In Autum, there are Often honey flows that occur, and it depends on what locality your bees are situated regarding suitable climate and amount of forage availability.
In the suburbs there are parks, creeks, native bushland, and trees planted as street specimens. Often there are Mugga Ironbark, Paper Bark “Bellbowrie Tea Tree”, Western Red Bloodwoods, Brush Box, White Box, and others too numerous to mention here.
That is why you need to keep a diary of what fl owers and when it flowers, when it yields nectar and when it does not. When it buds, how long it carries its buds before flowering. Rain – moisture when and how much preferably when new growth – buds start, when the buds swell, before buds start to open – crack, and whilst flowering.
At this time, there are species of Paper Bark may be flowering, as it is a short-budded tree following rain that happened at the right time. It is yielding and bees are working it; you should notice the increased activity at the hive entrance. So now is the time to start taking off honey so you can begin the process of reducing your hives for winter.
Look at your honey supers which you have prepared the month before when you looked at brood for disease and did the sugar shake. Have an empty box sitting on a lid rim and smoke over top bars and entrance.
Take off the hive lid and start to lift out frames and shake or brush bees off into the box then place in the empty box sitting on lid. Repeat until you have emptied the super then take off and dump on ground to shake off any adhering bees. You are now down into the next box that you put all the half-fi nished combs which should now be full.
The procedure you carried out in preparation for this is called “under -supering” and is the best way to add new boxes. Lift off the three-quarters-full to -full boxes, put on an empty box. Lift partly fi lled box on top. It is usually the two outside combs on either side that are not completely filled so after lifting box on top put the fully capped frames to the sides and the partially filled frames to the middle. This encourages the bees to come up to the top box to fill the partially filled combs and because they have to travel through the empty box, they start to put honey into the middle four frames filling them as well as the middle frames in the top box.
You then move the full four middle frames in the undersupered box to the outside and put the partially empty frames in the middle. This makes the bees work them quicker as heat travels up through the middle of the hive.
Take your two boxes of honey into your shed or premises where you are going to extract the honey, and extract it the same day as it is warm and will come out of the comb easier. Do not leave it for a couple of days before extracting as, despite having sealed it up, hive beetle can heavily infest making the honey not suitable for human consumption.
The boxes of ‘stickies’ (frames that you have just harvested) can be put over an internal cover which is about 10-12cm smaller than the inside dimensions of a bee box. It can be made out of black plastic sheet or vinyl linoleum, and, leave them over winter. If the winter is mild or the spring is early and the bees are short of room they will travel up above the cover and start to use the empty super.
If you don’t want to do that, put the stickies above the cover for a week and the bees will come up and dry them out then you can take them off and store them protectively so as you have them ready to use in the spring.
Arthur Gaske
