Preparing the Bee equipment for next season!

craigcryptoking (69)in #nature • 6 years ago (edited)

Hey everyone, the season of Winter normally brings on many changes in nature, one most profound to myself personally is the ending of the honey-flow in my area.

Generally every end of April we super down all our bee-hives (remove top honey collection compartments) clean our equipment and store in eager anticipation for the coming Spring!

This may seem ambiguous in that we put the bees to 'sleep' for the winter and in a way they do get much less active. They remain in their hives with less space and less bees, science has proven this in a necessary action each Winter so we pretty much follow the rules!

With bee-keeping one gets many pests, hive beetles, wax moths, some birds that prey on the bees and more. We generally store all used equipment with residual honey and wax inside plastic for the cold months to stop these pests invading the boxes. Many bee-keepers keep these in cold storage facilities which really works very well!

As can we seen by the below pics these super frames with the half wax foundations, why half you may ask? The birds ate the rest :(

Inside our bee equipment room with our spinner in the backdrop and bottled honey already crystalized, this tends to happen closer to winter. A good 'metric' of real honey is the fact it goes hard over a month or two. If you have honey older than six months and it is still liquid, throw it away, it's not honey!