So Friday we decided it was time to harvest our honey, we hadn't looked at the bees for a little while so we were a little worried they may had done a runner- luckily they hadn't, they had been busy capping their honey.
Harvesting honey is on paper easy however it's an all day process. Firstly you have to open the hive and take supers full off capped honey, then take off the cappings and extract the honey from the frames.
First we opened up the hive and took of the first super. Supers are where the honey is housed and we add extra to keep up with the expanding colony and the honey flow. We had 3 supers on our hive and took 2 off. The supers are separated from the main brood by a queen excluder stopping the queen laying in the honey.
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| You can see the first super we took off in the background, you can see the bottom structures of the frames which break off as you remove them |
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| They had been busy filling every nook and cranny with honey, On the edge of the top of the hive you can see a honey harvest victim with the venom sack clearly visible, this means she tried to sting us. |
We then remove the capped frames from the supers and brush off the bees back into the hive, as much as we love them we don't want them around for the car journey home! In the picture below you can see the capped honey, when the water content is correct bees cap the honey with wax- these white cappings indicate the honey is the right consistency and ready for harvesting.
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| Capped frame of honey being taken from the hive, with their own built comb on the first frame left in the hive below. You can see the stinger out on the bee on the frame we're taking out, She got the vibe we were up to something! |
Once all the bees are brushed off we put the frames in an empty super (or 2 in this case) and load them in the car to take back home ready to extract. It was a mega hot day and I've never been so hot in my bee suit, we removed two supers of honey and went right through the brood making sure there were no queen cells. Like I said we had left them for longer than we would have liked but they seemed content and not too angry that we were stealing their liquid gold, we got a couple of stings on our fingers but that was mostly by accidentally pinching them! They had been busy and had capped nearly all 3 supers of honey. in the last picture the first frame in the hive they had made from scratch, just over two weeks ago we just left the top piece of wood in (we had run out of frames) this was to close the gap, they made the cells, filled them with honey and capped them!
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| The hive missing it's two extra supers and the girls queuing to get back in |
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| The two supers in the car ready for the journey home to be uncapped |
Stay tuned for part 2- the uncapping process.
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