Harvest Time

Well it's harvest time and we did OK, not as good as we hoped. We only have two colonies, the left one didn't produce a Queen when we put the Queen cells in that came for the right colony, that is because the first one out will kill the others and we didn't notice the Queens were dead when I moved the frame over. We still have two very strong colonies, that did make us some honey. Not as much as I wanted because I switched a full honey super from the center colony the left one, when I thought it was just week. Well they didn't have many gatherers so they just enjoyed the full honey super, as it was fully drained when I looked.

So back to the harvest, we had only two boxes of honey and not all the frames were full only about half. I would suspect it's because I added two boxes to each colony thinking more is better, but that just make more work to draw out now comb and make honey. Lesson learnt and we'll be better prepared for next year. I used a scraper to remove the capping's and put four frames in the extractor at a time, gave a big spin to remove the honey, turned them, did it again and repeated the process until all the frames were empty. The honey went through a double sieve strainer and then I put it through a fine clothe, it's nice and clean ready to go.  We got about 14 lbs of honey and a couple of pounds of wax capping's. I cleaned out as much as I could and then put them outside today to let the "girls" clean up the rest, it's their honey after all. I'll give it a final cleaning when they have finished.

Two colonies left.

Very strong when we took off the honey supers.

Extraction set up.

A bit of honey and the wax cappings.

Capping scraper set up.

Lots of work done for me.

They are having a great time.

Full of bees.