AncienTrails

Lughnasa                                                                    Honey Moon

Bees make several products in addition to honey:  propolis (the sticky stuff bees use to seal up the hive), royal jelly (fed to larvae to turn them into queens) and bees wax (the six sided honey comb).  All of them have various uses, but the only thing I’ve gathered after the honey is bees wax.  Up until this year I had never rendered it, but after reading and watching a few videos, I hit on the easy method I’ve shown you in previous posts.

Here is the result:

Beautiful.  The smell is one you’d like to have in your house year round sweet, fresh, clean.  Next stop, candles.  I might make some furniture polish, too.

Lughnasa                                                              Honey Moon

I’ve been on vacation.  A bee vacation.  Kate and I started prepping on Tuesday, extracted on Wednesday, cleaned up and dried honey on Thursday and spent some of this morning finishing clean up and rendering wax.

This cappings tank functions as a solar oven, letting the honey drip down from the cappings through slots and holes in a tray that sits inside the tank and under the lid.

Yesterday I watched a youtube video on wax rendering and a guy used a two-hundred dollar solar oven for separating wax from impurities.  I thought, hey.  I can do this with my cappings tank.

So I copied his screen mesh covered with a layer of paper towel, put that on the tray under the lid and put the cappings and gathered wax from other times on it.  And voila!  Pure yellow wax is now gathering, floating on water in the tank, the only energy source the sun.  No pots, no double boilers, no crock pots, no fancy insulated tanks.

Four years ago I bought candle molds with the intention of making, well, candles.  I have a new skill learning resistance when I’m learning too many things at once and the wax rendering, candle making hit my barrier every time we finished extracting.  Too weary.

This time though Kate and I had the extracting figured out, made it work, so I could learn how to dry honey and render wax.  Next is making candles from the wax.  With the rendering so simple, it will become a regular part of the extracting process.  As will candle making.

So we learned two new skills this extracting season.

Lughnasa                                                               Honey Moon

Today, bottling and washing.  Storing.  The cappings are in the sun where the heat helps the honey left behind escape into a bin  below. The bees, smelling the honey, have gathered around the lip of the cappings tank.  In the process of cleaning the extractor I got some honey on me and the bees began buzzing, trying to land, get what I had.  I went inside.

Kate and I both got up wincing a bit this morning.  Just before lights out last night, Kate said, “Good thing we don’t have to earn our living through manual labor.”  Yep.

Although.  The tiredness from this kind of work has a satisfying quality, earned in a good cause. A certain works righteousness goes with the Protestant work ethic.  Thanks, Max Weber and John Calvin.

Lughnasa                                                                    Honey Moon

We harvested four supers of honey under the honey moon.  Kate and I worked all day, until about 6:30 pm to extract the honey from 36 frames with honey on both sides.  Pulling the supers went much more easily this year since I used a gentle chemical that bees don’t like to get the bees to leave the super.  I loaded them on a pallet and covered them with cloth covers Kate made yesterday.

This was the first year we ran the extractor in the kitchen, rather than on the deck.  We wanted to reduce the number of bees coming to the extraction.  The chemical, the super covers and extracting inside all helped.  We had only a few bees and they were ones who had not vacated the supers before I removed them from the colony.  Success on that front.

But.  We air condition our home as some of you know.  Honey at 90 degrees flows smoothly out of the supers and into the extraction tank.  At 65 degrees, not so much.  The first six frames took over a half an hour.  We would have been at this well into the night.  So.

Kate stepped up her uncapping skills which helped us get to all the honey, fast.  We debated taking the extractor outside on the deck, but that would mean we couldn’t keep the honey gate open and let the honey flow directly into a bucket.  We thought about the garage, but before we made a decision, we decided to give it one more try with Kate’s new uncapping process and a second innovation, a hair dryer stuck into the extractor while it was working.

There we go.  We got our time for six frames down to around 10-12 minutes.  Much better.  I estimate that we have between 65 and 75 pounds of honey, our best year ever and one resulting from a package hived in April.  Extraordinary, especially considering the very cool spring.

Tomorrow is clean up and bottling, then storing the extracting equipment for next year.

Feels good to be done. (though.  there are still two supers on the colony because the nectar flow might not be quite over.)

Lughnasa                                                           Honey Moon

Everything has the dust washed off the extractor, the uncapping tub, the pail with the honey gate, the three filters, the five gallon pails to hold the honey before bottling.  Kate has made cloth covers for the honey supers.  When I push the bees out with honey robber, I’ll put the supers on a pallet on a two-wheel dolly, then cover them so the bees don’t swarm back on the frames.

The kitchen will not look like itself for quite a while tomorrow.  Instead it will become our honey house with the extractor whirring, frames being uncapped with the hot knife, honey moving slowly through the filters, removing bee parts.  There is no way to extract honey without it making a mess.  The trick will be to have the mess end up on the plastic and the cardboard.

When we finish the extraction, we’ll still have honey in the uncapping tub since uncapping itself takes off some honey along with the cell’s white caps.  That honey has to separate out from the wax and that can take awhile.  The supers have to go back on the colony for cleaning.  The bees will clean them up, then they can be removed and stored for the winter.

After we complete those steps, we’ll bottle honey using the five-gallon pail with the honey gate.  At some point later we’ll put on the Artemis honey labels.  Up to this point I’ve not learned how to work with the wax, but I plan to do that over the next few weeks.  I want to make candles.

Of course, the bee keeping doesn’t end with the honey extraction.  In fact, after I get the honey supers in the house, I still have to remove last weeks hopguard strips and put in this weeks, the final treatment.  This is for varroa mites.  Also, I’ll need to check, sometime in the next few weeks, the honey supply the colony has for the winter.  If it’s inadequate, I’ll have to feed the colony to prepare them for winter.

There is yet more to do after that.  I have trees to cut down and brush to remove for the new bee yard.  Leveling out four colony bases and moving this colony back there will happen later in the fall or early winter.

My current plan is to have four colonies on a regular basis.    That means buying one more package next spring if this one overwinters and I can divide it.  In 2014 I would have three colonies, a parent, a divided colony and a package.  If I can maintain their health, then the parent colony will die, this year’s divide will divide in 2015 to form two colonies and the 2014 package will divide in 2015, getting me up to the four that I want to maintain.