The honey extraction kit has arrived and so today was our first attempt at removing honey from the hive in our backyard. It's been there about a year and we've added additional supers to it over time so that the colony has a place to expand and grow. Now, it's time to take out some of the golden goodness that has accumulated while these female worker bees have been busy pollinating our garden.
My wife donned the bee suit last night to remove the supers and allow the bees to naturally go back to the queen in the brood chamber overnight. In theory, this will yield a super that is free of bees that can then be extracted the next day. In theory. In reality, it started to rain last night. The night became an exercise in trying to satisfy the conflicting priorities of protecting the honey from the rain and allowing the bees in the super to fly free back to the hive. We suceeded in keeping the frames dry but this morning there were a swarm of disoriented bees in the backyard and the super still had bees in it.
However, we devised a system where she brushed the bees off and then handed me the frame in to the garage, closing the door behind to keep out the swarm. We went inside to start processing frames and the bees went back to the hive. They were sticking around the honey rather than returning to the queen. Once the honey was gone, they went back in.
The processing was a lot of fun. We found that the best way to cut off the wax caps was by scoring it with a fork instead of cutting off with a hot knife. Two frames go in the extractor which is then spun to generate centrifugal force that slings the liquid honey to the outside and drains down to the bottom of the pail. This is then poured off and strained through cheesecloth to remove the wax. We found that letting the unfiltered honey sit for an hour let the wax rise to the top where we could spoon a lot of it off before filtering.
One honey super yielded about a gallon and a half. After filtering out the wax, this came to just over x jars.
A flickerstream of photos from this harvest is available here.
