Bienen - Geschichten_en_v3

The Beehive

Another one of my grandfather's hobbies was beekeeping. The bees lived in several colonies in the beehive on the farm. My grandfather had a way with bees and cared for them lovingly. In spring and summer, the little stingers fanned out to gather nectar from the meadows, forests and fields for their honey production.

When my sister was about three years old, she was very curious about where the bees went when they disappeared into the hive. She would stand in front of the fly hole, wanting to see with her fingers exactly where the bees went crawling in. Fortunately, the bees were pretty mellow and she only got a few stings.

Regularly, when a new queen could not be removed from the hive in time, she and the majority of the colony would gush out of the hive to look for a new home. Then we children would set out after them, to see the colony had swarmed onto some branch, hopefully not too far away, where they all settled down.

Capturing a new colony was always very exciting. Occasionally, an unknown swarm appeared and we tried to persuade it to land by simulating thunder: banging on old metal buckets with plow shares. Even if you couldn't see a passing swarm immediately, you could hear the distinctive hum and buzz from afar.

Regularly, when the bees had filled the combs with honey for the winter, grandfather would come along with his pipe filled with cigar butts and other horrible smelling herbs to calm the bees and thus rob them of their labour. The battens which covered the top of the hive were removed and the honeycomb taken out. Any bees crawling on the comb were swept off and eventually found their way back through the front entrance.
  For protection and to avoid bee stings, my grandfather wore a mask made of a fine veil over a large hat which covered his face. Though otherwise, he always worked with a thick jacket so the little buggers couldn't sting through, but most of the time his hands were bare. At times, he cursed when a little stinger had stung him again. We children always had to remove the stinger from his skin.

With an uncapping device (a metal comb on a handle), the covers were removed from the cells and then the honeycombs were put into the extractor. We always argued about who would get to turn the crank. After the honey was spun out of the honeycomb, it flowed down the side walls and came out of a spigot at the bottom.

The glass jars of honey would keep for several years. Since it was all natural, it always crystalized and had to be heated to become liquid again. Grandpa's honey always had a unique and distinctive flavour.

Because we had robbed the bees of their winter provisions, we got to feed them in the winter with sugar water. You simply dissolved sugar in warm water and put it in a special tray on top of the hive for the bees. So our grandfather used up a few kilos of sugar regularly which didn't always delight my mother....

During the winter, the honeycombs were repaired. A pre-formed artificial wax honeycomb was purchased, and attached to the empty frames of the honeycombs: Two very fine wire threads were strained between the edges of the frame. The pre-formed honeycomb was positioned just below the threads so that the threads lay directly on the wax.
  The peaked end of a thick, notched carpenter's nail was heated and fed along the thread, pressing it into the pre-formed honeycomb.
For a firmer connection, additional wax was melted and poured along the edges between the honeycomb and the frame. The man-made honeycombs were stamped only about ½ mm deep. As the bees do it in a natural environment, they finished it them themselves, rising the comb with natural wax.

After my grandfather died, my father took over the bee business. Repeated diseases in the colonies resulted in increasing difficulties since whole colonies perished.


Written down on October 12, 2012 by Johann Wiesheu (*1965), Munich
Translation by Maximilian Grötsch and Peggy Chong

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