Nectar filled honey comb.

This is a nectar filled honey comb.

You also notice freshly woven shut bee cells.

Twenty one days later new born bees will be breaking out of them.

Making new Queen Bees 2015: Day 1

Searching for four day old larvae.
We then inserted eighty of them in seperate queen cups and fed them with some queen jelly. These queen cups were introdused in a very strong but orphaned bee hive to be fed queen jelly by the bees. Twentyfour hours later they will be seperated and inserted into four different beehives to continue the feeding.

Bees working in the garden on this sunny day.

It’s a beautiful spring day and the bees are working in the garden.

Recycling the beeswax 2015

Recycling the beeswax 2015 Stavros and Giannis are here seperating the old blackened and ofcourse empty honeycombs from their wooden panels and preparing them to be recycled. The honeycombs will be melted in a steampress and then collected. Roussos will go through this procedure two times in order for the wax to be filtered correctly. This way we will receive clear beeswax. We will then mold the beeswax into fresh wax sheets that will be inserted into the new pannels and serve as teh base or the new honeycombs. In sprin the bees will start building their new cells on top of these wax sheets and then later on fill them with honey.

Recycling the beeswax 2015

Recycling the beeswax 2015
Stavros and Giannis are here seperating the old blackened and ofcourse empty honeycombs from their wooden panels and preparing them to be recycled. The honeycombs will be melted in a steampress and then collected. Roussos will go through this procedure two times in order for the wax to be filtered correctly. This way we will receive clear beeswax. We will then mold the beeswax into fresh wax sheets that will be inserted into the new pannels and serve as the base or the new honeycombs. In sprin the bees will start building their new cells on top of these wax sheets and then later on fill them with honey.

The bees are snowed in!

Winter beekeeping.

So winter has reached Crete and it is time for beekeeping gear maintenance. During the winter we are going to go through various procedures to keep all of our gear in good shape but also to help the bees get through the winter and prepare for their growth and increase in spring.
Today we boiled a few cap openings that will be placed in the beehives in paraffin wax at 160 Celsius to make them water resistant and increase their strength.

Havesting the thyme honey 2014

More pictures here.

The first step in the process is to choose which honeycombs are at the right state and remove them from the apiary. We then use an electrical knife on the top of the honeycombs to melt away the protective wax layer and expose the honey. As the honey has been exposed, the honey can drip out of the combs if placed in the right angle. This however would be a very slow process , so instead the honey is extracted by centrifugal force and collected at the bottom of the machine.

Beekeeping lesson with Julianne and Dena.

Honey tasting straight from the honeycomb!

This was the day before the new queen bees that we had created were going to break out of their queen cells. It is absolutely critical to seperate them before they exit because otherwise the first one out will kill the rest in order to remain the only queen in the hive. Therefore we removed the queencells from the incubating mother hive and seperated them. Then we went to the small new hives we are growing.

These are three small hives that are connected to a mother hive. They are being nourished by this mother hive and it’s queen but they don’t have a queen of their own and they are seperated from each other and the mother by a net. In each new hive we have already inserted a strong honeycob with many bees from another hive and two new empty ones.

So we opened each of the new hives and inserted the queen cell. This way the next day teh new queen will crawl out of it’s cell to it’s all new hive that belongs only to her and doesn’t have to fight any rivals. And if succesful we will have created 12 new bee hives!

As you can see our beehives are place up on the hill in the old village of Agia Roumeli. The view is great from up there!

It was a great beekeeping lesson! Thank you Raquel and Carsten for joining and enjoying!