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.)
