Most of us - unless you are a mole man or reside somewhere in the depths of the Mariana Trench - will have encountered the humble honeybee at some point during the course of our lives. And if you’re like me, the most you’ll know about them is that they pollinate flowers, can occasionally be a bit of a nuisance at the family picnic, and that they are responsible for producing the honey which magically appears in neat little jars on the shelves of Tesco (other supermarkets are available).

But getting that honey is an incredibly involved process, requiring a lot of equipment and several years of expertise. Enter Dr Phil Donkersley of Lancaster Environment Centre: he’s been keeping bees for years for both his lab work and for fun, and is our resident expert on all things bee. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to follow him around for a couple of days, gaining insight into the process of collecting honey from bees, learning more about the hives that produced it, and getting hands-on experience in the packing process.

The hives

In order to get honey, what we first need are hives – preferably the hives of the Western Honeybee (Apis mellifera), which is the only bee in the UK that produces honey in the quantities we need for commercialisation and consumption. Whilst all bees produce honey, our native solitary bees only make enough honey for each of their individual larvae, whilst our bumblebees only live in hives of up to 300 individuals, compared to the honeybee’s hives of up to 50,000 workers. Also, their honey tastes pretty bad (mostly because they have a propensity to poop in it), so it probably wouldn’t sell particularly well.

Fortunately, Lancaster Campus is home to a number of honeybee hives, both situated at the Ecohub in South Campus and up on the Hazelrigg field site. All in all, there are 12 hives across the Lancaster sites, and we were harvesting honey from two of our biggest and healthiest colonies, though we expect another harvest in autumn from four more of them!

Safety first! To avoid us having to crack out the Anthisan, Phil and his team pop on their beekeeping suits and gloves before entering the hive enclosures. Contrary to popular belief, you shouldn’t actually smoke the bees when harvesting the honey as it’ll contaminate it and impact the flavour! Hives are made up of several boxes called "supers" - and the ones we want are the "honey supers" (as, spoiler alert, that's where the bees keep the honey)! So, our initial port of call is to separate the honey supers from the rest of the hive:

Phil separating the "honey" supers from the main hive

Then, we install something called a “porter escape” on the supers. These are essentially one-way doors that will let the bees out of the super, but not back in. We leave the supers in the field for a couple of weeks to give all of the bees time to find their way out of the supers, and then we go and pick them up! Any stragglers still clinging to the frames can be removed with a goose feather, leaving us with just the frames full of delicious honey (and the slightly less-delicious wax).

The extraction

Now onto the extraction! For this, we needed an inventively-named device called an “extractor”. They come in electric and manual versions, but since we had several supers’ worth of frames to get through (and it was upwards of 25C), Phil opted for the electric version. We were also joined by some wonderful undergraduate volunteers who came to pitch in and help with the extraction process! We were extracting two distinct batches of honey that day: one batch of this year’s honey, made by bees who were predominantly eating the nectar from heathers we find on the fells around Lancaster. The honey from this batch was incredibly viscous and took a fair while to extract! In comparison, the second batch of year-old honey was significantly runnier, darker, and sweeter-smelling in nature. According to Phil, this honey was more mixed in nectar origin, but likely came from bees that had been visiting lots of clovers and ivy. The flowers that the bees forage on have a very strong impact on the taste of the honey. Honey itself is really variable in its flavour profile, from rich chocolate notes to crisp citrus, and even strong herby tastes like thyme, rosemary and lavender! Would you even believe professional honey judges train for as long as whisky judges?

The first order of the day (once the supers had been carted in), was to “uncap” the honeycomb cells, removing the wax that the bees have deposited over the cells to keep the honey in them. There are a wide range of fancy tools that may be procured to perform such a task, but honestly, a standard fork from the cutlery drawer does the trick just as well.

Our wonderful student helpers uncapping the honeycomb in the frames

After that, we placed the frames into the extractor and switched it on! The extractor spins the frames around quickly, using centrifugal forces to spin the honey out of the combs into the barrel of the extractor (and occasionally onto you, if you stand too close).

The extractor at work!

The honey dribbles down the sides of the extractor and collects at the bottom, and then can be channelled out of it via a tap into an awaiting bucket!

PSA: ensure bucket is in fact awaiting, lest you want a sticky mess all over the floor….

Honey, fresh from the extractor!

Once the honey had been collected it was time to strain it, to make sure that the awaiting customers don’t get more than they bargained for in their jar (beeswax, honeycomb, dead bees, the end of one of the frames that flung off mid-spin etc.). The straining process can take some time, especially with the thick heather-based honey, so we left that going whilst we cleaned up the extractor.

Phil passes the honey through the filter to remove any debris and detritus

That was a wrap for the day! Over the weekend, Phil continued to filter the honey to ensure all the lumps and bumps were removed and that we were left with some nice consistent bee juice ready for jarring the following week. Never fear though, the wax collected in the filter won’t be going to waste – we’ll be turning that stuff into hand cream at a later date!

The jarring

After the filtration process was complete, it was on to the jarring! Whilst the jarring process wasn’t particularly arduous, it did require volunteers to assemble themselves into a production lineand a fair degree of hand-eye coordination. One person stood as the designated jar-opener and hander, another stationed below the filter barrel manning the tap, whilst a third was responsible for putting the lids back onto the jars after they had been filled with honey and placing them back into the box, ready to be labelled up!

Phil and a student fill a jar with honey from the barrel

All in all, the heather honey batch produced almost 50lbs of jarred honey (or around 44 jars), whilst our trusty mixed batch came in at an equally-honourable 30lbs (or 25 jars).

Our honey, artfully arranged into a pyramid (feel free to ignore the cardboard box behind it)

…The profit?

A couple of days later, we made a quick jaunt round to ReStore, the on-campus charity shop, to deliver the honey for them to sell on our behalf! ReStore has been stocking our bee-based products pretty much since they opened, and were more than happy to receive a fresh supply of Phil’s honey! It’s on sale now (or was, at the time of writing; it sells out pretty quickly), so do pop up if you want to grab yourself a jar of Lancaster-made honey. All the proceeds go to funding further research into bees, so it’s well worth the investment – plus it tastes pretty good to boot. The big research project the hives are part of right now is a BBSRC-funded project on the role of the bee gut microbiome in tolerating climate change!

The lovely people at ReStore accepting the latest delivery of honey

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  Inside the hive: The future of beekeeping

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