We’ve had a change of pace here at the Suburban Bee Company over the last few weeks. As summer turns to autumn, that busiest of times in a beekeeper’s calendar has arrived.

There’s been much to do; honey to collect, bee’s to feed, storing and maintenance of bee equipment; harvesting of the surprise fruit and nuts from our new trees.

Since early in springtime we’ve been visiting each of the hives to monitor our bees. We’ve kept them disease free and tried to avoid any chance of swarming. As summer drew along, we’ve needed to protect the bees from wasp attack – although very sadly this year we did lose a colony to those voracious pests. And all the while, our industrious foragers have been out and about collecting nectar from the great variety of trees, plants and flowers available to them in the gardens and wild spaces of suburbia. The bees have processed and evaporated the nectar, sealing the golden honey they produced into the honey boxes in each of our hives.

And finally we’ve been able to collect the last of our honey boxes. There’s plenty to do before our 2015 harvest is ready to fill our jars. The wax used by our bees to seal honey in each cell of the honeycomb frame needs to be removed. These ‘cappings’ will be cleaned up and melted down to produce pure bars of beeswax – and may become any number of exciting products from candles to polish.

Each of the honey frames is then spun in a centrifuge to free the contents. Once there is enough honey, we pass the thick, oozy golden stuff through a filter. Careful here though – too much filtering will remove all the pollen and goodness that is the mark of great locally produced honey. Once filtering is complete, we leave the honey in tanks to settle before getting ready to pour into jars. And there will be more to come in later blogs on our new-look jars and labels for 2015.

So with the honey taken care of, we’ve also been busy getting our bees ready for the winter. They need a store of food to power them through the cold months. Although bees don’t actually hibernate, they do cluster inside their hive and use their wing muscles to keep the temperature up. In fact, regardless of the outside temperature, bees will keep the centre of their cluster at a rather amazing 30-35ºC if they are raising brood. With all of that heating, the bees really can eat their way through the store. We try to make sure each hive has something like 10-15kg of food for the winter. Whilst we take the delicious real honey the bees have sourced from nature, we replace it with sugar syrup. And strong stuff it is too – you can make it by adding a kilo of sugar to a litre of water. That would be something like having 50 teaspoons of sugar in your tea!

At the moment it’s still warm enough for the bees to be out flying every day. Pretty soon though, temperatures will drop and our bees will be infrequent visitors in the skies above the farm until those seemingly far off days of next spring.

Here at Suburban Bee Company, we’re beginning to turn our attention to winter at the farm. Oh, and all of those delicious things you can make with honey. Recipe blog, anyone?