All year round in the Department of Beekeeping

When spring approaches the bees become active.

Throughout the winter they have been clinging tightly to each other, forming a large cluster of bees inside the beehive. Now they start the new year with cleaning up.

Here the worker bees have cleaned up and thrown out any dead bees in front of the hive. These will later be flown far away from the hive.

Flower pollen and nectar are food for the bees and they have to work hard to get enough for the new brood.

In early Spring gathering pollen is the most important thing. Pollen provides protein for the small bee larvae. Here a flowering willow is having a visitor.

The pollen is gathered in pollen baskets on the bees’ hind legs and is flown home to the family. Here the yellow pollen baskets filled with willow pollen can clearly be seen.

Each flower has its own pollen colour. The white pollen baskets on the bee’s hind legs, as shown above, are pollen from Butterbur, also known as Sweet Coltsfoot, which blossoms very early. A bee family uses 20 to 25 kg of pollen each year. This requires about 3 million of such collecting rounds.

The queen, as seen here with the red marking spot, can lay up to 2000 eggs a day. So there is a rapid increase in mouths to feed. A queen can lay 500,000 eggs in her lifetime.

The bees are attracted by the flowers’ scents, colours and nectar. The sense of smell is situated in their feelers in the form of pores. Worker bees have 9,000,000 pores and drones 45,000,000. Each bee has 10,000 single eyes to see with.

The flower nectar is almost pure sugar water. In order to fill her stomach once, a bee must visit 85 apple flowers, and often many more if other bees have already been there.

When there is an abundance of flowers producing nectar, the beehives are quickly filled with honey.

A full comb of fresh honey.

When they have filled the combs with honey, the bees seal the cells with a white wax lid.

Here the bees are about to complete their work on a honeycomb.

When the bees have filled up a box with honey, the beekeeper adds a new box on top of the full one. The difference in the families’ ability to collect honey is clearly visible.

As soon as the honey has been harvested from the beehives it will be extracted using a centrifuge. But not until all the necessary tools have been washed and rinsed twice.

And boiled as well.

The honeycombs must be more than 2/3 sealed or else the honey will not keep for long. The comb shown above is 100% sealed.

Uncapping the cells before extracting the honey from the comb, using a special tool - the uncapping fork.

The honeycombs have to be placed inside the extraction centrifuge. The centrifuge spins at high speeds - first clockwise, and then anticlockwise, causing the honey to be flung out from both sides.

The honey is tapped out at the bottom of the extraction centrifuge.

After that it is filtered through a coarse sieve.

And finally through a fine sieve.

The honey is poured into glass jars.

Labels are put on the jars which are then packed in boxes.

The spring harvest contains a lot of rape honey which is light coloured. The later harvest gives a darker honey which comes from white clover and wild flowers.

The label shows where the honey was produced. The honey from Narayana Press/N.U. Yoga Ashrama originates from the nature at Gyllingnæs and the ashram’s own fields and hedges, and is therefore mostly ecological.

Preparing the bee hives for winter starts already in July. All the old dark combs are moved up from the central broad nest (in the bottom of the hive) into the honey super above it, and replaced with new ones. This gives the bees fresh wax combs to sit on during winter. Later on in August and September the bees are fed with approx. 20 kg of sugar syrup for each family. Now they can survive until spring. When it is cold, they cling together in a dense cluster inside the bee hive (seen at the top of the image).

A view of some of the Ashrama’s beehives. Fall is approaching, and the bees will look after themselves until April next year.