A few final notes following the pulling of fall honey from our hives. We had mentioned a while back about small hive beetles and the damage that they can do in a hive. If you have a strong colony, the bees will do a good job of fighting them off. The guard bees run them out of the frames. We help the bees out a little bit. We learned a trick from our bee club that is doing the trick.
Swiffer sheets. Yep, you heard me right. Those sheets that you put on a dust mop to clean your kitchen floors have a dual purpose. They will catch and kill small hive beetles. We put a sheet on the top of the frames. The bees run the small hive beetles out of the hive and up to the top. When they run across the Swiffer sheets, their little feet get caught in the microfibers and they are stuck together like velcro. They end up dying. Look at all the small hive beetle carcasses on the Swiffer sheets!:
Tricia began rendering the beeswax from the cappings from our fall honey pull. It only consisted of 21 frames, but we still save every bit we can. Tricia puts all the cappings along with some water into a crock pot and lets it all liquefy. This is then poured through a muslin cloth that acts as a filter. We do this process twice to get a lot of impurities out of the beeswax. It looks like a brick of gold.
We're saving all this beeswax for candle-making and making lip balm. We are getting quite an inventory of beeswax and there are so many uses for it.
Once the beeswax has been filtered and removed from the crock pot, what remains is some honey that was trapped in the wax. That honey, however, is mixed with water. We tend to feed all this back to the bees. In very early spring, we'll pull this out of the freeze and feed the bees.
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