Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World (42 page)

The best way to work is to have one person dissecting and another one or two stringing the comb into frames. Shake the bees off the comb and lay it on your work surface. You need to fit it into the strung frames. If it’s too big, cut it to size. Lay the frame string-side down, and add the comb in pieces to roughly fill the frame. Then enclose the open side with another quick zigzag of string.

Save any small or spare chunks of honeycomb by tossing it in one of the buckets or bags. You’ll use it later to feed the bees. Shut the bag or bucket to keep the bees out. Use the other bag for garbage—you might find some dirty old comb in the process—and general cleanup.

As you fill each frame, transfer it to the hive box or nuc box. Fill frames until there’s no comb left in the original hive.

Spritz any bees hanging around on the table or the original hive site with sugar water. Then you can sweep them into a dust pan with the bee brush and dump them over the frames in the new hive. They’ll crawl in. The ones in the air will be attracted to the scent of the queen. They’ll also be drawn toward the honey and the brood.

When you’re done, put the lid on the nuc box or hive. If you’re planning to transport the box, wait a few hours if you can, until sunset preferably, to give the workers who are out in the field a chance to return to the hive. Meanwhile, plug up entrances to the old hive so that a new colony does not take up residence in the same spot. When you’re ready to go, tape up the nuc box or hive box so that all the exits are sealed and the lid is on tight for safe transport.

Once home, put the hive box on its stand or the nuc box on top of the permanent hive box until you have a chance to transfer the frames. Unseal the entrances so the bees can come out in the morning and take a look around.

The next day, or soon after, suit up again at midday and carefully transfer the frames from the nuc box (if you used one) into the permanent hive. Remove some of the empty frames from the hive box so you have lots of room to lower the bee-covered Franken-frames into the hive gently. Fill the lower box first. If you have more than 10 filled frames, put a few in the upper box. Otherwise leave the upper box full of empty frames for the bees to build on in the future. Put the second box on top of the first box. If any spare bees are in the nuc box, upend the box over the permanent hive. The bees should fall down between the frames. Any that are flying will figure things out.

FEED THE HIVE

It’s a good idea to feed the bees to keep them happy and healthy until they can reestablish their hive. To do this, you’ll use a spacer frame to create a feeding area on top of the hive. See directions for how to build one on page
283
. Put on your gear, and as usual, it’s best to do this during daylight hours, when the workers are out. Have everything ready so you can move quickly. Remove the lid of the hive. Take the spacer frame you assembled and put it on top of the hive, on the topmost hive box. This will provide a little head space for feeding. Lay any chunks of honeycomb that you reserved from the cutout there, right on top of the frames. Also give the bees the prepared bag of sugar water. Spread the bag out flat. Take a razor blade or sharp knife and cut a 2-inch slit in the center, just enough that the sugar water puddles out a little onto the surface of the bag, not so much that the sugar water gushes into the hive. This cut will become a feeding trough for the bees. Put the lid on top of the spacer and leave the bees alone.

After 3 or 4 days, put on your gear again and lift the lid to check on the bag. If the bag is empty, swap it out for another. Feed the bees this way for a couple weeks. If flowers are plentiful, they’ll soon have enough supplies of their own. If there’s not much in bloom, you might have to feed a bit longer. They’ll lose interest in the sugar water when they don’t need it anymore.

TIPS ON KEEPING BEES

Mostly you’re just there to watch. The bees will take care of themselves. Observe your hive as much as you can, to get to know the bees’ behavior. Happy working bees don’t mind if you walk up close to the hive, so we often spend time with no gear on, right in front of the hive, watching their comings and goings. By observing, you’ll learn to identify normal bee behavior. You can see workers returning from the field with pollen panniers packed on their back legs. This is a good sign that they’re tending brood. You’ll see how the hive hums with activity on a sunny day and how they hunker down when it rains. Some of the behaviors you see you won’t understand. That’s okay, just keep watching. Remember, you have to let bees be bees. If they’re having any internal problems, you have to trust them to sort it out.

The one thing you should do is suit up every month or so, smoke the hive, and peek inside to make sure they have enough room. If they’ve filled about seven out of ten frames in the topmost box, it’s time to stack another box full of empty frames on top of the hive. If they get crowded, they might swarm. That is, half of them, or all of them, might leave your hive to look for more spacious digs. Bees from a crowded hive also tend to become aggressive, so it’s in everyone’s best interests to make sure they have plenty of room.

Finally, for support and ongoing education, seek out other beekeepers in your area—preferably backward-style or natural beekeepers—through beekeeping clubs or online groups. Visit them and lend a hand when they work with their hives. For further reading, we suggest
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Beekeeping,
which was written by two backward-style beekeepers. See our resource listing at the end of this book for more beekeeping books and links.

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Build a Honey Extractor and Collect Some Honey

PREPARATION:
1 hour

Traditional honey extractors are expensive devices designed to spin honeycomb at high speed. The centrifugal action sucks the honey from the comb, leaving the wax cells intact. The empty comb is then returned to the hive, where the bees will refill it. Since they don’t have to rebuild the comb, they put more energy into honey making, thus upping the hive’s productivity. As backward beekeepers, our primary concern is the bees, not the honey. We don’t provide them with prebuilt comb, so they don’t make comb that would do well in a centrifuge. When we collect honey, we use a simple crush-and-strain method.

All this requires is a few pieces of easy-to-assemble, inexpensive filtering equipment and the assistance of gravity. The comb is lost to the bees, so they have to rebuild, but building is what they do best. We get to keep the honey and the wax.

YOU’LL NEED

• 2 (5-gallon) food-grade buckets with lids
  
• Sharp knife, like a utility knife with a new blade
  
• 5-gallon (60-pound) plastic pail with a honey gate installed at the bottom, and a lid (available at beekeeping supply companies)
  
• 5-gallon nylon paint strainer (available at painters’ supply stores)
  
• Drill with Vi-inch bit
  
• Something to crush the comb, like a sharp paint scraper mounted on a pole or a very clean spade
  
• Ordinary beekeeping equipment for collecting the honey: bee suit, gloves, smoker, bee brush
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

ASSEMBLE THE BUCKETS

Set aside one 5-gallon bucket for collecting honey. You won’t need it right now.

Using a knife with a sharp blade, cut the center out of the lid
^A
belonging to the bucket with the honey gate.
^B
Leave about 1 inch around the rim.

Drill two rings of ½-inch holes in the bottom of the regular bucket: a small ring dead center and a second ring close around it.
^C
Arrange the holes so that they lie within the circumference of the hole you cut in the lid of the honey-gate bucket. This bucket will sit on that lid. The honey will pass through these holes into the lower bucket, so the holes must be positioned within the circumference of the hole in the cutout lid.

Tuck the paint strainer
^D
into the bucket fitted with the honey gate. The paint strainer is bag shaped. Fold the edges of the bag over the rim of the bucket and snap the cutout lid onto the bucket to hold the strainer in place. Balance the bucket with the holes in the bottom on top of this lid. That’s it. That’s your fancy setup.

COLLECT THE HONEY

The honey is cut out of the frames at the site of the hive. Have the second clean 5-gallon bucket ready to collect the comb. Smoke the entrances and wait 5 to 10 minutes for the bees to pacify, then lift off the top of the hive. If they still seem a little aggressive, give them another puff of smoke. Lift the frames from the hive, one by one, looking for those that are full of honey. When you find a likely candidate, give it a sharp shake to knock off the clinging bees. Using the bee brush, sweep away any stubborn bees. Standing over the bucket, cut the honeycomb out of the frame with a sharp knife, leaving a ½-inch strip of comb at the top of the frame to serve as foundation for rebuilding. Let the honeycomb fall into the bucket. Put the lid on the bucket to keep bees out, replace the empty frame in the hive, and repeat. Always be sure to leave enough honey for the hive.

When do you harvest honey? How much honey should you leave? Generally speaking, there won’t be enough to harvest until a year after you’ve started a new hive. Both a captured swarm and a cutout swarm have a lot of rebuilding to do. The presence of excess honey means they have time and energy to concentrate on stockpiling food. We don’t begin to consider harvesting honey until the hive has expanded to fill 5 boxes. Knowing how much to take and when to take it is part of the art of beekeeping. The answers vary, depending on the size and health of the hive, the season, and the availability of resources for the bees. Some hives can yield a hundred pounds of honey at a shot, others can’t afford to spare any at all. Until you get the knack of it, you’ll want the advice of a beekeeping mentor who can evaluate your specific set of conditions. If in doubt, don’t harvest. It’s better to err on the side of caution.

CRUSH THE HONEY

Inside the house, away from the bees, open the collection bucket. Crush the comb using a long, sharp implement of some sort, like a paint scraper mounted on a pole or a clean spade. A sturdy metal spatula might do for smaller quantities of honey. With sharp downward motions, cut through the comb until there’s no more resistance to the blade. The crushed comb and honey will be a semiliquid mass.

STRAIN THE HONEY

Tip the collection bucket full of honey and mashed comb into the top bucket of your strainer. The holes in this bucket will catch the larger chunks of wax, then the honey will drip down into the lower bucket, where the paint strainer will catch smaller pieces and other impurities. This will take a good while, so put a lid on the top bucket to keep out flies and leave it overnight.

ENJOY THE SPOILS

The next day, put a sanitized jar beneath the honey gate and open the gate. Sample your very own raw, unfiltered, local honey collected from wild bees. It tastes like sweet joy.

SMALL-SCALE HARVESTING

The double-bucket system is designed to accommodate large quantities of honey. If you have only a comb or two, you can use the same basic principles to improvise an extractor. Line a colander with cheesecloth. Balance the colander over a large bowl. Put the honeycomb in the colander and crush it into pulp with a spatula. Cover the colander with a kitchen towel and let the honey drain into the bowl overnight. The next day, bottle the honey or strain it through fresh cheesecloth a second time, if necessary.