Tuesday, August 13, 2013

First Honey Harvest

We decided to harvest some honey today and give the new extractor a whirl (heh.  No pun intended!)  The first step is to rob the bees.  I used Bee-Gone and a fume board to send the bees in the top box back into the lower boxes.  This allowed me to remove the top honey super with no problems at all.

We brought the super back to the garage, where we uncapped the frames.  Joanna remembered exactly how to do it from the one lesson she had last year at the Honey Bee Festival!

Then, we put the uncapped frames into the extractor and we were pleasantly surprised at how quick and easy it was.
 We only had about 3-4 frames worth of honey, but it was such a joy to see it flowing!
We ended up with about 6 pounds of liquid gold.  It's very light... and very delicious!  Now I just need some cool labels to make the jars pretty.
We still have the other hive to extract, and there should be even more honey in there.  Fingers crossed!  As it is now, those six bottles of honey cost us about $150 each!!!!

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