Heather Honey.

Options.

Ling heather, Calluna vulgaris, produces a honey with the unique property of being a gel unless stirred or agitated. This is called thixotropy and makes extracting heather honey a little tricky. One way of dealing with it is to press it out. Combs are cut/scraped back to the midrib and placed in a linen bag which is squeezed in a fruit press, or a special heather press.

Commercial Beekeeping.

If you are a bee farmer with lots of frames to extract, and several thousand pounds to invest you might go for this machine if you wanted to extract heather honey in an extractor. What happens is, the prongs in the machine press against the honey combs penetrating the cells and agitating the honey as the machine jiggles. The honey becomes mobile for around 15 minutes before returning to the thixotropic gel state. This is enough time to place combs in the extractor and remove the honey.

Caught Out.

A couple of years ago my bees started collecting ling heather from nearby clear-felled woodlands where regeneration conditions allows heather to flourish. I had to agitate the cells with an uncapping fork which was hardly the efficient tool or method. However, after about a day working on this, I did get some seriously nice honey.

Managing Bees For Cut Comb.

This year I gave the strongest colony a box of foundation with strips of un-wired foundation which they quickly drew out and started storing honey in. I took away the honey super that they had been working to store and give back later for winter stores. I fed enough sugar syrup to get them make new comb but not store any in the frames. This amounted to about 4 liters. It may not have been the most efficient way for the bees, given the amount of honey they needed to eat to produce the wax, but the honey was delicious. I didn’t have appropriate containers so couldn’t sell this from my doorstep as usual. What I thought had been clear plastic containers in my store turned out to be hundreds of lids only!

Another Way of Producing Heather Honey.

Sections.

Producing sections requires several beekeeping skills and a good nectar flow. Assembling these basswood sections is fiddly. The thin pieces can beak easily if not moistened first and handled carefully. The bees are not always keen to go up into these small boxes and so a very strong colony in a single brood box is required. The bees need to almost bursting out of the box and on the verge of swarming. The challenge is to prevent them swarming and keep them at home to finish the job.

A Dying Art, Or A challenge For The Future?

Yesterday, a beekeeper with over 70 years experience told me that when he started mostly everyone produced sections. “Oil seed rape killed sections”, says Jimmy Welch, retired gamekeeper. When oil seed rape, Brassica napus, arrived on the Scottish agricultural scene around 1957, lots of people gave up beekeeping because they couldn’t produce sections if the bees were foraging on OSR. OSR honey granulates fast and sets solid on the comb which would completely ruin section honey. However, there is an appetite for things from “the old days” and people still want to buy section honey. They just can’t find it because so few beekeepers produce it.