We kicked off the month of August with one of our favourite annual activities – the honey harvest!
We currently manage six beehives, which we regularly inspect throughout the season to monitor both the health of our bees and the progress of honey production. During an inspection, we look for the presence of the queen, eggs and larvae, assess the space available within the hive and check the overall condition and development of the colony.
Within each hive are three types of honeybee – the queen, workers and drones – each playing a different role within the colony. When worker bees discover a good source of food, they can even communicate its location to others through a fascinating behaviour known as a ‘waggle dance’!
As harvest time draws closer, our inspections also help us determine how much honey can be collected without compromising the colonies. Only frames with suitable honey stores are selected, with plenty always left within the hives to sustain the bees through the colder months when opportunities to forage become much more limited.
The selected frames were carefully taken from each hive and labelled so that, once the process was complete, every frame could be returned to the colony it came from. Keeping equipment with its original hive is an important part of good hive management and helps minimise the risk of transferring disease between colonies.
Before the honey could be extracted, we first needed to open the wax capping which seals the honey within the comb. We used a combination of methods to do this. For some frames, a heat gun was passed briefly over the surface, gently melting back the wax to expose the honey beneath. We also used uncapping forks, which allow the wax seals to be carefully lifted away from the surface of the comb by hand. Once uncapped, the frames were ready for extraction.
The frames were then placed into a centrifuge, which spins them at high speed. The spinning motion forces the honey out of the open comb and onto the inner walls of the centrifuge, where it runs down and collects at the bottom. From there, the honey is released through a tap and passed through a double sieve, removing pieces of wax and other small debris while allowing the freshly extracted honey to flow through.
Then came the particularly satisfying part – filling the jars! Our brilliant team of Heathrow volunteers provided some much-appreciated extra hands, setting up a production line to fill and label the jars.
Altogether, this year’s harvest produced an impressive 337 jars of honey from our six hives, which will be used as gifts as well as prizes for future volunteering events. When you consider that a single worker bee produces only around 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey during their lifetime, each jar is the result of an incredible collective effort from the colonies!
Check out our next post to find out more about what we got up to for the rest of August and September.