Housework...

 The cold wet weather continues so the bees are still tucked up inside their hives  - what is the beekeeper supposed to do with all this downtime? A spot of house(hive)work is the answer, a chance to really clean up all those old frames and collect any wax that can be re-used.

The first thing was to cut out any old honey and pollen stores and drop these into a pan of boiling water - the heat separates out the wax from the  stores and the resulting soupy liquid is poured into a bucket and allowed to cool. The wax then rises to the top and sets like a lid which can then be taken off and filtered again, and the remaining liquid can be put out for the bees to pick over when the weather improves.

What's left on the frames is typically some old used comb and the task is then to separate out the wax from all the bee poo and dirt. Last year Kevin ingeniously devised a steamer using an old plastic hive and a wallpaper steam-stripper. Simple in concept and extremely effective, we put the frames of old comb into the hive, plug in the steamer, and watch as the wax runs out at the front of the hive. After half an hour or so we are left with frames full of waste and a bucket of wax. What's fascinating is that the waste stays in the shape of the comb, as in the above photo. We then filter the wax a couple more times to get out any remaining impurities, then store it carefully for use later in the year for our candle-making workshops.

Our belief is that we owe it to our bees to re-use this wax - it costs them a great deal of effort to produce it so it would be wrong to just chuck it out because it's dirty. By spending a bit of time cleaning the frames, we harvest the wax and provide them with some lovely fresh frames in the spring. If only the rest of the housework was as much fun!