What a Weekend

Sunday. The first day of the week and last day of the weekend. I always dream of slow Sundays. A day that starts with church and ends with family dinner. It doesn’t always play out like that for us…life can be busy. I feel like our family has been busy like the bees. Summer is slipping away, and school will be starting soon. Bees are fantastic “pets” to have as you can be away all summer long and not need anyone to care for them – no feeding or watering necessary. They take care of themselves! 

We were gone a little more than normal this summer. We had time with family at the lake and at the beach. We were also able to take on Yellowstone and Grand Teton…a ten-day trip that I’m still not unpacked from. 

Throw in a family reunion, a teenage room makeover and honey extraction…I’m glad it’s Sunday, we are home, all that is behind us, and we are headed into a new week!

But let’s talk HONEY EXTRACTION!!! Yes, that happened this weekend. On Friday our mentor came to assist in assessing the hives and pulling the honey supers. After all my observations and worry, I am happy to report that both hives seem to be healthy. Hive #2 will likely need some feeding this fall – that hive wasn’t as heavy with honey for the bees. We’ll feed this fall to give them a boost in hopes they will make it through winter.

August might be a little late for harvesting honey – August is generally when the first Apiguard treatment is applied (for mites I believe). We’ll have to tackle that this week when temps hopefully drop below the 90’s. It’s been so hot!

On Friday we pulled three almost completely full honey supers. One off hive #1 and two off hive #2. Hive #2 had a third super with minimal honey in it. I was happy that hive drew out all the frames of foundation in the third super…that will be a bonus next year.

In order to pull supers you first have to get the bees to evacuate. We want the honey without the bees! Using a fume board and some stinky stuff you purchase at the bee store seems to be the most effective method. Simply spray the fume board, remove the hive cover, and replace with fume board. Wait about five minutes and in that time most all bees will move down from the supers and back into the hive brood boxes. This makes it very easy to pull the supers without bees. From there we had to transport the heavy honey supers to the truck for transport. If you don’t move quickly the bees will find the honey on the truck – we covered with beach towels to detour them from moving back in to collect honey from the supers.

It was so hot and humid on Friday. Wearing a full bee suit working to remove only four honey supers from two hives was a lot of work! I suppose it’s good for me but…I just don’t like to be hot. 😩

Again this year, our mentor had us to his house to extract the honey from the frames. He has an incredible set up. We were able to uncap the honey from each frame.

This exposes or frees the honey so it can be spun from the frames in the extractor.
It took a few hours to pull all of our thirty-two frames. The honey runs from the extractor to the bucket. We came home with almost two buckets of honey. From the bucket it has to be strained. Straining removes any bees that might have slipped in and it also removes the excess wax cappings.

I think we hit close to forty-six pounds of honey this year. That’s up from last year’s forty pounds. Once it’s all filtered it’s ready to be put in containers. We filled all sizes and sorts this year…

I opted to use the jars as decor in the kitchen. It was also an easy storage option…as long as my cabinets stay attached to the wall – all that honey is heavy!

All in all we filled over fifty jars. Hopefully this will be enough for us to not only be able to share but enjoy ourselves, too. The little beekeeper really wants to sell the honey but I don’t think I’m there yet. We’ll see how it all plays out. My mentor suggested selling it high when we do decide to sell…he understands all the work that goes into that little bottle of honey!

We started the extraction process on Friday and finished bottling late Saturday night. We squeezed in a family reunion on Saturday and would you believe I won a bee wreath!!! I love it!!!

We set out the extracted honey supers for the bees to “clean up” they return to those supers for any remnants – works out nicely that they even clean up any remaining messiness from extraction.

I placed the supers on the driveway and the bees quickly found them. It’s interesting to see them work.

As of today, it looks like they are losing interest and feel their work here is done. See the mess of wax on the ground outside the boxes…that wasn’t there when I initially set them out. This evening I’ll bring the remaining supers into the garage…from there each frame gets placed in the freezer for about three days (a real pain reserving freezer space for honey frames). If my understanding is correct, this process prevents wax moth damage. If wax moths damage my super frames the bees will have to spend energy building comb on foundation next spring – that takes time away from their honey production. Returning drawn out frames to them allows them to skip the process of drawing out comb and allows them to get straight to the business of honey…so freeze the frames is what we will do. There is another method to prevent wax moths…it might be worth me looking into.

With that, I think you are all caught up! I’m tired but I am so happy to have an abundance of honey in the house again. I have so many ideas on what to do with it and how to share it…stay tuned and maybe even watch for some honey coming your way!

-Worker Bee 2021