THE LITTLE GOLDEN FOLK !
(Page 8 of 10)
March/April 1974
By Bill Benintente
When you've secured the swarm in a box or on the branch, shake a few bees into the fresh hive and put the rest on a white sheet laid directly in front of the entrance. If you can locate the queen, so much the better: Once she's hived the rest will follow immediately. Handle her carefully by the thorax or wings (never by the abdomen, lest you injure her and impair her egg-laying ability). Don't worry, however, if you can't find the mother in that mass of life. In most cases the bees will take the hint and enter the super anyway.
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If your newly hived swarm remains where they are a few days, you'll have doubled your colonies quickly and free of charge. (The stay-at-homes in the original community will immediately rear a new queen.) The only disadvantage is that two separate smaller hives produce much less honey than a single large one.
Still, some beekeepers feel that dividing a colony in this way is an inexpensive way to fill hives and they encourage the action just before their bees are ready to swarm on their own. This procedure is slightly more involved than those I've described here and is covered in specialized books on bee culture (see the reading list with this article).
A TASTE OF HONEY
As a colony gets into full production, the storage cells in the brood chamber will fill up and you'll need to add supers (one at a time) to take the surplus honey. In a northern state this stage will be reached somewhere between the middle of June and the middle of July . . . and you'll be able to share the bees' harvest shortly thereafter.
If you like, you can remove a super when it's full, cut out the comb in chunks and enjoy or sell it just like that. Should you plan to do this, he sure to use the thinnest foundation you can buy or eating your honey will feel like biting into the backbone of a fish.
If you want liquid honey, however, you'll need a contraption called (what else?) a honey extractor. This is a simple centrifuge mounted inside a stationary stainless steel tank with a honey gate at the bottom. The full foundations are uncapped on both sides (that is, the caps of fresh beeswax are sliced off with a warm honey knife) and the frames are slid down in a basket inside the tank . . . which may hold two or more, depending on the machine's capacity. Then a handle at the top is cranked and the whole works inside spins around rapidly, throwing all the fluid out against the sides of the container. The harvest drips down to the bottom and-after a few sets of frames have been extracted-is let out into a pail, filtered through damp cheesecloth and bottled.
Some extractors are very expensive (mine cost $29.00, marked down from $65.00 . . . the usual price for a two-frame model). If you look around, however, you may find a farmer or beekeeper near you who's willing to part with a good used machine at a reasonable figure. A handy person might even be able to make an inexpensive substitute that would work as well as a store-bought model.
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