey. But this meant that some of the honey could not be spun out of the honeycomb in the same way. Instead, the honeycomb was cut out of the frame with a knife and put in a separate bucket. This bucket is then placed in a warming cabinet so that the crystals melt, the honey liquefies and naturally separates from the wax. After a few days the wax is removed and the honey can be mixed with the rest of the extracted honey before being put into the settling tank.

The buckets in the warming cabinet
Once it has settled we will put the honey into jars one day later this week.

Bees are such amazing creatures and they let nothing go to waste. After extraction we are obviously left with lots of sticky, messy frames. These are put back into the hives and the bees clean up the mess for us, making use of all the leftover honey and wax. In a week or so I will remove these clean frames and fit new foundation ready for them to be used again.

Photos of Honeydale honey pots to follow very soon - we can’t wait!

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Barn Owl Chicks at Honeydale

7/20/2016 03:41:00 pm 0 Comments

Thrilling news from the latest Honeydale Farm bird survey. There are Barn Owls chicks in the nestbox. Our birdman, Richard Brougton from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, observed that both parents are bringing in food and chicks can be heard hissing in the box (so must be fairly big already). There's hatched eggshell underneath the nestbox. 


Honeydale Farm is proving to be a great hunting ground for Barn Owls. Two of the grass fields have recently been mown, which has given the owls a temporary glut of prey (as the voles are exposed) and one of the owl parents is also regularly hunting in the long grass in the orchard and catching a lot of prey (3 voles in half an hour!). Leaving this grass long until the autumn will give the owls a stable hunting ground for the duration of rearing the chicks and we’ll also be leaving wide margins of long grass after mowing in order to maintain a good supply of voles.

There are also huge numbers of butterflies on the farm at the moment, especially Meadow Browns. Richard says he doesn’t think he’s ever seen so many. The uncut strip of herbal ley in one of the arable fields is teeming with butterflies. Richard also saw a Marbled White, which might be a new species here. We’ll be looking into conducting a butterfly survey to compare with the baseline figures gathered when we first took over the farm.

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Long Live The Queens

7/20/2016 09:39:00 am 0 Comments

When we carried out our weekly inspection of the seven hives at Honeydale Farm we made some exciting discoveries.

Hive two is doing well. Although the bees have not really started to fill their first super, the queen is laying eggs and bee numbers look good.

Hive 1 (pictured below) is doing so well that we’ve added yet another super, bringing the total to four now, so the hive is looking very tall. The picture to the right shows the 4 internal 'supers', while the picture below shows the hive fully constructed with it's outer 'lifts'.



We found the queen again (we found her last time but didn’t want to disturb her) and have clipped her wing and marked her with a white spot. This means that both hives now have marked queens which are healthy and laying well. Hopefully the warm weather this week should allow the bees to get busy again and fill some more supers.

We will be taking our very first harvest of honey next week and we can’t wait for our first taste of Honeydale Farm Honey.




Thrillingly, the swarm box now has a queen! We opened it up today and Chris' hunch about their calm behaviour has proven to be spot on, even though it’s taken quite a long time for us to confirm (no pictures yet, sorry!). We didn’t actually see the queen but there are freshly laid eggs in the honeycomb which means a queen is definitely present. We added another empty brood frame to give the bees more space to build honeycomb. If all goes well we should be able to make another colony from this swarm box in due course.

Chris' newly installed hives are also looking good and all have settled in nicely. It’s interesting to see the difference between his 5 hives though, even in the space of a week. Three of the them are developing slowly, with plenty of space left in their brood box for the bees to fill. The other two hives are far more advanced and already need supers adding to them. This just goes to show how variable the colonies can be.

Chris carries out the first inspection on his 5 'National' hives
All the black pollen in this frame shows the bees have been foraging on poppy pollen

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NewBees

7/07/2016 04:02:00 pm 0 Comments

Chris Wells has been at Honeydale today settling his bees into their new hives. He brought five colonies in nuc boxes last week and let them acclimatise to their new surroundings before installing the hives. Now the hives have been built, the frames have been successfully transferred from the nuc boxes and the bees have been given a supply of sugar syrup to tide them over until they have built up their own supply of honey. They’ve already been making good use of the abundance of wildflowers at Honeydale. Several of the females were spotted returning with pollen sacks filled with bright yellow pollen and there is an abundance of distinctive black pollen on the frames too, showing that the bees are foraging on poppies. Chris found queens in four of the five boxes and the fifth is displaying plenty of brood, so all is good. The hives will be left alone until next week when Chris will come back to check progress.


We also carried out an inspection on our own two hives. You may remember in the last update that Hive 1, although producing a good amount of honey, was missing it’s queen and we could not identify any eggs, however the bees were behaving quite calmly, and were polishing brood cells, suggesting there was a queen somewhere soon to be fertilised. The great news is that we have found freshly laid eggs meaning there must be a queen present and she most likely has only recently returned from her mating flights and started laying. As soon as we found the eggs (after celebrating a little) we closed the hive - we’ll let her carry on laying eggs for now and mark her with a white dot next inspection. In hive 2, the newly marked queen has continued to lay eggs, there is a great brood pattern on many of the frames and things are looking great. Things are looking less hopeful for our swarm box which has no brood, indicating that there’s no queen present and the box is likely to be vacated eventually. We are considering starting a new colony from these bees by introducing a new queen.

Looking forward to next week’s inspection when Chris’s Cotswold Bees should have started to feel at home. We’re now delighted to have seven beehives at Honeydale Farm.


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