2015

After the very cold July and August this year (2015) and the almost total failure of the main crop (blackberry Rubus fruticosus and white clover Trifolium repens) the bees were very light at the honey harvest with almost all of their stores in the supers and next to nothing below!

Varroa

As soon as the honey is off – you can think about treating for Varroa but that subject deserves a post of its own.

Feeding for winter

It is vital to always check how much stores the bees have in the brood box when you take off the supers and best to feed them immediately. Not only does it gee them up wonderfully but it helps you with that horrible guilty feeling you get when you take their honey away.  You just never know what is round the corner and when you will next get the chance to feed them.  You could break your arm like I wot I done once. Fortunately I had someone to feed and treat my bees for me.

Don’t depend on the ivy (Hedera helix) for winter feed. Although it is quite reliable it isn’t a certainty and if it doesn’t yield you’ve put your bees up shit creek without a paddle

Winter Feed

In Autumn feed a strong syrup – 2lbs sugar : 1pint water or 2kgs : 1litre. Heat the water or you’ll be stirring for ever. Make sure all the sugar is completely dissolved or it might granulate in your feeder.

Alternatively use a special bee feed. These are more expensive than sugar but they have advantages which make them worth it.  They are very strong syrups and use inverted sugars which are easier for the bees to digest. And of course you are spared all that heating and stirring.

Sugar Syrup vs Bee Feed

If you feed the bees sugar, aka sucrose, the first thing they do is manufacture and add the enzyme invertase which inverts the sucrose molecules to fructose and glucose.

Click here for more on Bees and Enzymes

Ambrosia and Apiinvert are syrups of fructose and glucose so that first step towards storage is done for them.  It is also a very strong syrup – 70% fructose/glucose and only 30% water.  If you think about it they only need to remove one third of the water content – 10% of the bulk – to store it. And just think of all that stirring you don’t have to do.

By the way – it doesn’t granulate and is ‘microbiologically stable’. Now what does that mean I wonder? I think it probably means it’s sterilised and contains no fungal spores. Unless you add some …

… I bet I could get it to ferment – a nice champagne yeast, a scatter of dried elderflowers and yeast nutrient and bob’s your uncle.

Feeder

Whatever type of syrup you are feeding, use a rapid feeder – Ashforth or Miller type for Autumn feeding. These feeders provide  a great long trough allowing hundreds of bees to come up after the feed and take it down rapidly. Hence the name. ‘Rapid’ that is.

Contact feeders – the bucket type with the circle of gauze or the home made ones with pinpricks – are slower and less suitable for winter feeding. They are designed for spring feeding where a slow drip feed of a light syrup can mimic a nectar flow and stimulate the queen into lay.

Contact feeders also work less well with a heavy syrup and a smaller number of bees are able to drink at one time.  If you have made a sugar syrup it can granulate on the gauze. Of course if you’ve nothing else – a contact feeder will do but keep an eye on it because the bees tend to propolise the holes up as part of their winter waterproofing regime.

Supersedure

Colonies undergoing late supersedure may show a lack of interest in their lovely syrup until their new queen gets going. Bear it in mind before taking feeders away altogether if some seem slow.

October

This year (2015), in some upland parts anyway, the ivy has been a damp squib so even more important to check early that the bees have enough stores  to carry them through the winter.

October is the last month for the beekeeper to realistically feed the bees up for the winter – weather depending.

As the temperatures begin to fall regularly below 15 degrees, the populations of bees dwindle and those that are left spend more of their time clustered so feeding syrup is no longer an option. Eventually a point is reached where it is taxing to ask winter bees to ripen stores – remember these are the bees that have to go through to March – best not to wear them out.

Any hives that are still light could be bolstered with some frames of stores from elsewhere.

If there is a mid-winter stores crisis – fondant can be applied.

Gales

A rock on a hive might keep the roof on in a gale but if the stand is toppled the hive will burst asunder and the bees will be exposed to the weather so rope or strap your hives if possible.

Even if the hive is knocked off the stand by livestock a rope will keep the boxes together and perhaps save the bees till after you’ve surfaced after christmas.

Hive Stands

While hives can be happily stood on low stands for the summer it is better if you can, to get them up onto high stands for the winter. Remove tall weeds from around and under the hives to allow a free flow of air  – bees do not thrive in damp conditions. Chalkbrood does though!

Check for rot in your stands and exchange for sound ones now. Drag the rotten stuff home to dry, ready for repair and wood preservative of your choice.

Mice

They say a mouse has the ability to uncouple the plates of bone in its skull and flatten its head to pass though holes bigger than the thickness of a pencil! Any entrances thicker than that will need mouseguards. A mouseguard is a strip of metal perforated with bee-sized holes which can be pinned over the entrance to prevent mouse invasions.

Mice can destroy a hive of bees in the winter.

Click here for Bees and Michaelmas

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Click here for How to Feed a Wintering Apidea

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The four quarter days are:

• Lady day or the Feast of the Annunciation 25th March;
• Midsummer’s day around 25th June;
• Michaelmas 29th September;
• Christmas 25th December – lest we forget – fat chance.

They all approximately coincide with either an equinox or a solstice.

Equinoxes

An equinox is when day and night are of equal duration and there are two of them – spring and autumn:

• Spring equinox 21st March;
• Autumn equinox 23rd September.

Solstices

As for the solstices there are two of these too – winter and summer.

• Winter solstice (shortest day and longest night) 22nd December;
• Summer solstice (longest day and shortest night) 21st June.

Michaelmas Traditions

Falling on the 29th September close to the autumn equinox, Michaelmas marks the end of the old agricultural year and the beginning of a new one. It is the time when the harvest is in (or should be in) and when farmers traditionally pay their debts and renew their leases.

In days of yore, after the harvest, the geese were turned out into the stubble fields to fatten up on the fallen grains of wheat or barley and one of them would be killed and eaten to celebrate Michaelmas. Hence its other name – Goose day.

Hence also the header here. It is by the Scottish painter James Guthrie who painted it in 1883 when he was just 23. It is called ‘To Pastures New’ and hangs in the Aberdeen Art Gallery. That looks like a September sky don’t it though? And the little girl has her hat, shawl and boots on. I think she’s propelling those geese to the stubble fields.

Presumably the geese would go in after the gleaners. The gleaners would be sent in to pick up the ears and grains missed by the harvesters. This picture below is ‘The Gleaners’, painted in 1857 by Jean-François Millet. It hangs in Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Click it for full size image.

Now that’d wreck yer back I’d say!

‘But what about the bees?’ says you…

Michaelmas for the beekeeper, is more or less the same as for the farmer. The end of the beekeeping year comes with the honey harvest and preparations for the next year start with wintering. You need to have your winter preparations more or less complete by Michaelmas. Your bees should certainly be fed and treated for Varroa.

Temperature and Population Effects

The Autumn equinox has passed so the nights will be getting longer and colder from now and the days shorter and they’ll be colder too. All the way to Christmas and beyond.

Each time the temperature drops below 15 degrees centigrade the bees begin to cluster and become less and less active. This is why your Apiguard won’t work below 15 degrees so you’d better hope you’ve treated them by now.

They have also evicted their drones by now so they don’t have those lovely big fat boys to help keep them warm either.

The populations of worker bees in the hives are dwindling rapidly so what with that and the colder weather, it becomes more and more difficult for them to process syrup and ripen it for storage. Hence a strong syrup (2:1) or special bee feed such as Ambrosia for autumn feeding – less water for the bees to get rid of.

Remove it if they won’t take it down – it’s a big chilly thing to leave in a bee hive even if it doesn’t ferment. If they’re still a bit light you may need to give them fondant mid-winter.

Michaelmas Forage

There is very little floral forage out there for the bees at Michaelmas – just the ivy, the dregs of the heather and some autumn garden plants such as Mahonia or the Michaelmas daisies.  And there is always the gorse of course.

• Ivy pollen is yellow
• Bell heather is whiteish
• Ling heather is pale beige
• Gorse is orange/brown

The bees can bring in a surplus of ivy nectar if mild weather and the ivy flowers coincide but only pollen and a little nectar from the rest.

Last year the ivy came into bloom in August and flowered all the way to November. The bees were strong after that fabulous summer of 2014 – will we ever forget it – and they worked the ivy well so they went into winter strong and well fed. A crop of ivy honey was almost inevitable and created its own problems this spring – but don’t start me.

If spells of mild weather coincide with the ivy – we will know all about it. Perhaps prepare for a crop of ivy honey.

Click here for how to take a crop of ivy honey.

This year (2015) however, flowering is very late and it looks like there could be very little ivy honey this year.  All the more important they are well fed beforehand – although the ivy is reasonably reliable it is not to be depended on.

Michaelmas daisies

These are Michaelmas daisies. I just noticed they were coming out today – 29th September. Perhaps that’s where they get their name! The bees visit these for pollen and on a sunny autumn day they’ll be alive with bees.

Fail to Prepare – Prepare to Fail

It can be difficult to summon the energy to prepare the bees properly for the winter but wintering prepares the ground for spring. Remember – the better you prepare your bees for the winter, the more you will have for next year.

Click here for How to Prepare for Winter

Click here for Winter Feeding of Bees

Click here for Which Feeder

Click here for How to Winter your Apidea

Click here for how to feed a wintering apidea

Click here for mid-winter feeding of bees

Click here for mid-winter oxalic acid Varroa treatment

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• When one of them is queenless;
• When one of them has a vile queen and you are about to make them queenless;
• When one or both colonies are too weak in the approach to winter.

Most bee books will tell you to unite the two using the ‘newspaper method’ This is where a sheet of newspaper (or two), primed with a pinprick (or two), is placed between the two colonies to be united – one on top of the other of course.

The rationale is that the newspaper prevents immediate contact between the two and acts as a sort of a timer – the bees can smell each other through the paper and by the time they have chewed their way through they ‘know’ each other and will not fight.

Generally, it works well but there are certain criteria for a successful outcome:

• One of the two colonies should be queenless;
• Any queen cells must be removed from the queenless half or the bees may not be receptive to the other queen, they might initiate supersedure and they might even swarm;
• There must be no open brood with the queenless colony – or they might build queen cells before they unite, then swarm or use these cells to replace your good queen when they do;
• And you’d better check there’s no queen cells in the other half either – you know what they’re like!

But there are other reasons for uniting bees and there are other ways of doing it…

Click here for the Third Box Principle

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Admittedly the earliest flowering ivy was a few miles downhill from here and we are on up on the north face of a chilly hill where most things are late, however – it’s still quite a spread you must admit.

Every warm day now, the bees are all over it gathering pollen and whatever nectar there may be. Spot the bee – click on the photo below for a better view.

Some of the flowers in this picture were pollinated some time ago and you can see the berries developing, russet now but black later. Some are still in full bloom and others are only buds. These last will almost certainly not open at all.

Here is the quandary I found myself in this year: I had several sad little queenless Apideas and two other strong ones, each with five frames (feeder removed) and with good laying queens in them. I can never quite face shaking the poor queenless bees out, nucs weren’t possible and there’s nothing so sad as watching an Apidea dwindle its way into winter with laying workers and a bellyful of slugs.

So here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

• 5 queenless Apideas
• 2 queenright Apideas
• 1 nuc box
• 2 fat frames of stores
• 1 frame pollen
• 2 empty drawn frames
• 1 spare Apidea body box
• 1 Apidea Miller feeder
• 1 large plastic bucket
• 1 water sprayer
• Foam
• Travelling mesh

Method

• Take the nuc and add in the two frames of stores one at each side leaving a good gap in the middle;
• Bung the entrance with foam;
• Now the brutal bit – take the plastic bucket and and lightly spray the inside of the bucket;
• Shook all the bees out of the queenless Apideas into the bucket and tumble them around together spraying a bit more water to keep them flightless;
• Once these are completely mixed shake in all the bees and the queen from the weakest of the strong Apideas. Do this as gently as possible especially once you’ve found the queen – be sure to shake that frame with the greatest care. If you can’t find the queen just be careful with all of them;
• While you are doing this sort out the frames of brood from the shaken queenright Apidea and the best frames of stores from the others and put them into the spare Apidea body box;
• Pour all the bees into the nuc and carefully put the other 3 frames in on top of them;
• Fit the crownboard covering the feed hole with travelling/ventilation mesh then take it away to an out-apiary and feed it feed it feed it, but keep the entrance as small as possible to deter robbers.

My nuc is now as strong as a horse, queenright, stuffed with ivy honey and ready for the winter.

Now for the rest:

• Take the spare Apidea body box and equip it with the frames of brood we mentioned earlier and the best two frames of stores;
• Set this box on top of the other queen-right Apidea;
• On top of this, fit the Miller feeder. If you’re using these be aware that you will need to throw in a handful of straws or wood-shavings or similar as the bees have direct access to the syrup and will float off and drown otherwise. Unless, of course, I’m doing something bloody silly in which case, Dear Reader, I ask you to correct me using the comment form at the bottom of this post.

By the way the Miller feeders come with a strip of queen excluder to pin underneath to keep ‘Herself’ out of the syrup.

The perfect place to overwinter an Apidea is the sort of south facing windowsill that is really too hot in summer – like the one in the pictures above.

I should add, I have overwintered Apideas on a single box in the past but you need to have them very well provisioned, you need to pack the roof space with fondant and you need to keep a close eye on them especially in the early spring.

Click here for instructions on how to feed an overwintering Apidea

Click here for full Apidea instructions

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However, taking a crop of ivy honey is problematic for several reasons:

1. It sets in the comb even more quickly than rape honey so is difficult to extract;
2. It is the last honey flow of the season and the bees build up on it and rely on it for their winter stores;
3. By the time you take it off it could be too late to feed before winter sets in.

So, here’s what you do:

• As you are taking off your main crop of summer honey, note those colonies which are strong, vigorous and under new queens. This last is important because a new queen will still have a large brood nest and is likely to expand it further under the stimulus of the  incoming ivy pollen and nectar so the bees will put the honey into the super. The brood nest of an old queen will have contracted considerably since the summer flow – she may even be off-lay and the bees will pack the honey around the brood nest.
• Make sure your selected colonies are well-fed – give each 5-7 litres of Ambrosia or strong sugar syrup. More if they need it.
• Keep your eye on the ivy flowers and watch the hive entrance for yellow pollen –  click the picture below for a close up of pollen load. You may get a whiff of ivy honey around your hives even before you spot the first flowers open. Now is the time for action.

• If they aren’t already in single brood boxes – clear your marked colonies down into single boxes. This is important – if they are on double boxes or in single boxes over a half, they are less likely to fill your super.
• As you probably know, ivy honey sets even faster than rape honey, it will set as fast as the bees can ripen it and sometimes faster! You could try and extract it but the chances of you doing a clean job of it are slim – there is going to be granulation, your extractor is going to be impossible to balance and it is unlikely you will extract more than about 30% of your crop.
• Instead of fouling up your lovely drawn-supers, for each strong colony set up one super of frames equipped with 1 or 2 inch starters only. That is a strip of foundation 1 – 2 inches deep.
• If your bees are strong and there is a good flow, the bees will draw out the starters and fill a box each with ivy honey. If they don’t – nothing is lost, whereas if you had put on drawn supers, yes they will put ivy honey into them more quickly but if there is a only a paltry flow your supers are loused up for nothing.
• Don’t be tempted to put on two supers:
  1.   Giving the bees such a large void above the brood nest when the weather is getting chilly at night is not kind;
  2. You will increase the likelihood of having to feed them.
• If it does turn out to be too cold to feed syrup and the bees are very light when you take off the ivy, ApiFonda sell fondant bee feed in 15kg packs which can be inverted directly over the top bars inside an eke. Details here http://www.swienty.com/.  I haven’t tried this and it seems a bit clumsy but if all else fails and you are desperate for that crop of ivy, you could try it. Pack old jumpers or sacks or screwed up newspapers around the box of fondant to fill the void in the eke or the poor bees will be cold.
• Alternatively – leave it till the spring.
• To ‘extract’ the honey, cut out the entire combs and put them into buckets. Put the buckets into your warming cabinet with the thermostat set to 40 degrees centigrade and leave till the honey is completely melted. The wax will not melt at this temperature but combs will collapse and float to the surface. This should only take 24 hours but leave for another day if necessary. You can then either lift off the cap of collapsed combs with a slotted spoon or a skimmer and run the honey first through a coarse sieve to remove the large pieces of wax and debris then through a fine cloth to clean it ready for bottling/sale.
• Be careful not to heat it so hot you melt the wax – that is not the aim.  Beeswax melts at about 64 degrees and temperatures in that range  will cook the honey and irreparably  denature those lovely enzymes and aromatics.
• You can shove the lot through your heather press but  don’t squeeze it warm, like I did, because the wax will come squirting though the bag in a horrible paste form. Instead, stir the bucket first and let it cool a bit, then pour the lot carefully and steadily into the press – the warm honey will run through the bag without assistance but let the wax cool a bit more in the press before you apply pressure.  Watch it closely.

An alternative to stealing what is effectively the bees winter stores and possibly demoralising them completely, you could leave it on till spring and chop it out then. If they didn’t need it, it will still be there and if they did need it, you can be pleased you didn’t take it.

Click here for Bee Trees – Ivy

Click here for more about those lovely enzymes

Click here for Michaelmas and Geese, Ivy and Wintering Bees

Click here for ivy honey cold cure recipe

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If the wax is old and very black it is best to strip these frames down and add fresh foundation in the spring – you’ll seldom find AFB in nice clean frames.

Here’s what to do:

First of all, be aware that acetic acid is not a nice chemical and the sort you need is 80%, which is much, much stronger than vinegar. It will burn you if you get it on your hands and have similar effect on your eyes so wear gloves and goggles. If you inhale it, it could strip your lungs as well so don’t inhale.

Also, it will rot concrete or metal if you spill it so don’t.

• Set the brood box filled with the frames you want to fumigate on a solid timber floor with the entrance blocked off with foam.
• Disposable nappies make great fume pads. Take a disposable nappy/fume pad and spread, it absorbent side up, across the top bars. Pour 120ml acetic acid onto the nappy.
• If you have more than one box, just stack them up on top of each other. A nappy and 120ml of acetic acid on top should be enough for a 3-4 box stack.
• Add a shallow eke, upside down, empty section-crate or an empty super then cover with a solid roof or crownboard and make sure there are no leaks for the fumes to escape.
• Leave for one week. Don’t leave for much longer or the acid will get to work on your frame nails.
• Remove the fume pads and allow the boxes to air for a few days before using. If you’re not going to use them for a while just stack them away and they’ll be grand.

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There should be a course -‘Entomology for Beekeepers’ because the assortment of creepy crawlies to be found in the detritus at the bottom of a beehive is bewildering and horrifying – like Doctor Who with maggots.

Among these horrible occupants is a lot of wax moth and by wax moth I really mean the larvae and pupae of the lesser wax moth Achroia grisella  which live on beeswax and pollen. Badly infested frames are wreathed in cobweb-like shrouds left by the larvae as they tunnel through the combs. In corners and in any crevices lurk the pupae which are very hard to remove and they seem able to embed and even glue themselves into the wood!

Wax moth are more often found in brood frames – they don’t like supers especially if they are stored wet – ie not given back to the bees to clean after extraction because 1. they don’t like honey and 2. they need the old bee coccoons and pollen in their diet and they are mostly to be found in the brood frames.

To store supers wet – stack on an old floor and a queen excluder to prevent mice then place a couple of sheets of newspapers between each super then top off with another queen excluder and a sheet of plywood or some other solid lid.  Also, bear in mind – wax moth don’t like the light and they don’t like the cold so if you have somewhere light and airy and cold that will deter them too.

But back to the scraping. Where the frames are old and the combs black, it is best to just jettison the wax: break it out and use it for firelighting but scrape down the frame to re-wax in the spring. Where the combs and the frames are in reasonable condition (apart from the moth) and so long as the wax is not actually crumbling away to dust with the infestation, scrape them down and apply Certan before storing away. Certan is a spray-on biological ‘cure’ containing a bacteria which seeks out and destroys wax moth larvae. There are no implications for the bees or the honey – which is always nice.

Alternatively fumigate with acetic acid. Click here for instructions on how to do that thing.

A massive population of wax moth can lead to a population explosion in the creatures that eat them  which should be good but isn’t really. I’m talking spiders here – those whoppers with hairy legs and death heads on their tee-shirts. Cor they really give you the willies those things.

Since the advent of mesh floors I think there is less wax moth than there used to be as there is much less hive-floor debris for them to wriggle about in – but they haven’t gone away you know.  A blow torch is great for getting into the hive corners where your hive tool won’t reach and it is so satisfying to roast the little feckers.

However in the wild, wax moth will seek out and demolish the combs in abandoned nests, some which may have died of American Foul Brood… A case of nature pressing the reset button.

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I’ve been doing that for many years now and the cupboard is full of wobbly stacks of it so the time has come to do something with it. The options include the following:

• Trade it in for foundation;
• Melt it down and make your own foundation;
• Make some beeswax wraps;
• Make some lip balm;
• Make hand cream;
• Make soap;
• Make furniture polish;
• Make candles;
• Set fire to it all.

Trading it in is a trouble-free option and you get free foundation. It’s a bit dull though isn’t it?

If you have time on your hands and like a challenge you can make your own foundation. That said – the equipment for this is very expensive. However, you do know where the wax came from and whether or not you need to worry about pesticide residues.

Lip balm is easily made but an ounce of beeswax makes about 10 pots – not a great option if you have that mountain of wax. And you need to worry about pesticide residues too!

The same can be said about handcream and soap.

Soap is exciting! Click here for more about soap.

Furniture polish uses quite a lot but be careful with all those fumes and naked flames. More excitement. Click here for furniture polish recipe.

But candles… now there’s something that’s relatively easy, creative and will possibly help with that small, multifaceted income. That’s what I thought and that’s what I started yesterday – hand dipping those lovely elegant ones.

Here’s a couple of things you need to know:

• For candles it is best if you start with cleanish blocks of rendered wax – don’t start this process with a stack of filthy old combs because it won’t work. You need lovely clean wax – any powdery crud in there will migrate to the wick and block it all up.
• Beeswax starts to melt at 64 degrees C;
• If you overheat it, it will start to lose that lovely yellow colour and go a dingy olive – don’t let that happen;
• Beeswax is inflammable – it will spontaneously combust at around 200 degrees C so beware;
• Beeswax may react with anything other than stainless steel or pyrex.

Here’s the equipment you’ll need.

Equipment

• Plenty of time;
• Patience;
• Beeswax and a hammer to break it up;
• A 10″ candle will weigh about 70grams so you are going to need 70g x (the number of candles you plan to make) of melted strained wax ready to add to vessel A (see below) plus sufficient wax to fill vessel A before you even start. How you calculate this is up to you but you need to bear it in mind because you won’t be able to dip candles till vessel A is full;
• Double boiler or waterbath (stainless steel or pyrex) to melt the wax;
• Thermometer;
• Fine cloth to strain wax – old tights will do the job;
• Disposable or disreputable old clothing including tramps shoes because beeswax is the most recalcitrant material known to man and you are going to end up wearing at least some of it;
• Candle wick (comes in various sizes) – size 1″ is appropriate for 10″ long candles which are 1″ at the base. Candlewicks suitable for beeswax candles can be obtained from https://www.thorne.co.uk/candlemaking/candle-wick;
• A tall pyrex or stainless steel container one inch taller than the length of your candles, something like a spaghetti holder – we’ll call it ‘A’;
• A tall tin, such as those which olive oil come in, with the top cut off so the aforementioned vessel will sit into it – we’ll call it ‘B’;
• A pan large enough to accommodate the olive oil tin – we’ll call it ‘C’ unless you are confident that your vessel B will take heating without bursting asunder;
• A hot-plate which won’t matter if it gets all spattered with beeswax – not the cooker in the kitchen;
• Somewhere to hang your candles – a series of nails or pins uptilted so the candles don’t slide off – use your imagination/s;
• The candlestick you want your candles to fit into.

Method

1. Break up your wax as small as time and common sense allows;
2. Put it into the double boiler and heat till it melts;
3. Get vessel A into vessel B and add enough water so that when A is full it will come to about 3cm below the neck;
4. Put nested vessels A and B into C with as much water as is sensible;
5. Strain the wax through the cloth/old tights into a warmed pyrex or stainless steel pan then pour into A to about 1 cm from the top;
6. Put the thermometer into the water in vessel B and you need it quite hot to start with but don’t let it get above 80 to be on the safe side. Alternatively just keep an eye on it – you’ll know when it’s not hot enough because it will start to set around the edges and there’ll be a film across the top so add a bit of heat then;
7. Cut up your wick into the lengths you require plus about 2″ so you can make a loop;
8. Dip your wicks one at a time into the wax and watch the air bubbles come to the surface;
9. Hang on your uptilted nails and before they get stone cold give them a bit of a pull to straighten them;
10. Be organised and get dipping;
11. After about 4 or 5 dips, roll the candles with a clean, glazed wall tile or a sheet of glass on a clean piece of marble or a floor tile to further straighten them;
12. Lower the heat, or turn it off even, but don’t let it get much below 70 and don’t let a film form;
13. Carry on dipping till you get to the diameter you require – test how they fit in your candle holder;
14. A bulb of wax will build up on the bottom of the candle – trim it off before it cools.

Click here for how to render beeswax

Click here for beeswax facts

Click here for beeswax lipbalm recipe

Click here for simple beeswax wraps

Click here for beeswax handcream recipe

Click here for beeswax furniture polish recipe

Click here for beeswax soap recipe

Click here for beeswax candlemaking

Click here for emergency home  dental repairs with beeswax

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Strange name though: Purple Moor Grass- until you see a swathe of it on a summers day with a strong wind blowing across it, then there is a purple sheen to the green. It is a grass suitable for skepmaking because of the length of its leaves and because of its toughness. Another excellent quality is that it withdraws nutrients from leaves and stems at the end of summer then obligingly sheds the foliage for the winter.

Both the leaves and the tall flowering stems will make a good skep.

Leaves

The leaves (above)  are easier to work and make a softer skep but surprisingly strong so long as you get the rope nice and tight. Strong enough to bear my weight! Somebody told me once, “If you can’t stand on it, it ain’t a skep”, so I test them all now.

Flowering stems

The stems can be very tough and brittle whether you soak them or not and will not bend sufficient for the tight circuits demanded at the start. There are two solutions to that – either cut them at the end of summer when they are still green at the base or use the leaves to start with then start to feed the stems in later.  When using these you will need to either strip the seed-heads or snip them off beforehand.

Be a bit careful with these as the seeds can become parasitised by a fungus from the same family that causes ‘ergot of rye’ on rye, Claviceps microcephala. Read on…

Ergots

If C. microcephala is present, you’ll see some of the seeds will be enlarged, hard and grey – these are ergots.  A bit like wild rice or mouse droppings. Don’t eat them – they can cause miscarriage, hallucinations and death.

Here’s an ergot on Molinia – that black thing in the middle – click the photo below for a closer look:

Harvesting

When the long flowering stems are half bleached and still a little green at the base is a good time to cut them as they are quite dry but still pliant so go forth and get cutting.

If you prefer to use the leaves for your skep making, wait till they’re bleached but a bit green at the base.  Wind them around your hand and give them a good pull – if they come away they’re ready, if not – give them a bit longer.

Later in the year the leaves start to moult on their own but they can get very wet. Also the deer can trample the tussocks badly so don’t leave it too late into the winter.

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