Honey Harvest

It's been a great summer for the bees, plenty of warmth and lots of pollen and nectar to collect, just what was needed after our very cold spring. 

Our height and general weather played in our favour this year, our bees hadn't really started to do much when we got the unseasonable snow at the start of April, as a result they didn't end up starving because the colony size was too large to be supported by the available food. 

We increased from 2 hives to 3, and got a really nice looking honey crop.

This is a super full of frames of honey, we got 2 and a bit of the productive hive, and will take a look in a couple of days to see what's going on and if there are any frames to come off, while still leaving the bees enough food for the winter. 

Mum and I did the extracting this morning and it looks like we'll have a nice number of jars to sell. 

The observant ones among you will spot my workshop being put to an alternative use, all that easy to clean set up was rather handy for dealing with the sticky you get from extracting honey. (Everything was of course thoroughly cleaned before we started).

Once you've spun the uncapped frames in the extractor the honey collects at the bottom of the tank, and then is filtered off in to a storage bucket.

The sieve collects the wax, and any other bits and pieces that you don't want in a jar of honey, and then it's just a case of leaving it to settle to let the air bubbles float out for 24 hours and we can get it in to the jars.