A Taste of Honey.

Put clearing boards on the two beehives that have honey to harvest today, they’re a sort of non-return valve for bees that work on the principle of a lobsterpot entrance. The bees can find their way out of the honey box into the brood box, but can't find their way back again. It makes collecting the honey so much easier when there are no bees to contend with.
 
Part of the process is removing the queen excluder which is this array of wires. The spacing is quite critical, it is such that it presents little impediment to the workers, but neither the drones nor the queen can get through, and it sits between the brood box and the honey box. Its real purpose is to prevent the queen from laying eggs amongst the honey for, although consumers in other countries like larvae mixed in with their honey, Europeans tend to find the idea a little off-putting. Not only that, my bees are a valuable commodity in their own right.
 
One of the characteristics of the excluder is that it confuses the workers; they see the spaces on either side of it as a single continuous space which is wide enough for them to fill with comb, rather than leave it as a passageway. This gives the beekeeper the opportunity to have an early taste of a few drops of honey. The honey crop this year has been gathered within the last couple of weeks, I can only guess that it is from ivy; it is a dark colour, strongly flavoured and a late crop (the three normally go together) but I would not expect the flowers to appear just yet. Maybe someone will be able to tell me at our honey tasting evening.