Spring Honey Harvest

(Japan) I apologize for not having any photographs, but I neglected to bring my camera to work.

Yesterday I checked my native Japanese honey bee hive on the roof of Agriculture Building #1, Hakozaki Campus, Kyushu University and saw that all the honey at the top of the hive appeared to be capped, so decided that now is a good time to harvest some honey from the hive. It is recommended to harvest honey in May and October in order to avoid absconding by Apis cerana japonica colonies. This Spring has been much cooler than last year’s.

Today I got my gear together, took in up onto the roof of the building and lit the smoker. There was quite a cluster of bees (a bee beard) on the front of the hive around the entrance, as well as a cluster hanging down underneath the hive. As I started twisting off top bars (the combs are not attached to the top bars in a fashion that a comb can be removed for examination or harvesting) in order to cut out the honeycomb from the top, I smoked the bees that were in the top of the hive. All in all, the bees in the colony were not pleased and many came pouring out the front entrance as I smoked them from the top. Before harvesting any of the honey, I took all the top bars off the top of the hive. I then used the smoker to drive down as many bees as I could.

Some of the bees would just not leave, so I had to cut out chunks of comb with the bees still on them. I blew off as many bees as I could, but ended up putting both comb and bees into the cooking pan that I took with me for that purpose. For some reason, I did not receive any stings. The entire operation took less than an hour and was not too awfully messy, but the bees were in quite an unhappy and confused state with many bees hanging on the outside of the hive. It will probably take a couple of days for them to settle down and for me to determine whether or not they will abscond or stay in the hive. I will check again tomorrow to see what the situation is.

When I got the covered pan (with the cut comb in it) down to the 3rd floor, I took it out to the stairwell and used a pair of forceps to remove as many bees from the pan as I could. Most of them were covered with honey and I did not think it worth the effort to try and save them (maybe 30 or 40 bees), so I took a small cup of soapy water out with me and dropped the bees into the soapy water as I removed them from the honey comb. Dish soap is very toxic to honey bees, so they quickly died. This Saturday I plan to do a colony removal from the wall of a building in Central Ward, Fukuoka. I will write about that afterwards too.