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.

Lughnasa                                                              Honey Moon

We’re beginning to get ready for honey extraction on Wednesday.  Kate’s making cloth covers for the honey supers today and tomorrow we’ll get all the extraction equipment out of the shed and into the kitchen.  There we will lay down cardboard and plastic, arrange the uncapping tub, the filters, the plastic 5 gallon pail with the honeygate and stabilize the extractor’s triangular metal stand on wood.  After setting up the extractor itself and getting a speed that doesn’t send it skittering over the kitchen floor, we’ll be ready for the next step on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, after a final reading of the refractometer on the uncapped honey, we’ll go ahead with all frames unless there is not enough capped honey.  If there isn’t, we’ll only extract from the capped frames and put uncapped frames back on and do them later.  The issue is the water content of the honey.  Honey has to have less than 18% water to be honey, otherwise it ferments.

More on the Wednesday process later.

Lughnasa                                                                Honey Moon

The colony at work.

8/14/2013  Lughnasa                                                           Honey Moon

So.  It was going well.  The refractometer reported 19% water content in uncapped honey, too high and expected.  That was from the second honey super of six.  I had my plank across two upended trash cans that I used last time.  My ergonomics were better.  Lowering with my right arm.  All six supers, each with some weight now, maybe 5 total full or close to full were on the plank.  I got the hopguard strips out and had removed last week’s strips from the top hive box when I heard a noise.  Uh oh.

My temporary super holding plank had shifted and all six honey supers hit the ground.  Wow.  A lot of angry bees.  This is where I came in last week.  The difference this week?  I had a sweat band on so I could see out of both eyes and I had used the long beekeeper gloves with the sleeve that goes up to the shoulder of the suit.  Thank god.

The only stings I got this time were on my right ankle and I smoked them right away, dispersing the “sting again, right here!!!!” pheromones.  That left me free to contemplate the huge, sticky mess.  One thing at a time.  I decided I would finish the hopguard strips on the three hive boxes since I had to do it and I had begun.  So I did.

After the last hopguard strip went on, I moved over to the six tipped over supers.  Three I righted with a gloved handle on the top of the frames.  No problem.  Two supers I had to set aside and reinstall their frames one by one, turning them right side up as I did.  The last one though must have caught another super.  The super now sat at an angle.  That required a new one altogether.  Of which I have plenty. After grabbing that one from the garage and replacing the frames into it, I began lifting the supers back on to the stack.  Not easy because of their weight, but it got done.

Now, inside, I’m glad there’s only one more iteration of this process.  If I weren’t doing this mite treatment, I wouldn’t need to be doing all this lifting and moving, but I am, so I do.  Hopefully most of the honey will be capped next week, which means that it’s automatically below 18% since that’s when the bees cap it.  That will mean I can remove the supers for honey extraction and not have to put them back on.

8/14/2013   Lughnasa                                                                                      Honey Moon

Cool weather.  Presents an interesting problem.    Honey has to have less than 18% water content to qualify as honey.  To measure this a refractometer is necessary.  I bought one.  It needs calibration; but, there’s a hitch today, the temperature.  The temperature has to be 68 degrees.  Won’t hit that until 11:00 am according to my weather websites.  I want to check the honey at 10.  On August 14th this is an issue?

I’m picking plums this morning, then I’ll do the refractometer test of the honey, after which I will, again, remove all six honey supers, remove the hopguard strips I placed last week and replace them with new ones.  My plan is better this week.  I have a desire to avoid the hassle of last week’s battle with an angry superorganism.  Aversive conditioning really does work.

Check you after it’s all over.

8/10/2013                         Lughnasa                                                 State Fair Moon

Honey extraction coming up on August 20/21.  We’re going to get ready on that Tuesday, which means cardboard on the kitchen floor and plastic all over, too.  It also means bolting our extractor stand to a piece of plywood with 2×4 lengths nailed to it for the stand’s braces, getting the uncapping tank set up and all the filters and bottling equipment cleaned out and ready for action.

On Wednesday I’ll begin by using honey robber to move the bees out of the honey super, one super at a time.  This involves putting a bit of a chemical on a felt backing contained in a super-sized wooden box and putting that box over the super.  This drives the bees down and allows me to get a bee free super off and onto a pallet I’ll have waiting on my truck dolly.  I’ll repeat this six times, covering the stack of supers each time I add a super to keep the bees away.

Once all six supers are off, I’ll wheel them into the garage and carry them, still covered, into the kitchen.  Kate will have the uncapping knife warmed up and will start uncapping.  When we have six frames uncapped, they’ll go in the extractor where they will spin as centrifugal force pulls the honey out of the comb.  This process continues until all frames, as many as 54, certainly 40, have the honey drained from them.  That’s when filtering and bottling begins.  A big process, lots of steps, but easier each time we’ve done it.  Practice makes lots of bottled honey.

After all this, of course, there’s selling it.  This is going to be a crop well beyond our needs so getting some cash out of it to defray the considerable money we’ve already sunk into bee-keeping makes sense.