Cleaning Up After the Bees

We’ve had a colony of bees living in the hollow column of our side entrance for years now.  Due to the location of the hive, we’ve been unable to get any of the honey, but we’ve enjoyed them living there due to the fact that they pollinate our plants.  In a post from early May, we showed you the bees bearding up outside the entrance to their hive.  They either do this when it is too hot or when a new queen is leaving in a swarm.

During the last week of June, we noticed diminished activity in the hive, with only a few bees flying in and out.  Then, one afternoon we opened the door and smelled a foul odor.  It was a sickly sweet fermented odor, with a slight alcohol scent.  We looked down at the base of the column and noticed honey running out of the bottom.

Fermented honey (meade) running out of the bottom of the column

It really stunk and it was attracting bugs.  I knew that something had to be done to clean out the honeycomb filled with souring honey out of the column.  I got our jack and a 4 x 4 and jacked up the roof of the side porch enough so that I could pull the column out.

The fiberglass column, even though it is hollow, was very heavy and as I pulled it out, maggots began falling from the cap of the column that contained some honeycomb.  it was just a nasty exercise. Benjamin helped me pull the thing out of the way so that we could start working on it.

Pulling the column out

As we pulled out the column, a bunch of honeycomb with rotten honey and maggots poured out.  

Quick inspection showed that there was a lot of honeycomb still in the column, lining the interior and going about 4 feet down.

Using a T-post I started scraping the interior and pulling out honey-saturated honeycomb.

Here is a closer look:

The Honeycomb hideout

It was pretty nasty stuff:

I wish we could have gotten to this while it was still good

We sprayed as much of the honey and honeycomb out of the column as we possibly could and sprayed a bleach and water solution on the inside out outside of the column to try to knock down some of the awful smell.

We had a big pile of honeycomb and sticky rotten honey by the back door that fell out when we moved the column and another pile that we scraped out in the yard.  We shoveled all of the honeycomb that we removed into a 5 gallon bucket and we threw it in the pasture.  We learned a couple of things in the process:

1.       Chickens like to eat honey-drenched honeycomb, and

2.       Black socks and flip flops aren’t going to get me on the cover of GQ magazine.

Oh, one other thing we learned: I’m going to talk to some beekeeper friends of mine.  I already miss the bees.  I want to see if they’ll bring a new swarm of bees to our house.  This time in a beebox and we'll put it in the backyard.  We'll be able to get the honey off of this one.