The Second annual Honey harvest

Well, after all day Saturday, and most of the day Sunday, the extraction is now officially over. We had a decent turnout of people who came to help out, and a good time was had by everyone. Considering it was the first time using the new equipment, everything went very smoothly except for the problem of the pump hoses clogging.

We haven't measured the exact amount of honey yet, but somewhere around 100 gallons my rough estimate. Quite a bit less than we were hoping for, but still a good amount.

Here's some pictures:

The partial setup

It was a bit of a problem keeping the bees out of the room.



A steady stream of golden honey flowed into the bucket all day long...



...except when it refused to. Trying to unclog the pipes...again



Except for the occasional frame getting stuck, the new uncapper worked like a charm.



We had a great group of people helping.



Especially with scraping and loading frames.




Honey streaming off of the frames

-J

Harvest time!!

We're getting down to the end...harvest time is almost upon us. This is our first time using the new equipment, so we're going to see how it goes, and hopefully learn some new things!

The official harvest date (as of now) is next Saturday, September 25th. Everyone who's interested is invited to come help out with the extraction process, or just hang out and see how it's done. It was a blast last year, and should great experience this year too!


-J

Edit: Slight change of plans in the date.
Date Edit-Again :-|

The apples are ripe too! You really can't beat a good apple

straight off the tree, unless it's honey straight out of the hive....

Well, I guess I haven't posted here much this summer(between traveling, and school, and whatnot, I've been pretty busy). But then, as far as the beehive operations go, there hasn't really been all that much going on. Things have been going pretty smoothly throughout the summer.(at least, as smoothly as can be expected) We had about five of our 40 hives die, but the rest are running well.

One of the biggest problems we ran into is bees not drawing out the new frames. All the old, drawn out frames are full of honey, but they don't seem to want to touch the new ones. Why? I don't know, but it's likely slowed down honey production considerably. But, if it all goes really well, we may be pushing 200 gallons of honey.


Above: The hive on top of the old chicken coop--possibly one of our best hives.