Honey Tithe

Whenever I harvest honey, I feed the honey that I can't get out of the comb back to the bees: the honey tithe. I put all the crushed, drained comb in a colander in the backyard by the hives. The essential part of this process is that I hide the colander in a tree, otherwise it's a bee feeding frenzy! If I just left the colander in the open, there would quickly be thousands of bees dive bombing my backyard (not so good for neighbor relations, here in the heart of the city). After a few days the bees almost completely clean out the wax, leaving it for me to render into beeswax.

bees eating the honey drippings

Some people don't like to feed the bees the left over honeycomb because of the possibility of spreading any kind of disease from one hive to the others. I'm a laissez fair kind of beekeeper, so I do it anyway and haven't had any sick hives to this day.