Honey Hostilities
This weekend was all about the honey harvest! Anna collected the extractor on Friday afternoon and I’d already put clearer boards on a couple of our hives. The ‘Bedroom’ Hive was huge with 4 completely full supers and a fifth that was half full. ‘Dyfi’ hive had two full supers and ‘Leri’ had a couple that weren’t quite capped. It could be a good honey harvest this year.
So, once Anna was home, Morgan and I went out into the garden and took off three supers that had been cleared of bees – 2 from the bedroom hive and one from Dyfi.
We checked the ones in Leri too but they still weren’t fully capped. Anna then set about extracting the honey and I helped too. Before we knew it we had loads of bowls of sticky golden honey waiting to be put into jars and labelled up.
There was still lots of honey on the hives though so it was back on with my bee-suit.
The plan was to return the empty honey supers to the hives they had come from and to move another of the supers on the bedroom hive to the top and place a clearer board under it so that we could get another super-full of honey from it. We’d still be leaving them with at least 1.5 supers of honey plus whatever they had in their double brood box. Meanwhile I left the ‘Dyfi’ Hive with a full super of honey and simply returned the empty super to them so that they could clean up the frames.
I then headed up to the bedroom hive ready to move the supers around. The bees had other ideas though. No sooner had I opened up the hive and they started to attack. Somehow a few of them managed to sting me through my suit and then a few managed to get inside my suit. I made a hasty retreat leaving the hive half dismantled as I tried to sort myself out. I’d been stung on my wrist, my leg, my head and my stomach and now had a whole host of ‘followers’ who were also determined to sting me. There were quite a few in my wellies too! I eventually managed to fend them off and retreated inside the house to re-group!
The hive was still open so I’d have to go back out, but Morgan offered to do it instead and soon had his suit on. We made sure it was properly done up and that he was well protected. I told him just to close it up and leave them to it but he wanted to have a go at moving the supers around so that we could get the honey out of another. That idea soon changed because as soon as he was out there he’d been stung as well. He’d been stung through his suit on his arm and also through a hole in one of his gloves. We changed his gloves and he had one more attempt, this time just putting the empty supers back on the hive and closing it up.
He managed it, not very neatly, but considering the circumstances he did pretty well. You can’t really blame the bees, they were just protecting what is rightly theirs! We’d already stolen around 40lb of their honey why would they give up any more of it. They certainly put up a good fight and their efforts worked – we hadn’t managed to get any more of their honey and had simply left them to it. In fact, I do need to go back into them to sort a few things out but we’ve decided to leave them alone for at least a few days so that they can calm down.
Once Morgan was back in the house, he was having something of a reaction to the stings. As well as the expected soreness, redness and swelling around the sting sites, he’d also come out in hives in a number of places and was itchy all over too. His hand was pretty swollen as well, and still is a couple of days later.
I’m still not sure how the bees managed to sting us through our bee-suits, or how they managed to get inside of mine, but I think I’ll be taking extra precautions next time I take a look at that hive! We do have around 50lb of honey all jarred up now though. We also know that there’s probably at least that much again out there in the hives, and we’d like to get half of what’s left, we just aren’t quite brave enough to go and get it!
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Wow poor you and poor Morgan, that looks really swollen I guess he’s had plenty of antihistamine already so hope it all goes back to normal soon, naughty bees they certainly weren’t going to give their honey up that day.