A beekeeper's primary tasks in hive management are to assess the behavior of the bees, to monitor and anticipate the space needed by the colony, and to treat the colony for diseases. Beekeepers have a yearly set of activities that are required for good management of their hives. During the winter, equipment is typically repaired, painted, or replaced. In the late winter, the beekeeper will assess whether the colony has enough food to last until the spring.
When the bees become active with the onset of springtime, the keeper will make sure that the brood nest is being formed in the lower tiers of the colony, remove any damaged equipment, and provide food if the colony needs an extra boost. As the weather reliably warms and flowers begin to appear, the primary task becomes monitoring the space needs of the hive.
Once spring arrives, a beekeeper will visit each colony at least every two weeks to check on the bees. Honey made in the spring and early summer is removed in midsummer, and this is the share of the honey for the beekeeper. The bees then have the opportunity to rebuild the honey stores they will need to sustain them through the winter from flowers that bloom in late summer and early autumn.
In past centuries, taking honey from wild colonies usually involved subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the area of the hive where the colony was located. The honeycombs were torn out and destroyed along with the eggs and larvae. The honey was strained through a sieve or a basket to remove the broken pieces of comb and any other solids from the liquid honey. Modern beekeepers, however, have the benefit of moveable frame hives, and when the honey is removed using a hive tool and extracted from the honeycomb frames, the beeswax can be returned to the hive for refilling by the worker bees.
Exactly how a beekeeper removes honey frames from beehives depends on the number of frames and the number of colonies that the beekeeper is managing. A hobby beekeeper may harvest just a few frames of honey, while a large beekeeping operation might harvest hundreds of frames.
The first challenge is to remove the bees from the frames of honey. A hobbyist may simply remove individual frames and use a soft bee brush to dust off the adult bees before taking the honey away, while a larger operation will use a machine, called a bee blower, that creates forced air to blow the adult worker bees off the honey frames. Many beekeepers use an alternative method of separating bees from honey, called a bee escape. This creates a one-way passage that is placed between the honey supers and the brood region below, allowing the bees to crawl downward through the escape, but not return back up.
After the escape has been left in place for about twenty-four hours, the honey supers are typically bee free and can be removed without disruption of the frames. A final technique is the use of chemical bee repellents, either benzaldehyde (almond oil) or butyric anhydride. A few drops of these liquids are placed on a board that is specially designed for hive fumigation, and the board is placed for two to five minutes on top of the honey frames. The bees in the honey area will move away, and the beekeeper can take the honey off but leave the bees inside the colony. If used properly, chemical repellents are effective, but if overused, they can disrupt the entire colony.
The next task is to remove the honey from the combs. Each frame of honey is capped with a thin layer of beeswax that must be removed so that the honey can be extracted. The cappings can be removed with an uncapping fork, an uncapping knife, or another mechanical tool. Next, the frames are put into a honey extractor, which works like a large salad spinner.
As the extractor rotates, the honey is forced out of the frames and down into a large holding vessel, and then the honey is usually filtered to remove large bits of wax. In some larger honey-extraction facilities, the honey is heated so that it flows readily through the extraction and filtration process, but smaller honey extractors do not heat the honey as it is being processed.
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08192010
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