It is Saturday to 13 February and deliveries of wax keep arriving at my door. In these days of social distancing we do click and collect or drop knock and run!
I am again master minding the annual wax exchange. Simply put I encourage the members of the association to save every morsel of wax they scrape and recover as much wax as they can from their hives.
Indeed later today I will be recovering the wax from the hive that died out.
The process is simple quick and easy..... according to me! difficult according to others, it is really just a matter of understanding the nature of bees wax and going with the least line of resistance!
This is an old video
Now if you don't have a commercial steamer don't fret. Get a wall paper stripper and a 50lb honey bucket!
Same effect.... £300 cheaper
I use both !
This is filtering wax through a layer of fabric
This wax can be traded for cash, or sent for conversion... a better solution in my opinion.
I manage to get 40 -70 lb of wax each year.
A couple of years ago we sent off 225lb of wax for conversion. Sent £200 in folding money and in return we received £1560 worth (over the counter price) of foundation back... I rest my case!
This morning I went and checked entrances and cleared out the dead bees, snow and ice from the entrances. I noticed that the few hives that had entrances facing north had solid lumps of ice in them.... mental note make all hives face east or south east to face the rising sun before next summer.
Still working on the swarm blog... this was just a bit more topical!
Happy beekeeping.
Comentarios