Our Honey Harvest

We decided that we had enough honey to harvest, yet still leaving the bees with enough honey to overwinter. I'll start by talking about our weaker hive, they don't have enough honey yet, so we have been feeding them sugar water like crazy. They take the water and make it into honey. Here is a frame that is partially capped. They cap the honey when it is done, meaning the right amount of water has evaporated from the original nectar.


Remember how we combined two hives? Well we haven't seen the queen since, so we don't know who the new queen is - but she is laying like crazy. Here is some brood, this would be called a solid brood pattern, meaning she is laying in each cell. This is a very good thing, as opposed to spotty brood.



Moving on to our stronger hive, we took one full Western box from them. Each frame weighs 5 pounds! Here is some of their beautiful capped honey:




We used pretty much the same process as when we extracted honey at Dan's house. Hot knife to uncap. Video at the bottom to show this better.


One the caps were removed we put them in this two frame extractor we borrowed from friends.


The frame after all the honey has been spun out.



After 4 frames we would have to drain the tank because it would hit the bottom of the frames. We opened the spout (just like on a car where you change the oil) and double sieved it to remove wax pieces.

The first video shows uncapping and the second show the extractor in motion. Near the end, if you watch the sides you can see the honey hitting the sides of the extractor as it is pulled from the comb (hopefully you can see this, a lot of quality was lost in the upload). Having an 88 degree kitchen last night was actually a very good thing, it kept the honey flowing! We got about 2.5 gallons from our one box, a nice amount I think. We should get about 9-10 gallons next year, too much for a normal household! Our honey is DARK and so good! It's much darker than our neighbor's honey...one block away! Isn't that a strange thing.