Honey Harvest

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Our annual honey harvest saw over 120 members of staff getting stuck into the action!

We have three bee hives on the roof of Innovation Centre and this summer they’ve been busy pollinating plants and making honey. A bee hive consists of several wooden boxes filled with frames where the bees build their honeycomb. We collected the frames at the end of the season, making sure that the bees were left with enough honey to keep them sustained over winter.

As part of the Sustainable City Challenge we invited staff to come and help us harvest the honey. The first job was to uncap the wax from the honeycomb which locks the honey in. We uncapped it with a pronged fork and kept the wax cappings for later projects.

  The frames were then put into a spinner which extracts the honey by centrifugal force. We filtered it through a sieve and then loaded it up ready to be jarred.

  After adding pieces of honeycomb to some of the jars we filled them up with the deliciously sticky honey!

We have 123 jars of honey in total which will be on sale in October. Keep an eye out on Twitter and Yammer for more information, or read more about City’s bees here.

 

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