Backyard Apiary

Antheia, despite being split once and sending out 2-3 swarms, managed to fill an entire medium super with honey. The super only had 8 frames in it, so there was a lot of burr comb connecting the frames together and to the walls of the super. I do not have an extractor, the honey harvesting was going to use the <a href=”http://www.bushfarms.com/beesharvest.htm#crushandstrain”>crush and strain</a> method. Restaurant equipment works well for this and is significantly cheaper than purchasing buckets and such from a bee supplier. I picked up most of the equipment from <a href=”http://www.ureco.com/”>United Restaurant Supply Company</a>.

When removing the honey frames from a hive, there are a few methods that can be used.

1. Use a fume board to drive the bees down lower in to the hive. This works relatively quickly, but I don’t ever plan on fuming my bees.
2. Use a bee escape to prevent the bees from being able to re-enter the box that you want to harvest. This could take a couple days and you need to close up the top to prevent robbing. I have a few bee escapes, which I cannot find so I didn’t use this method.
3. Brush the bees off each frame as you take it out.
4. Rest the box on it’s side and blow the bees out of the box using a leaf blower or air compressor.

Lucky me, I have an air compressor and I must say that it works really well. 100 psi at 6-12 inches will blast the bees off a frame without killing them, even if one get pinned down. I placed each cleared frame in to a busing bin and used a screened hive cover to keep bees from trying to reclaim the honey. I removed 7 of the 8 frames in the box. The one I left behind had half of the frame uncapped. The bees cap the honey after enough of the moisture is removed and its ready for long term storage.

It took about 1.5 hours to cut, mash and scoop the honey comb in to the screened bucket. I tried a lot of different techniques for removing the honey to figure out which works best. A long deboning knife worked pretty well for cutting off the caps and cutting the comb from the frame. I don’t own a <a href=”http://www.brushymountainbeefarm.com/Cappings-Scratcher/productinfo/787/”>Cappings Scratcher</a>, but a fork work well for opening up the caps. Scratching the caps is something you normally do when using an extractor. When crushing and straining, it serves no purpose, but I was curious to see if a fork would work and it did. One of the 7 frames I removed had a lot of uncapped honey on one side of the frame. Scraping the capped side with the knife, I was able to remove the capped honey without damaging the other side.

Most of the honey has dripped through the screen and the collection bucket is filled past the 5 liter mark. I also collected about 1.5 liters in a smaller bucket by squeezing the wax in the screen. That was probably a bit unnecessary but definitely shortened the amount of time I’ll have to wait for it to all strain through. That honey is not as clean as the large bucket because I ended up dropping some wax in it. Oh well, I can run it through the screen again when I transfer it in to the big bucket. When it’s all done, I should have at least 15 pints of honey (over 20 lbs).

After I was finished with the frames, I swapped them for clean undrawn frames in Antheia. The bees will clean up the honey left on the frames and store it. A few of the frames were wired wax foundation, so they got that back too.  I put the rest of the honey covered equipment about 100′ from the hives for all the bees to clean off. Given that I have 6 hives in my yard, I was a little disappointed at how slowly the bees were cleaning everything up. It didn’t help that a lot of the bees managed to submerge themselves in the honey. A few of them were still alive when I played lifeguard. I even carried them back over to one of the hives and dropped them at the entrance so the other bees could help clean them off. This is one of the main differences between a hobbyist beekeeper and a commercial one. The hobbyist will try and save every single bee.