First weekend in Aug 2018...we took our first batch of honey from the bees for the year!
Everything has been growing like crazy and the bees seem to be doing really well. Last time we put the honey supers onto the hives and shuffled things around a bit because there were lots of frames that had just been capped or were just about to be ready.
This weekend we took this years first batch of honey. We had bought a 2 frame hand crank spinner from Dancing Bee Supplies, a double metal strainer, another 5 gallon bucket with a tap and a decapping knife.
We filled a 5 gallon bucket with honey and jarred it in 150g/300g/550g/900g/1.7kg jars. The washings went into a large carboy for a batch of Christmas mead and the wax was cleaned up and poured into pucks. The specific gravity measurer thingy says that the honey is 18.1%...which is great. It's definitely more goopier than last year's honey. Some of it was lighter and some was darker. It all ended up in the same bucket and it tastes amazing. Everything gets sticky while taking honey...YUM!
The garden has taken a beating this year. Not enough rain and many of our tomato plants have fallen over from the weight. We really need to come up with a better trellis system and off-grid watering setup!
