2nd Batch of Honey!

This weeks hive visit was amazing, they are still going strong this late in the summer. We took off another super of honey- this was nearly 20lbs! I realised last time I lacked a lot of pictures of this process, mainly due to it being so sticky! This time round it wasn't as hot and wasn't as messy. We had 10 frames of honey. Once the bees get the honey home they put it into wax cells and when it is the right consistency and the water content is just right they seal it over with thin wax cappings.

Sealed frame of honey

The first task is to remove these cappings, you can use knives or various uncapping tools, my personal favourite is a dinner fork! You have to place the fork just under the surface and pop them off.

Inside the spinner

Once you've done this to both sides it goes into the spinner along with another frame, we try and get equally weighted ones so that the spinner doesn't rock too much. We then spin the honey out, the honey is flung out of the frames in what looks like a sprinkler motion (we never realised this until watching the slow motion video below!) once this is done the honey sinks to the bottom. We then sieve this out to get rid of any stray cappings and it goes into a settling tank. We leave it for a few days to settle as some pollen rises to the top and then bottle it up, it's labelled and ready to go!

Here it is- liquid gold!