Backyard Apiary

It would be nice if all honey was inspected on the way in to the country. The illegal honey from China and a few other asian countries makes it difficult for US beekeepers to make a living and it subjects US consumers to a disturbing amount of antibiotics and chemicals.

The only way to be sure that what you are buying is actually honey, buy local. Most farmer’s markets have local honey available. Prices vary, but the flavor will be much richer than the imitation “honey”.

Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn’t Honey

Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn’t Honey. Ultra-filtering Removes Pollen, Hides Honey Origins. by Andrew Schneider | Nov 07, 2011. More than three-fourths of the honey sold in US grocery stores isn…

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

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.