Honeybee_ Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper - C. Marina Marchese [36]
Placing these shallow supers on your hive at the appropriate time is familiarly called supering. The best time to put a honey shallow on your hives is early spring, which in my area, the Northeast, is considered May or June, when the first flowers are popping up and the nectar flow is in full swing. The earlier you place your shallows on your hives, the better chance you have of getting those workers to draw out the beeswax foundation and fill the cells with honey. Early supering gives your colony plenty of time to complete all their honey-making duties in time for your honey harvest in the fall.
By September, if you had a good summer and the weather cooperated, the bees will have filled all nine frames inside the shallow with honey. If the shallow becomes full or looks crowded, and your bees are still bringing in nectar, it is time to add another shallow on top of the stack. The ideal productive honey season is one where your hive has a large, healthy population of foraging worker bees. This part depends upon your queen and her ability to reproduce. The weather also plays a role in honey production. A pleasantly warm season with occasional rainfall is amicable to pollen production. The bees also need to have continuously blooming nectar-bearing flowers to forage on. A summer that is too humid makes the flowers wilt and dry up the nectar, and one too rainy will wash away the pollen.
Once the worker bees have completely filled each hexagonal cell with honey and placed a wax cap over it, you should remove the honey-filled frames from the shallows. It is important to make sure that the bees cap at least 80 percent of the honey-filled cells on each side of a frame before you remove it. Honey from uncapped cells is watery and not ready to harvest, because the bees have not yet finished evaporating the water content of the nectar to 18 percent. If you harvest honey from frames that are not fully capped, you run the risk of having honey that will ferment in the bottle.
Beekeepers remove their honey shallows and extract their honey for bottling at different times, depending on when fall arrives in their location. In the Northeast, this is usually late August and September. Although you remove the honey shallow, the main two deeps still contain enough honey for your bees to carry on the colony throughout the rest of the fall and winter. Removing my first honey shallow from my own hive was a memorable occasion. The sight of a frame filled with honey, perfectly capped and glinting in the sun, is a beautiful and gratifying thing.
HARVESTING THE HONEY
Before the honey can be harvested, the shallows must be removed from the hive, and the honeybees must be removed from the shallows and the frames. There are two ways of removing the bees from the shallow. One is by using something called a bee escape. A bee escape is a plastic insert that goes into that oval hole in the center of your inner cover and acts as a one-way door. It allows the bees inside the honey shallow to crawl down into the deeps, but not return to the honey shallows. You place the bee escape between the shallow and deeps a day or two before you want to remove the shallow from the hive. Generally, after twenty-four hours, all of the bees will have left the shallow and will not be unable to return, allowing you to remove the honey super and leave the bees behind.
The second method of removing bees is for the impatient beekeeper, and it is the one that I prefer. It involves a fume board and some aromatic spray. A fume board is a flat board resembling a hive cover with foam lining the inside. Essentially, you remove the inner and outer covers of the hive and replace them with the fume board. But before you do, you spray the fume board with an aromatic spray that smells like almonds. This spray clears the bees out of the honey shallows. Bees dislike the aroma so intensely