After a year of preparation and hard work, we finally came to the point where it was time to collect the honey. Since this was our first attempt, we were a little nervous about doing it right and how things would go.
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| From 2014-07-02 |
After all, one of the hives, which we've creatively called hive #1, is mean as can be and the bees attack relentlessly no matter how big or small the maintenance I'm doing. I wasn't looking forward to how they'd react with me pulling two or three supers.
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| From 2014-07-02 |
Sawyer and Sammy joined me to help out with picture taking and lifting and moving supers.
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| From 2014-07-02 |
There are several methods for clearing the bees out of a super. You can pull a frame one at time and brush them off, use chemicals to drive them down into the hive, or use a leaf blower to clear them out with extreme predjudice.
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| From 2014-07-02 |
I guess some people have nice bees that are so sweet they call them their 'ladies'. Mine are no ladies. They're mean as hell, so I didn't feel bad about taking the leaf blower to them and I definitely don't call them 'ladies', in fact I have another descriptive name in mind.
Overall the process went pretty well. I didn't get any stings at all and Sawyer only got one that tagged him on the cheek when his veil got off centered. We had a moment of panic when he yelled he'd been stung. As I turned to check it out, it looked like a whole bunch had gotten up inside his veil. I told him to take off and run through the bushes to get them off him.
Sawyer took me at my word and ran so far that Sammy had to get on the quad and go find him. Luckily all was well and we couldn't even see where the sting was once Sammy pulled out the stinger.
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| From 2014-07-02 |
Needless to say, we didn't get too many good shots after that. However, there were definitely some lessons learned. I think next time I'll using B-gone or some chemical like that to drive the bees down before removing the supers and using the leaf blower.
There were just too many bees still hiding inside the super and it took a lot of blowing to get them out. Also, in hindsight, I think I should have taken 4 supers instead of three.
By the time we got to the 4th, the bees were so mad that I basically chickened out. Using some of the chemicals might have made it a little easier. Even so, we still came away with 3 completely full supers weighing a total of about 130 pounds.
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| From 2014-07-02 |
To extract the honey, we were lucky enough to be able to borrow the extracting tank and tools from our good friend Dusty. It saved a lot time and trouble being able to use those instead of renting from the bee club.
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| From 2014-07-02 |
The first step in extracting the honey is pull each frame, one-by-one, out of the super. Each super, in my arrangment, has 10 frames. I number them to help make sure I put them back in the same order when I'm inspecting them.
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| From 2014-06-28 |
The first three frames are in the extractor. Lot's of honey left to extract.
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| From 2014-07-01 |
A perfectly capped frame, ready to have the wax cut off and put in the extractor.
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| From 2014-07-01 |
This is what it looks like after the caps are cut off. The purpose of the strainer is to let honey drain out that is still in the cut off comb. It's surprising how much more honey you can get from the cut comb.
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| From 2014-07-01 |
Once the lid is removed off the "mason jar", the frame is put in the extractor in preparation for spinning the honey out.
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| From 2014-07-01 |
The extractor holds three frames at a time and gets quite wobbly as you spin the crank, due to the frames not being perfectly balanced. As more and more of the honey is extracted it gets less and less wobbly
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| From 2014-07-01 |
After reversing the frames and running the extraction again, all the honey is spun out. Here's what the comb looks like after the process.
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| From 2014-07-01 |
Draining out the freshly extracted honey from the extractor. There's still a lot of bits of wax and debris prior to filtering
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| From 2014-06-28 |
Here's the honey going through the first stage of filtering. Lot's of wax debris. Don't extract honey without expecting to get sticky. It can't be done.
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| From 2014-06-28 |
After a second stage of filtering through an even smaller filter, we have the finished product. Seven and a half gallongs of beautiful golden honey.
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| From 2014-07-01 |
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