The Big Honey Season

I type up this post now the power's back. I handwrote it by the natural light of the day through the window, starting two hours after dawn.

I'm writing at the dining room table which is the place that affords most light on this bleak stormy morning. It seems appropriate the power's out. It's the last day of May and autumn. Time for me to reflect and record the honey season that has come to a close. It's 8C outside and the bees would be tight and warm in their winter cluster.
The warning breeze of yesterday was valid. The wind grew in ferocity during the night and battered the house while we lay in bed. It roared in the treetops, we half expecting at any moment to have a tree trunk sharing the room with us. After 26 years enduring such storms now and again, when the odd "bong" on the roof comes as a stick wrested from a tree hits the iron above, you roll over and try to ignore what's happening and catch up on the old shut-eye.
It's a far cry from the consistently still, warm, sunny days of last October, in mid spring, when the bees were flying east from dawn till dark working the silvertop and gathering an unprecedented, for me, large crop of spring honey. Not a serious beekeeper by any means, I nevertheless felt exitement at the heavy bee flight. Prior to this on my walks I'd noticed the heavy budding on the messmate trees and anticipated the possibility of a good summer flow, despite messmate being unreliable and often turning off with summer rain.
As a non serious beekeeper, I'm not set up for extracting honey. There's considerable inconvenience organising the work, and finding the time in my busy self employed life and complex family situation. My dad was very ill, Robbie was approaching VCE exams and wanting driving practice, Gord was finishing his TAFE course with parent/ teacher meetings and career nights, not to mention the drought and water restrictions which complicated things at the farm. And Lib broke her wrist badly in a fall in late September. There was a strong dread in realizing the extra work a honey flow would create.
The odd thing was, when I first fired up the smoker one Saturday morning last October, I enjoyed working the through the bees immensely. The smell of fresh nectar and the excited contentment of the bees infected me. The hives were strong and healthy, brimfull of gentle bees, seemingly happy and knowing I was there to help.
The dread was not entirely gone, but I came away glad that decades ago destiny would have it that I learned something of bees and honey. I felt 'switched on' again to the world of the honey bee.
There were four hives in my backyard, and one in the yard of friends' property at 'Sunset'. This hive belongs to my friends. I gave it to the previous owner of 'Sunset' who left it behind when he sold up and moved. The new owners were keen to learn about bees and I've given them a few lessons, but as they've been busy renovating the old house I've looked after it for them until they get the confidence to work it themselves.
One of my four hives swarmed in the spring. After boxing the swarm I took it to 'Sunset'. It was a big swarm that drew out the foundation in no time. So then I had six hives, four strong and productive, and two smaller unproductive till they built up, these being the swarm and the parent it split from. By late summer all six were big and strong and gathering honey.
After the silvertop flow, the weather stayed fine and settled and the honey kept coming. Not as heavy as earlier, but it rained on cue for the blackberries to give a lick and the bees were still flying heavily to the east. I wondered if they were finding some grey strinybark as this honey was noticably frothy when extracted, and it also contained some ti-tree. This extract was markedly different to the earlier silvertop and the later messmate, and, in the end, candied rather quickly and was a mixture of floral sources I would say.
As the summer progressed the messmate yielded heavily and I just managed to keep up with the bees with the little spare time I had, extracting each second weekend or grabbing an hour or two during the week to take supers off and put stickies back. It's also the handling of the honey, the straining and packing, that makes the hobbyist busy in an 'on' season. The hot weather, days and nights, helped. Cold honey slows things down.
Typically, the bees were cranky on the messmate, though not too bad. They were busy and the flow was continuous but if there was a bit of unsettled weather in the wind they'd belt you. At the end of the messmate flow when I went to take honey expecting them to be extra nasty now the flow was over, bracing myself for confrontation, I was pleasantly surprised to find them gentle as lambs again, with a big shake of manna gum and or mountain grey gum nectar in the combs.
By mid April they were closing down fast, reducing broodnests quickly and shrinking down. There was still a shake of nectar but they'd struggle to ripen it. I united the two poorest to others, they'd simply worn themselves out, leaving me three at home and one at 'Sunset'.
I took the last two supers off the united hives in early May, leaving the four hives as doubles with plenty of honey to get them through winter. My last extract that weekend took my tally for the season to 820kg. All my estimates through the season were conservative so the final figure may have been a little higher. That's a lot of honey for 5 beehives left in the one locality all season. Amazingly this bountiful harvest came during a crippling drought when agriculture generally throughout Victoria and beyond was on its knees. Most beekeepers have a tale to tell of a ripper honey flow. Now I do.
The humble honeybee inspires and gives hope, in a world bogged in negativity. During a season of bushfires, drought, climate gloom, and in my own case, the loss of my father in March, the bees showed me you need to keep focused on good things. And to keep on keepin' on.