Bottled Antheia 2010 Spring Honey
Antheia 2010 Honey.
Antheia 2010 Honey. 2 quarts, 2 pints, 12 half pints and one 4oz jar for grandma.
I found time to bottle some of the honey Antheia harvested during the spring flow. It delicious with a beautiful amber color. I cannot get honey that is more local, unless if I were to bring a hive indoors. Most of what I bottled today is already slated for family. A 4 oz jar for grandma, mom gets a pint, siblings get an 8 oz jar, except my sister who gets a quart because she’ll give me a few bottles of mead made from the honey. The rest of the honey will be sold to help cover the larger than expected equipment costs this year.
There are still 9 frames of capped honey in Hegemone that I wasn’t sure if I would harvest this year. They have plenty stored and there is still the fall flow for them to harvest more. I didn’t harvest at the same time as Antheia because crushing and straining a box is a lot of work. Next year I will need to use an extractor.
It’s fun thinking about how much honey I could harvest next year. I pulled 6.5 frames from Antheia this year, despite the hive being split and sending out 2-3 swarms. If I were to average the same number from each hive next year, that would net me 52 frames worth of honey. If I can keep them from swarming, then claiming 10-20 frames per hive should be no problem. This winter, I will need 14 more boxes and 140 frames to allow each hive two honey supers. That doesn’t include equipment to allow me to hive swarms, make splits or put queens in to mating NUCs. It’s very clear to me that I’m quickly transitioning from being a hobbyist to a commercial scale operation.
Future beeswax candles sitting in a tray waiting to be put out for the bees to clean
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