Hello and welcome to my page about my apiary. This page is mostly here so I can point people at it. The sort of people who might be interested are those who buy my honey. Although you might wish to take
"Bismark's" advice. This page is pointed at by
tinyurl.com/wmc-bees.
Yes, only two: I am an artisanal beekeeper. Over the years, the number of hives I've had has varied from zero (sadly) to four. Four was a lot to keep going. Two is a good number, I've been on that for a while. Here's some honey:
Recently - spring 2022 - I moved house from leafy Coton into Cambridge where I felt my bees might be less welcome, and so have moved them into the long garden of a friend who also keeps bees.
This picture shows the fuller setup: mine are the two central; the far right is theirs; the far left is a spare, currently empty.
Extracting honey
After the frames are removed from the hive and de-capped (the bees will seal the cells with a little wax cap when they think they're ready; to spin out the honey this cap needs removing; I do this with a kitchen bread knife; see this picture) they are then put in the extractor and spun. I have a 1/3 share in a stainless steel "tangential" extractor (which means the frames are placed tangential to the circumference, which means they need to be spun gently, rotated, spun again, rotated, and spun again; which is why the pros prefer radial extractors. Pic showing the inside). Spun off honey then collects in the base of the extractor and can then be tapped off, filtered (in this case via the conical stainless steel filter shown here) to remove bits of wax and undesireable bits of bees, and collected. It is then fit to be bottled.
The archives
There are lots of old blog posts over the years; let's list some:
*
Beekeeping, 2021 (an index page which I failed to find, hence created this one)
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