Honey harvest - part 1...

It's just about the end of August.  The vegetables have been coming in and the tomatoes are ripening by the armful.  It seems like each time we're up we forget to bring bins and end up using makeshift baskets out of our shirts to collect the harvest.  

The bees have certainly had their ups and downs this year.  The original blue hive (Rivendale) has been strong all the way along, but the other weekend it had Cath in fits because the bees were really unusually aggravated.  The white hive (House Targarian) has not been doing well.  Transplanting another queen did not take and now it is too late (for us and our schedules at least) and it will most likely not survive the winter.  

We took 9 large frames from the hives.  Mostly from the white hive to compact it down to 1 brood box and to shuffle things around to get the blue hive to produce as much honey over the next couple of weeks as they will.

We boxed up the frames, some in a nuc box and the others in a Rubbermaid bin...there way much running away to escape the bees who were annoyed with us taking their honey!!

We setup a large fine-ish strainer over a double layer of cheesecloth over a 5 gallon honey pail (plastic pail with a gate spigot at the bottom).  We used spatulas, forks and various utensils to scrape the honey and wax off the frames...and in the end found that a simple butter knife does a great job and getting the frames cleaned off.  We put the capped honey into the pail and the uncapped honey into a pot.  The uncapped honey has too high a water content (neat...you can see the difference in how it flows vs. capped honey) and needs to be eaten soon.

We washed the frames and utensils into a bin with plain tap water and then filtered through some more cheese cloth into a water cooler, to separate out bits of wax, the odd bee and other stuff.  We put that wash into a 3 gallon carboy with some dark sour cherries and a packet of champagne yeast to start our next batch of mead.  That necessitated decanting our 3 gallons of Christmas mead earlier in the day to make room.  The kitchen and my hands smelt wonderful the whole day!

I forget exactly, but I'll estimate that we ended up with 13 liters of honey from those 9 frames.  The big two liter jar is a mix of uncapped honey and the bottom of the honey pail of capped honey.  I'll dig up a recipe to make toasted sesame honey snaps for J...she loves those as a treat.

We melted down the wax and it still needs more purifying.  We tried to use a paper/mesh paint strainer...which results in pretty much finished clean wax in one melt but clogs and gets "fall apart floppy" really quickly.  I think that we'll do a "biggest junk" filter melt, then a "fine cheese cloth" filter melt and then try and pour that through a paint filter right into the silicone molds. 

It was a long evening and lots of mopping and wiping up....but really a lot of fun!