As I said in yesterday’s post I was able to get the supers pulled that I planned on extracting this fall. I knew going into this extraction that I did not have enough buckets to hold all of the honey that my bees produced this summer. As a result I left a lot of supers on hives until next spring when I will extract again.
In this post I mainly wanted to show how I have been extracting honey and the hardware that I am using. This is a process that needs refining. It took me two days to extract 19 of my own and 4 more for a good friend.
The honey is all now in buckets and will be bottled as soon as my bottles arrive at the door.
Any questions or comments?
Do you ship? 🙂
I will send you a sample. I feel bad for ya that you had no real harvest this year. I may be in the same boat next year, so e-mail me your address. I beleive I lost it in the computer “crash-n-burn”.
It is some good stuff. I may be a little biased, but after a couple years of this I know good honey when I taste it. I have turned out several grades, and this years stuff has a good flavor to it.
Guaranteed treatment free, also I can assure that there will be nothing but honey made from nectar of flowers in eastern Indiana. No sugar added. 🙂
Your honey sounds amazing! I wasn’t really managing bees for honey this year so that’s the way it goes. Our fall flow here just petered out because it was so dry and the growing season was three weeks early all year. But it is still really warm and will be for the next next month or so. The bees are very active and without nectar coming in they are consuming their winter stores already. It is looking like a long hard winter for bees here unless they have a lot of extra stores or they are fed, if needed. A lot of beekeepers here are pulling all the honey off the bees, leaving them without enough and then feeding them sugar for stores. I will feed if needed, but if they need honey they are keeping it.
It is always a judgment call on how much to take or whether to take it at all. Last year I took nothing from my hives. I was lucky enough to extract 6 mediums that a friend had for 1/2 of the honey. I now manage his hives for him. This year I left supers on two of his hives because they just didn’t seem to have enough stores. I think that one of the hives requeened itself this summer and was set back considerably.
I never pull all of the stores off. I check closely to make sure that the ultimate (third/top) deep is full of honey. I pull a deep frame that is close to the center. If it is not full and capped I leave a full super on there.
I hope some day to have enough bees and have my genetics to the point where I can “require” a certain number of pounds per hive. I am still in the concept stages of that and don’t even know if it is possible at this point. As for now I am very conservative with how much I take.
Can’t remember where I heard the quote or who even said it, but “dead bees make NO honey”.