June 28, 2012

It's honey time!!!

After all the work we put into keeping bees, we finally got some payback.

We decided to make the honey extraction a group effort, so we got several of our local bee keepers together. This included my current neighbors Lee and Diann and my old neighbor Joe. Oh, we also had Diann's granddaughter Sara to make sure we did things correctly.

Since none of us had previous experience extracting honey, everything was a learning process. The first thing was....how to uncap the honey frames. We did have use of the clubs heated uncapping knife, but really didn't want to get into processing the wax cappings. Instead, we tried two different ways to do the uncapping. The first method was to use a heat gun to melt the caps. This worked pretty well with little mess. The other method we used was scratching the caps open with a uncapping fork. This worked faster then the heat gun, but put a lot more wax in the extracted honey.

Here are some shots of Lee and Joe using the heat gun method.

We found out very quickly that using a handcrank extractor is a lot of work!!

Our total processing for the day was two supers of Joe's and one super of mine.

I think we were all glad we didn't have more supers to process since we were only able to include two frames at a time in the extractor.

Here's a shot of Lee cranking and Joe holding down the extractor.

After cranking for several minutes, we would remove the frames and inspect them to make sure most of the honey was extracted. We then flipped the frames and extracted the other side.

Another shot of Lee and Joe using the heat gun.

When we finally got all the honey extracted, Joe had 3 to 4 gallons and I had around 2. We filtered the honey thru a screened mesh when it was drained out of the extractor and then ran it thru a meshed nylon bag that is normally used in wine making. I then used a ladel to fill my jars. Here's are some shots of my bottled honey.

This is a short video showing the amount of work required to run the handcrank extractor.



One final note. After extracting the honey out of the frames, you never really get all the honey. This could make storing the supers for next year very messy. To do the final cleanup, we let the bees do the all the work. I placed my extracted honey super outside near the bees and in one day they had all the remaining honey cleaned out of the frames. They also cleaned up the excess wax around all the cells. They are amazing working bees!

June 25, 2012

Haven' updated my blog lately, so here goes.....


May 27, 2012

I knew my hive was getting full, so I decided to add some supers to make more room for the bees. On my way to the hive I noticed a lot of bees flying around. I was actually watching them swarm. They landed in a tree near the hive but unfortunately they were 60 feet up!! No way was I going to be able to catch the swarm. They stayed there for several hours then decide to fly to a new location. That was also 60 feet up a tree. I setup an empty box under the tree in hopes they would decide to setup residence there. We went away for the weekend, but nothing was in the box when we got home and the bees were long gone. Oh well!! Here's a video showing the swarm:

I contacted Mike and he explained that the bees make provisions for a new queen prior to swarming. He said that a new queen should hatch out shortly and she should be laying eggs in a week or two.


June 24, 2012

Checked my hives this morning to see how they were coming along.

The hive that I added a new queen earlier this spring seems to be doing good. It has both capped honey and lots of brood. Hopefully the population will build up before cold weather sets in this fall.

I next check the hive that had swarmed on May 27th. I was expecting to see brood, eggs and larvae, but had none of these. If there's a queen in the hive, she isn't producing. I contacted Mike to see about getting a new queen. Mike called me right back and I was able to pickup a new queen Sunday evening. He told me to put the queen cage in the hive and check it later to see if the bees are 'attacking' the cage. This means there's probably a queen already in the hive and they're trying to kill the new queen. If that is the case, I'll have to try finding the old queen and pinch her.

June 25, 2012

Didn't have time last night to put the queen cage in the hive, so I put it in this morning. Later in the day I checked to see if the bees were attacking the new queen, but it turns out she was already released. Guess they really wanted her bad!! So now the question is, is she alive or dead. The only thing to do now is wait a week or two and see if there are any eggs.