Tuesday, January 17, 2012

First Inspection and Harvest


According to the information on the image, the date of the first harvest was 8th January 2010. In a way, a month after we spotted the top bar beehive (tbh) was occupied, we managed to taste our very own honey.

TBH housing our first colony.
As of today (17/1/2012), the colony is still occupying the tbh.

As this time, we knew nothing about inspection and harvesting. We decided to take a look and see what happen. We do not have proper smoker and only clad in our DIY beekeeping suits!

Yours truly. My niece commented in my FB page that I looked like an astronaut!

Haniz. The beekeeping veil was made by his wife.

We were also without any "smoker". An equipment that allows us to smoke and "calm" the bees. Therefore, we settled to smoke the bees by using the eggs casings. Somehow, it did not catch fire but emitted smoke smoothly for quite a while.

First glimpse of the first colony.

This was the first glimpse of the bees from the TBH. At this time we did not know much about TBH design. Later we were told that the top bars should be about 32mm in width to ensure each bar holds only one honeycomb. In our case, the honeycombs were spread over a few bars. This is what they called "cross combs". It will make inspection and harvest a bit tricky and difficult. Anyway, at this time, both of us were so excited seeing the bees, the honeycombs and also the honey!

Honeycombs and bees.

This was the first real look at the honeycombs. The bees moved away after being smoked and left the honeycombs exposed. You can see un-capped honey and also broods on the bottom part of the honeycombs. Our knowledge at this point of time were ZERO about beekeeping, bees, honeycombs, honey and the whole works! We were just so excited with what were in front of us.





3 comments:

  1. Congratulations! I know very well what it feels like when a bee colony voluntarily accepts one of your hives made by hand.

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  2. I'll like to try keeping bee as a hobby. hope you can give me some address of suppliers of accesorries for bee keeping within malaysia. imported ones ar very expensive

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