Bees: Saturday, June 25, 2011

Weather: 80's, Partly Sunny/Cloudy, Quick Shower later in the day, Rainbow Appeared

Capped Honey on the Frame

Jim and I decided that this weekend was going to be a honey harvest weekend. We were up at the house 2 weeks ago and we saw that the Alpha Hive was ready to give up some of its golden delicious. We made our first stop there. I tried getting the smoker going but had difficulties. As we pulled off the covers, I realized that the bees were very calm and we didn't need to smoke them. We purchased several clear storage totes earlier in the week to store some stuff in the barn. I realized one of them would come in handy to store the capped honey frames as we pulled them out. The upper honey super was still being worked on so Jim removed it from the hive and left it on the side. The next honey super was loaded!!! We pulled out the first one and not only did it have every cell filled with honey but it also had over 200 bees on it. I followed the instructions and slammed a corner of the frame on the floor and sure enough...all of the bees fell off in a clump.

We continued to do this on each of the fully capped frames we found. At the end of it, we had 5 fully capped frames to harvest which wasn't a bad harvest. The 5 frames weighted about 25-30 pounds. The sun at this point was blaring and we were sweating up a storm. We decided to move quickly on the other hives by giving them a quick run through to see if we saw any brood or eggs being laid. Unfortunately, with a quick check like we did, we didn't find anything. This coming weekend we'll spend a bit more time on them and fingers crossed everything will be fine. Here's a video of Hive C:

Earlier this year I purchased everything I thought we needed for honey harvesting except the proper honey containers! We set our honey collection area in the kitchen. We cut a 3X3 piece of cheesecloth and placed it over a micro-strainer which straddled the 5 gallon pail we had with a gate at the bottom which controlled how much honey of the filtered honey we wanted to release.

Jim sat on a chair and held the honey frame over the cheesecloth which was over the strainer and pail. I used a regular kitchen plastic spatula that we use to flip pancakes and scraped off the combed honey from the frame and into the cheesecloth. Jim had the difficult job of hold the frame which weighted quite a bit. Once all of the waxed comb was removed from the frame, Jim and I squeezed the cheesecloth with both hands to release the partially filtered honey into the micro-strainer. On and on we did this and realized we had an easy 2.5 gallons of honey!

It's impossible to do this alone and thankfully Jim enjoys doing this as much as I do. We used up a case of jelly mason jars and then moved onto another case of smaller jelly jars only to find out we had much more to do.

Here are the jelly jars we used this first go around:

Honey in Jelly Jars

We decided to hold off doing anymore until we ordered the right kinds of honey containers...which I did today. Hopefully they'll arrive before we head up to the house again.

Here are some more pictures of the honey:

Scraping off the waxed comb and honey into the cheesecloth

More deliciousness being removed