Honey Harvest: Fall 2010

My latest extraction was last weekend, which was September 11th. The honey looks absolutely fantastic. I have received only compliments. I also have them in my new containers.

Uncapping the frames: Hot uncapping knife cuts off the wax caps on each cell.

Bottling the honey in 500g jars.

 The greatest thing about getting all this honey is that there was a professional photographer there collecting photos of the process. She was gathering the photos for a book or for stock photos perhaps

Honey Jars

Beautiful honey

All of these photos of are my honey and are done by Tracy Cox. You can see her website at: Tracy Cox Photo

Chaos

I have finished bottling and started selling my first crop of honey already. It looked awesome and tasted delicious. This is by far the most honey I have ever bottled at a time but since I started selling it before I even finished bottling it; I am still not quite sure what the tally is.

Wax and other debris is filtered out of the honey before bottling.

Double filtering from a coarse to finer final filter

In other news; I just checked my hives tonight and the white hive did not have a laying queen! If you recall the last post, I recombined a caught swarm with the rest of the hive body in an attempt to re-introduce the queen to the hive. It apparently did not work. I currently just added my spare nucleus hive on top to combine it with the white hive in the hopes of its queen taking over. I do not even know if that will work either; since they appeared to also be queenless and to have recently swarmed!

Newspaper combine on left side

It looks like my best option may be to buy a mated queen and to introduce her as soon as possible.

The green hive appears to have a laying queen but she has not laid many eggs yet. It appears that she has just started laying in the last couple of days.

Swarm Mayhem: Part 2 of 2

I decided it would be a good idea to inspect the hive which the swarms came out of; so I took the one hive apart and cut out dozens of capped cells. I found my one ugly frame and decided to replace it with a new frame; so I set the other frame out away from the hives to let the bees clean it up. It alone had 5 queen cells on it. As I was inspecting the boxes, I noticed that there was no young larvae on any frame; meaning that the queen had stopped laying a while ago. The queen stops laying when she is ready to swarm and the bees make her essentially lose weight so that she is ready to fly away when the time is right. Because there was no laying queen in the hive, I decided to leave two queen cells in one of the hives. The plan was to combine back my one caught swarm on top of one of the hives using a newspaper combine.

Queen emerging from queen cell!

Queen cleaning herself (see legs wrapped around her head)

A Queen meeting one of her servants

The frame that I removed was full of queen cells and I had the opportunity to watch and take pictures of a queen emerging. I then took many pictures of the queen crawling on my hands. The queens were emerging within minutes of eachother. It was incredible. I ended up leaving these queens to die out in the grass. Yes, very harsh thing to do but I am sure glad that I acted when I did because if not the hive may have thrown even more swarms!

Capped honey frame!

I decided that harvesting honey now would probably be my best option to get more frames for even more honey gathering. My wifes' uncle was kind enough to offer to extract my honey for me. I am looking forward to see what the honey tastes like.