Hi I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 95 of my podcast Beekeeping Short and sweet.
This week, I’ve been back at the workshop getting stuck into the cleaning jobs, had a really interesting meeting with fellow bee farmers and today, suffered the torture of the dentist's chair, so stay tuned for more beekeeping chat followed by a few blood-curdling screams as the drill bites home!
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Another busy week, someone recently said to me that beekeeping must be a doddle through the Winter because you don’t have to do anything! Believe me, it’s been anything but quiet. We’ve been recording a few more videos and that I guess does eat into the time a fair amount, not that I’m complaining, I love producing the videos to share, particularly those for the Patreon page where everyone is so very supportive with their comments.
We spent a very busy day at the workshop cleaning the majority of the old boxes and frames. I had a stack of boxes from the late Summer and Autumn losses that needed to be stripped out and cleaned so we decided we really ought to get stuck into that before it gets to be a last-minute panic. I’m really good at telling others how to get organised but for myself, I just seem to get caught up in the procrastination game and delays creep in. Totally my own fault and something I need to get a grip of.
So the cleanup operation went well in the end. We had around thirty boxes, mostly brood boxes with frames in, a mix of National and Commercial boxes. The frames in some could have been rescued but it’s a judgement call that I always fall on the side of caution with. My previous experience as a bee inspector has shown me that when you decide to take a short cut there’s every chance that’s the one-time things can go horribly wrong. A bit like that important piece of paper you had on your desk that you said you really must file, you forget to file it and three months later you’re shortly the house down trying to find out who moved it when actually you should have put it away when you thought about it.
Getting back to the cleanup operation, the process is quite straightforward, remove the frames, cut out the old wax comb, scrape the frame a little and stack the frames ready for boiling. Remove the runners from the boxes, grab a hive tool and go to work scraping all of the wax and propolis from the inside of the box and finally scorch the box with a flame to get the last stubborn bits of debris out and hopefully kill off anything that shouldn’t be in there.
The wax goes into a half-barrel with water in the bottom six inches and gets heated up to melt out before being strained and cleaned properly.
All of this takes time of course and we didn’t get everything sorted although I think the only jobs remaining are the scorching of the boxes and the cleaning up of the wax.
To be honest, I think there may be a few frames still to boil but all in all, it was a good days effort.
As usual, I have to thank Pete and Steph for their fantastic help, we tried to shoot a time-lapse video of the entire event which I’ve posted to the Patreon page, I’m not sure we got the right angle to show the sheer amount of work that was done but with practice I’m sure we’ll get better.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, I was in Solihull at a swanky hotel for a Bee Farmers Association meeting called the Knowledge Exchange Groups. It was a chance for members of the Bee Farmers Association who had signed up to the groups to get together and look at the data that we all compile for last years season, compare and contrast and from my perspective, see if I could find any indicators that would shape the way we do things this year,