Books by Wally Shaw

Honey bees can successfully live in all sorts of different nest sites - a holein a tree, a chimney pot or a bee-hive - but in all cases this is just a cavity inwhich to make a set of combs. It is in and on these combs that all the withinthe colony functions occur. Because it is dark in the hive, communication isthrough pheromones or vibration and combs provide the ideal carrier for thisinformation. For example, bees can always locate the queen by followingthe trail of her footprint pheromone on the combs. The main outside thehive activities are foraging, swarming and queen mating. As beekeepers,interested in the production of honey, we tend to concentrate on the foragingactivities of our bees and it is easy to overlook the fact that over 95% of atypical worker bee's life is spent within the confines of the colony engaged insome activity in or on the combs. In a sense, the combs are an extension ofthe bees that made them and it is bees and combs together that constitutethe colony.Up until about 1850, bee colonies, whether wild of under human stewardship(it hardly qualified as management), built themselves a set of combs entirelyaccording to their own design in whatever cavity they could find or wasprovided by the beekeeper. No restriction was placed on the way the colonyused these combs to engage in their main activities of brood rearing and foodstorage. With the introduction of the moveable frame hive, followed quickly bythe invention of wax foundation and the queen excluder, everything changed.Beekeepers were now able to induce the bees to make their combs wherethey (the beekeepers) wanted them, ie in wooden frames. The beekeepercould now even influence the size of cells they built by the dimensions of thehexagon embossed on the sheet of wax. It also became possible to separatethe use of combs for brood rearing and honey storage using a queen excluder.Some of the changes that modern beekeeping has imposed on colonies havepotential effects on the health and welfare of the bees and others do not.

The aim of this booklet is to help beekeepers to better understand honey itself and to harvest and prepare it for home use or sale retaining as much of its essential properties as possible. What exactly is honey, for it is certainly a lot more than a solution of various sugars in water? If we are to produce good honey it is important to understand how it should be handled in all stages between the hive and jar because in reality it is quite a delicate product. Stories about finding four thousand year old honey in Egyptian tombs and "and it was just as good as the day it was put there" are just that - stories. There are many similarities between honey and wines; they both need great care in their production, handing and storage if they are to develop and retain their full potential. It is generally accepted that the `best` honey comes straight from the comb (cut comb or sections). The various processes that we use to get pristine honey from the comb into a jar all have the potential to damage it in some way. In Britain we currently get a premium price for home-produced honey (the envy of beekeepers in many other parts of the world) and it is our responsibility to see that we bring a top quality product to market.