Sad Harvest

When we last looked in on the bees in February, they were doing well. The hive that had swarmed had made it through the winter, and the bees were foraging for pollen during the unusually warm February weather. We even saw the queen when we took a peek, and they had honey stores left. To be safe, we gave them a few extra combs from the hive that had died off over the winter. We figured they had only to get through a few more weeks.

And then March happened.

Temperatures plummeted, and the whole month was far colder than usual — as if February and March had switched places. We went from a high of 76 on February 21 to a low of only 12 on March 18, and it struggled to get above 40 for most the March. The average temperature for the month was 35 degrees.

That was too much cold coming on too fast for the bees to reorganize after they had broken cluster to forage on the warm days during the last two weeks of February. Bees huddle together and beat their wings to produce enough heat to stay alive when temperatures are below freezing, and they can only move across the hive slowly in a group. If it’s too cold too move for too long, they starve in place — even if there is food nearby.

So this is what happened. I knew it by the end of March, because we finally did have a warm-ish day on the 30th — and there were no honeybees taking cleansing flights near the hive entrance, as there had been in February. I also took a listen and could hear no industrious hum.

So when we did open the hive at the beginning of April, it confirmed what we already knew: The bees were dead. Nothing left to do but harvest what was left of the winter honey:

To get through the winter, the bees had eaten through much of the honeycomb already, and the hive was filled with honeybees from nearby who were very excited about free, unguarded food in early spring, the leanest times for bees. As we cut comb off the bars with the hive tool, we left the bars that still had a bit of honey at the top for the local bees to clean up. 

Harvesting honey is slow if you don’t have machinery. We do it by crushing up a comb at a time in a sieve and letting the honey collect in a bowl:

It takes a few rounds of crushing and dripping until you get as much as you can. You have to flip it around several times to encourage honey stuck in corners of the comb to finally drip through. You can never get it all, so I think I’ll put the crushed comb in a separate bowl back out by the hives so those bandit honey bees can clean the way by eating the rest of the honey. If this ends up attracting yellow jackets I’ll quit, but I’d like to help these other honeybees if I can. Plus, the cleaner the wax is, the easier it will be to process when we’re finally done extracting whatever honey we can.

This honey is significantly darker than the stuff we harvested from our first hive loss in 2015. The flavor is largely the same, though this is a bit richer and has maybe the slightest tang in addition to a basic floral and musky taste. As I recently discovered during a honey tasting, it’s harder to discern the flavors of your own local honey than it is to pick out the notes in more exotic varieties. I think this is because this honey just tastes the way everything smells around here in the spring, and we're so used to being surrounded by those scents that it’s the norm. Someone from farther afield could probably describe exactly which blossoms are at the forefront of our bees’ particular handiwork.