Wild honey, beeswax extracted after bees move on

BY Kelly Lopez

When a swarm of wild bees descended upon Dana Woolsey’s side yard, she decided to leave it alone and let it reside there. The hive stayed there for a year, creating both honeycomb and honey, until the bees swarmed and moved on. After all the bees left, Dana was able to gather all the honey left in the hive. She also extracted the wax and made lip balm. “It was a very rewarding experience!” she said. Photo by Dana Woolsey

Dana Woolsey recently used patience, resourcefulness and luck to harvest honey and beeswax right from her yard.

A hive of bees took up residence last year under a propane tank in Dana’s side yard at her Canyon Lake home. The bees found a hole under the tank and created the hive underground. Dana decided to leave the hive alone since it was not bothering her family. She has two small children, but the bees were not aggressive and kept to themselves, she said. Dana said she wondered what might happen if she just left the hive alone and decided to wait and see.

Many months later in early April, the bees started swarming and abandoned their hive under the propane tank. They took up temporary residence in a neighbor’s lemon tree, but then soon moved on.

Dana’s sister first examined what the bees had left.

“My sister got dressed in a bug suit and started opening up the underground hive,” Dana said. “She managed to get some honeycomb, but there was a lot of dead stuff and debris left behind.”

Dana Woolsey harvested and strained this honey from a beehive made and then abandoned by bees at her Canyon Lake yard.

Dana decided to do something with what the bees had made and her sister had retrieved. She took the honeycomb along with all the debris that was enmeshed in it and rendered it down with boiling water and a mesh bag.

Dana explained that the process of boiling down the honeycomb with all of the debris was not difficult. She boiled it and “only the wax floated up to the surface,” she said. “I let it cool and it came out perfect and beautiful.”

Next, Dana decided to use the clean beeswax to make useful things for herself. She made lip gloss and eczema cream out of the beeswax. Dana added CBD oil, macadamia oil, coconut oil and glitter, items that she said she had on hand, to the wax to make the lip gloss.

Dana Woolsey made this lip gloss from beeswax extracted from a wild beehive that bees made in her side yard. She used her wits and supplies she had on hand to make it.

A month passed and Dana’s curiosity led her back to the abandoned beehive in her side yard. When she went to the hive the second time,”honey was spewing from the hole,” she said, “so I grabbed a cup and some tools and scraped out all the comb that was left in there.”

She reached back as far as she could reach into the hive and discovered a lot of honey. Even though the honey had been sitting there for months, she was not worried that it had gone bad because honey has antimicrobial properties, she said. She used a fine strainer to get out particles and sand that were in the honey.

Dana said the project has been both fun and productive. The bees left behind a treasure, which she creatively extracted.

Now, she and her family have free organic honey and beeswax products to enjoy.