Last week I bottled up 12 one pound jars of honey and 12 half pound jars of honey. Thought I would share it with you or first bottled and labeled honey. The design is fairly simple and we need to work on a cool name for our honey. Don't "plan" on selling any of it just yet.
I have however sold my first jar to another bee keeper, he's my lumber salesman at the local building supply. He would not let me give him a jar, knowing how much work it takes to raise bees and all. He noted "if you want to make a small fortune in beekeeping, first you have to invest a huge fortune in beekeeping."
I will tell you this is some very tasty honey! Meg uses it in her coffee everyday. I add it to my oatmeal and we both have it on weekend pancakes.
Coming soon on the blog I'm building a butterfly cage for Meg's class room. We currently have perhaps 4 dozen small Black Swallowtail caterpillars on the fennel in our garden. Her kids will raise them in the classroom. Meg would not even think of buying those stupid caterpillar kits. And the schools have no budget to speak of to invest in kits anyway.
Yesterday my friends Ken and Leslie helped me pull 11 frames of honey to be harvested. We all had other things to do with the rest of the day so I placed the honey in a closed tub in the living room. Glad to report ants did not find it.
Early this afternoon Scott who I'm mentoring on beekeeping came over to help uncap and extract the honey. Meg took these photos before heading off.
Yep that is yours truly with a frame of honey from my mother hive. When we harvested the first time we pulled, harvested and replaced a super on the mother hive. There was another super nearly full of honey and 5 frames were ready to pull as you can see. The first removed super was looking pretty full so we felt the bees had plenty of honey.
The April 16th swarm bees down on the farm we pulled 4 frames from them, those bees are my best bees. The other two frames pulled were deep frames on the Hillsborough cutout hive, they have loads of honey.
This is Scott cutting cappings off a frame full of honey. The box in the back right has the empty frames was already spun in the extractor.
Doesn't that honey look yummy? Best tasting honey thus far IMO and we harvested 3+ gallons of honey today!
Here we are cleaning out the extractor we borrowed from Ursula and David. The bees are pretty good at this, they do not waste a single drop. You know we drained the extractor and let it set for maybe 15 minutes, collected another pound of honey that settled down the walls of the extractor.
So we had maybe 5-6 pounds of wax cappings covered in honey. We drained it for over an hour into the honey bucket. Then I took it out to the bees to clean up. I was out there without protection with 10,000 - 15,000 bees feeding like crazy on honey. Am I crazy, no stings, good bees.
As mentioned we crushed and strained one deep frame of feral honey, here the bees are cleaning it up as well.
I'm sorry I never shared this with you. We did a huge extraction at Ken and Leslie's on June 10th. Here is the hive from inside this empty old house on their property. We ended up taking a split from this hive, it was too big for just a day job. We found out at the end of the day that this was just 2/3s of the actual hive. All the eggs, larva and the queen were in the stud bay to the left of this cut out.
So now the split at Ken's has a laying queen and the hive inside the old house is covered in plexiglass and draped so they can observe the bees when they want to. Leslie crushed and strained about 25 pound of feral honey, she gave me about 10 pounds, man is it tasty.
Here's a report from yesterday hive inspections:
Mother hive is doing great we pulled 5 frames of honey and replaced them after extracting.
Lindsey hive has more bees on their porch than all the hives combined. Had an accident while inspecting. New cross comb was cut free and fell into the hive. Recused a block of brood about 4" x5" and gave the rest of the comb with nectar back the the bees.
Mother's Split hive is in trouble. No queen for the second time this year. Small Hive Beetles at least 100 seen with many killed. Just drone brood and what looked like a big queen cell, we hope that works. One frame side was covered with drones, 6 frames total covered in bees in the brood chamber, lots of black older bees, not good. I'll check them in a week or so to see if there is sign of a queen. Placed a beetle trap under the hive.
Hillsborough Cut Out hive pulled 2 deep frames of honey, the hive has 2 deeps full of honey. These bees are very active and I did not look into them very much as the home made frames are hard to pull out being so full of honey and burr comb.
Home Sweet Home TBH a few beetles, they are moving slowly and have a nice brood pattern.
Farm Bees we pulled 4 frames of honey and they are looking strong.
On Saturday Dave, Ursula and Wyatt came over to help with a honey harvest, my first. They brought a 2 frame extractor and we put it to good use. Ursula and I did the frame pulling and inspections, while 8 year old Wyatt helped with covering the honey as we brought it to him. All said and done we got between 35 and 40 pounds of honey! They did not have a lot of time to stick around so I ended up uncapping and spinning most of the honey after Ursula and David showed me how.
At the very end of harvesting the honey in the screened porch I closed up the 5 gallon bucket. Then figured out I could still get a few more tablespoons of honey. So I leaned over the small extractor over a small bowl in the back yard. Then the amazing part happened, a lone bee came in flying into the tiny honey stream and surfed the honey stream down without falling into the honey, she did this 3-4 times as it slowly trickled out of the extractor
We also started on building Ursula's top bar hive. Cut the main box wood and glued the wood planks up to 14 inches wide. We worked the hive as clamps held the glue tight, I have only so many clamps.
Here is a brief report on the hivesfrom May 12th
The Tree Hive is really busy. Trying to figure out where to put them.
The Hillsborough cut out hive now has lots of brood, the new queen did the trick. They are still ignoring the honey super I installed on top of the 2 deeps they are in.
The Lindsey Hive is slowly growing. They did not accept the small combs we tied inside several frames. Only one piece about the size of a slice of bread was used, the rest had fallen into the hive and was a mess. The yarn we tied the combs up with was removed. Feeding these bees and they are quick to use the feed.
Our Mother Hive which swarmed last Sunday now 6 days later has only a little drone brood (we saw several emerging drones), no worker larva was found. Nor were there any pests like small hive beetles or wax moths which made me pretty happy! We did find 8-10 emerged swarm cells and one swarm cell not emerged yet. The queen if she was there was not seen, yet the hive had lots of bees. We harvested 35-40 pounds of honey!
Mother's Split Hive doing well growing slowly 8 of the 10 deep frames are drawn.
Top Bar Hive Moving is slowly moving, maybe 10 bars with comb, yet none are full combs. Saw lots of pollen coming in this weekend. These are my calmest bees by far.
The Farm Hive is going strong, no inspection was done, the bees are starting on the center of the honey super installed last week. I found the beetle trap bottom(dry pan currently) full (50 or more 1/4 to 3/8 inch long) of wax moth larva and fed them to the chickens. Saw 3 bees at a time on flowers in the patch of Oriental poppies, took lots of video. The video for some reason did not stay on the memory card:(. No photos or video I took in the past week was on my memory card, I hate this memory cards are no longer reliable.
The garden:
Weeds pulled and our cover crop of Crimson Clover was tilled in on Sunday. Too muddy to get the garden planted the way we'd liked. Now the next 3 days it'll be rainy, so the garden still waits. One thing I noticed about the Crimson Clover, it appears it crowded out the bindweed roots in the garden. I have been hand removing bindweed roots for 2 years, just maybe we have a handle on it.
