23 July, our first honey harvest
Off we went, with some trepidation, to the orchard hives (F and G) to see if there was a harvest to plunder. Surely these girls, who had been established colonies for some time, would have something to show for their summer? Well, we managed to take a super and a 3/4 from them i.e. about 15 frames of honey. The rest was kindly donated by the Maisemore girls from Hive A.
Well, we dived straight in with the ‘just take it’ approach rather than faffing around with excluders and other apparatus, we just took a frame, brushed the bees off, and popped it into a plastic crate and then hid it under a sheet. Repeating this for each frame, we then moved the crate to the car, repeated a brush off of bees, and then took the lot home. At the end, we only had about 5 bees who made it into the kitchen, and not too much disturbance back at the hives.
The extraction itself was not as messy as I feared, but the worst bit was the cleanup afterwards. Whilst we were fairly clean with the extractor, my hair felt full of spun out honey by bedtime. Anyway, with our lovely shiny stainless steel tangential four frame extractor, we hand whizzed out the honey, filtered in into a stainless steel tank and then filtered it again into a food grade plastic bucket. I was somewhat surprised to find that we had managed to eke out 40 lbs of honey with not too much wax.
We did use a heated uncapping tray, which made life much easier on the uncapping and separating out the wax front, none of this washing the uncappings, just a direct melt into a bucket. Though this piece of equipment was possibly the worst to clean out properly afterwards. Another useful thing was having the rayburn in the kitchen keeping our operating temperature nice and warm and encouraging good flow of honey.
Our buckets of honey then went into the cool lounge to settle and allow the bubbles to work their way out, before some decanting into fresh jars with labels during the following week.
As a treat, the Pagden hive (Hive D) got the empty supers to clean out for us, which seemed to please them greatly.
August 9th, 2011
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