Each of those small, pale dots on my jeans is a bee sting. I decided to start the process of taking the honey off hive #1 this morning, and - as you can probably guess from the number of stings in the photo - it did not go well. In case you're wondering - yes, they were specifically targeting my groin area. They may be small, but they know how to hit where it hurts...
I was hoping that there wouldn't be too many bees in the super (the box with the honey frames) and that I might be able to simply shake the bees off and then take the super away with me today. Well, that wasn't an option, as there were lots of bees.
So, I had to go with the slower option. Basically, it goes like this: Firstly, you temporarily remove the full super (i.e. full of honey and bees) from the hive. Then you put a couple of these little devices, called 'porter bee escapes' into the slots on the crown board:
The way they work is they are one-way gates, which allow the bees down through the hole (in the one on the left) and then out through the slots that you can see at the top and bottom of the one on the right. Here's what they look like in place (not my own crown board, as taking photos today was... challenging...):
You then put the crown board back on the hive, with the super on top. The idea is that, throughout today, the bees will travel down, through the porter bee escapes, out of the super and into the hive below - and won't be able to travel back up again. Which means that, in theory, when I go back to the hive tomorrow morning, there won't be any bees in the super, and I will simply be able to take it off the hive and bring it back to my house to extract the honey.
So, I will be up early tomorrow at the hive to see if the theory works in practice.
