Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
Kate handed me a note with the honey harvest for this year:
Peanut butter jars (large): 7.5 x 3 lbs each for 22.5#
Pint jars: 17 x 1 lb 17.5#
1/2 pint 37 X 11 0z. 32#
1/4 pint 13 jars @ 5 oz. 4#
total 75.5#
This is not a large harvest as honey harvests go, but it more than meets our needs and offers us many opportunities to make gifts and to barter.
Kate’s the precise type, which is a good thing in a physician.
Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
The honey harvest has moved to the bottling stage. Kate has dozens of jars filled already, quarter pint, half pint, pint and quart (peanut butter jars). We’ll give them out as gifts, tips for good service, for barter.
I’d say our harvest this year was twice what it was last year, an amount that seems to make sense, so I think two colonies is plenty.
Mark Odegard’s label, utilizing art work from a friend of his in Duluth, is snazzy. It features a northern Artemis, bow pulled with geese flying above her. I’m going to Duluth this week or next to deliver payment for the art work. Honey.
Kate’s quick treatment of my multiple stings: cold shower, benadryl and prednisone minimized the post-sting trauma. I have no psychological aversion to the bees; they were just doing their bee thing, so bee-keeping will continue as part of our gardening, orchard, apiary set-up here.
The honey harvest has this strange phenomena associated with it, one I imagine farmers feel when they harvest crops in the fall. All the work, hiving the packages, feeding them, putting pollen in, adding hive boxes and doing reversals, putting on a queen excluder and slapping on the honey supers all lead to this one day, removing the honey supers, extracting the honey and bottling it. All that work and a very quick finish. Very satisfying, but a little strange in the brevity of the final, sought after act, the penultimate purpose of all of it.
The ultimate purpose, of course, is honey consumption.
Almost done with the bee work for the year. I’m reading to lay down my smoker and hive tool and to pick up the Oxford Latin Dictionary. Ovid will get more time now.
Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
Yesterday during the honey harvest (before the swarm) activity shifted among pulling frames from honey supers, delivering them for uncapping (Kate), getting them set in the extractor 
and going downstairs to work on Mark’s Saudi visa. Shifting from the concrete tasks of honey to the abstract and electronic tasks associated with the visa application caused some mental whiplash.
We had a few setup problems. In fastening the extractor to the deck (again) we positioned the rack so we had to work with it in the rear, clumsy but not impossible. After we got it in place, we loaded it up with fresh frames full of honey.
Turned it on. Nothing moved except the electric motor. Neither Kate nor I are what I would call mechanical geniuses so we dithered with it, trying this and that, until we discovered it needed the top snugged against one side to allow the motor to mate with the rod connected to the centrifuge. After that the extraction moved along as planned.
Not sure on the total yet but we have at least double last year’s harvest, maybe more. Now, though, we have to bottle it and get its moisture content checked. Anything with a moisture content below 19.6 (if I recall correctly) is grade A honey and will keep forever though it may crystallize. Just warm it up and it will become liquid again.
Honey with too much moisture will start to ferment. This may be ok with you.
The harvest took from around 10 am until 3:45 or so. It was at that point that I decided to test my bee’s perimeter defense with my head.
