A Mind Of Its Own

ODTAA is a medical term describing those unfortunate  patients who recover from one problem only to be confronted immediately by another.  One Damn Thing After Another might be a beekeeping term too, in which case one of those ‘things’ is honey extraction.  When we are asked, “I’m thinking of taking up beekeeping, what do I need to know?” the first response might be, “Are you capable of dealing with one damn sticky mess after another?”  This no doubt is what Rudyard Kipling had in mind when he wrote, 

“If you can keep your head when all about you 

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you …”

We have all invited visitors to swish a finger through the stream of honey coming out of the extractor, and watched as they dealt with the drippiness and the stickiness –   a twist of the hand, a quick lick, and it’s solved. But it is deceptively simple, as we discover when a child tries the same technique.  We have spent millennia developing techniques to coerce honey from its rightful owners, but have been less effective in developing methods to coerce honey from its rightful home – capped cells – because, to state the obvious, honey has a mind of its own. 

It starts when, inspecting a hive, you remove all of the brace comb which the bees have built, even though you have provided them with nice new foundation only one frame away.  This means honey on the end of your hive tool which, unsurprisingly, the bees are trying to reclaim together with the bits of loose comb which, if you don’t act quickly, will slip between the frames and drop to the bottom of the hive.   In desperation, you grab those bits of comb – you once tried stabbing them with your hive tool before they dropped but, because of the honey already on the tool, nothing would stick to it, even though honey will stick to everything else, including Teflon non-stick pans. 

Now, besides a sticky hive tool, you also have sticky fingers, and because you grabbed your hive tool, that now has a sticky handle. 

Because you have thought ahead and have a bucket of warm water at the ready, you rinse off your fingers and resume the hive inspection, at which point you realize you should have washed your hive tool before you rinsed your fingers. In frustration, you put your hand to your mouth, meaning that your veil is now sticky as well. 

Why are you wearing a veil to extract honey?  Books are filled with instructions describing how to get the best honey crop, but little is said of the requirement that you, the beekeeper, will need to pick up heavy, sticky boxes with small handles weighing  in excess of 60 pounds.  No matter what method you used to move the bees from the frame before removing the boxes from the hive, there are always a small number of bees who refuse to leave and are now determined to take full advantage or your aching back and sticky gloves.  Banging supers on the ground to dislodge said bees does not work; the inevitable result is broken frames and angry bees, hence the veil.

As these same books describe it, extracting honey  is a straight forward process: remove the caps from sealed honey comb, spin the frames, collect the honey and pour into jars. In practice it is inviting retribution from the honey gods to so much as think that this is something that can be done quickly in between other jobs. 

Most extracting is done in the ‘honey house’ – ie. the family kitchen – and preparation is key.   First, arrange for your family to be suitably distracted for at least twice as long as you think it will take to complete the extraction. To steal from Stephen Bishop’s  column in the June issue of Bee Culture, “Be advised.  You should only attempt (honey extraction) outside of the earshot of small children because your wife will will likely erupt with words that will stunt their growth as morale right individuals when she discovers the condition of her cookware …”

Secondly, plenty of clean damp cloths is essential, as well as a source of running  water from a faucet that can be turned on either with an elbow or with sticky hands, and is easy to clean – unchanged water in a bucket, used a couple of times, becomes a weak honey solution so its continued use means spreading a thin syrup over everything in the kitchen. A word of advice – immediately you see a drip it must be wiped  up. Given half a chance even the smallest drop can attach itself to a host, eg. the family dog, in which case you have to catch and clean the offending animal before starting to clean up the sticky paw prints.  

 Some beekeepers proactively cover the floor with newspaper, but the thought of traipsing through the house with sticky bits of newspaper attached to my shoes prevents me from trying this.  I do know (and don’t ask me how I know this) that using one shoe to try to remove sticky newspaper from the other shoe, does not work.   

Before you can extract you have to uncap. According to all the videos that you watched beforehand, the  bees will produce combs packed with honey on both sides of the frame which is perfectly flat and just above the wood of the frame. The trick is to skim off the cappings by gliding a warm knife along the edge of the frame, tilting the frame at a suitable angle so that the cappings fall neatly into the uncapping tray.  Simplicity itself.   In reality the knife goes cold so that both wax and honey stick to the blade. You scrape the knife on the edge of the tray,  dip it into the now cooled water and try again. Eventually you give up trying to keep the knife hot and just slice and scrape. The uncapping tray now has globules of wax and honey around its edges which are starting to drip down the outside, which in turns acts as a magnet for bees  (the scouts were watching when you forgot to close the kitchen window. )

Nor are you finished uncapping. Rather than flat, level comb that is easy to uncap, invariably the frames have peaks and valleys reminiscent of a miniature Zion National Park with its unpredictable combination of mesas and canyons.   The mesa’s are decapitated by the knife, but what of the canyons?  First you try using the tip of the knife but quickly  resort to an uncapping fork. A bundle of sticky wax honey rolls up the tines, and although you stop frequently to scrape it off (on the edge of the tray, where else?) eventually, it reaches the fork handle.   So now your hand is a sticky mess at precisely the moment that you realize you have to scratch your nose which has become unexpectedly itchy. But there are still five supers of frames that need to be processed before nightfall, so to hell with it;  you bash on with sticky hands, sticky knife, sticky fork and itchy nose and more honey on your veil; just don’t let anything sticky get on the floor.

Faucets on honey extractors also have minds of their own.  It may be taking a long time for the honey to dribble though a filter becoming clogged with wax, but even the mere thought of  wandering off to check your e-mails is tempting fate. 

Eventually all the frames are uncapped and have to be manoeuvered into the extractor, after which all those stickies have to be dealt with, the gooey cappings have to be strained, the wax separated and all that washing-up to do, very little of  which will  fit in the sink.  The honey itself has to be bottled, jarred, labeled and eventually liquified after crystallizing.  It’s ODTAA.

One honey bee, in her life time, will collect enough nectar to make 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.   That 1/12th of a teaspoon is enough to provoke barrels of frustration in the life of a beekeeper.  Such is the honey bee’s revenge.