Making Supers and Frames for the Hive

Electric current to melt foundation into wires We screwed the super, some use nails We are using the plastic ends for the first time

We haven't found a place to buy completely built hive box's so we made our own from the purchased parts. I would suggest looking to the Internet to buy your hive parts. Penders prices, as an example, seem reasonable. A Bee Keeper friend strongly suggested the plastic ends. He says they last much longer, and rarely will the ends of the frames split. I have one frame, in our existing hives, with this problem. Let's see how it works! One photo not taken was the two wires placed between the ends. This wire is to support the foundation wax. A crimping tool was used to tension the wire. Matt in the top photo is applying a small electric current into this wire to melt the foundation wax onto it. Why do we do this? First, we don't want the foundation to fall out of the frame. Second, our bees don't have to work quite as hard, as they use some of the wax to build their comb from. And third the "foundation" makes the bees build the comb in an orderly manner, making the honey extraction easier.

Bottling Bulk Honey

Bottling the honey took longer than extracting the honey from the hives! It was a learning curve and I have a few tips. The best tip is to heat the honey to 60 °C. Otherwise the honey will take forever to flow through the filter material.  Muslin was used as the filter material. Before heating the honey it took about 15 minutes for each bottle to fill, after heating only 20 seconds! The photo shows the final product. I bought the bottles at Cospak. They have all sorts of bottles, jars and containers, normally in bulk supply only. The 20L white container with honey gate I purchased from Hollander Imports for about $29 ... so who's going to eat the honey?

Bee Stings in Painful Places

One of the three places where you don't want a bee sting

Honey Extraction Time!

Finally the Cambridge Division & Co are delivering some produce. HONEY After a few hours (including several stings) we extracted about 18kg of the sweet goodness from 13 frames. The video above shows the wax being scraped off to allow the honey to be spun out of the frame. The pictures below highlight the Super and Frames and also the excess of wax & honey due to a healthy hive.

Bee Hive II not looking good

A brood box frame has very dark brown comb.

Our second hive doesn't look good. Very dark brown/black comb in the brood box. The supers have a similar look. But there are some eggs in the cells and on the top photo you can see drones walking around, maybe the queens there somewhere. 

Our bee keeping books says, the tan/brown cap is brood. That means there should be little baby bees under these brown caps. You can see this in the bottom photo.

Brood in a super

There is a lot of bees in the hive so I hope it will be ok. But when I compare this hive with the other hive it looks poor. The other hive is dripping in honey! Heavy frames loaded with capped honey! We really don't know what we are doing, so I wonder if there is something wrong. Perhaps the hive swamped and the brown comb is because it's old and they are re-building the hive with a new queen.

A Seen of Devastation

Came by Jill & Matt's smallholding to see the progress of the "garden entertaining deck". I thought to myself, "That is looking fantastic, most of the framing done. what is that Ute doing near the bee hives....?"

Is this a seen of devastation or what? Matt wasn't around to ask, but it's made my morning more interesting.

To make it more challenging, we have the two bee hives just in front of Ute. I wonder how they will react to horde of people trying to get a bogged Ute out. Better let Matt borrow my bee suit. Better wash it afterwards too...

First Bee Hive Inspection

Acquired two hives from contacts at the Tasmanian Beekeepers' Association. We have four boxes for each hive. One brood box at bottom and three box's on top.


After two weeks in new location we opened them up for inspection. Most of the honey was found in the second box (see picture). Very little honey in the top box (4th), but covered in bees so should be good things to come.


PS: Friends bringing a plate of sweet cakes while the hive is open makes them go crazy! Yes quite a lot of people where stung on the head!