Today I got to see Frank's bees. They are incredibly small - smaller than a housefly in the UK and non-stinging. They live in boxes about the size of a UK nuc box and don't have frames to draw combs down from so its relatively natural. The only problems arise when you try and try the honey out of the hive as you have to damage the hive to do it.
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| The hive (note small entrance bottom, centre) |
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| Prizing open the top |
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| Lifting the lid |
Once the hive was open it was really interesting to see inside.
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| The nest |
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| Close-up |
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| Honey sacs |
The next step was extracting - in our case with a large spoon - and filtering.
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| Industrial filtering |
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| Manual filtering |
When also then tried to melt the wax but the comb seemed to be so satured with honey this proved very messy !
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| Gloopy wax - we couldn't separate the wax types - there seems to be two ? |
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