Honey Tasting Contest

Last year I had my bees on a field about a mile from my house. I had a great time and learned a lot of new things about my bees and bee keeping in general. The farmer who let me place my hives on their field sent me this wonderful email and I would like to share parts of it:

Stan,

Just double checking to see if you still wanted to put your hives on our property. We would still love to have you. My two sons would also like to start beekeeping. Would it be possible for you to be their mentor? I am not going to have the other beekeepers on the property this year...

Also I wanted you to know that your honey won a tasting contest at the State Tax Commission. The instructor is a beekeeper and every year he has a tasting contest during a course that he teaches for all the county assessors. Yours won hands down!!!

WOW!!! what a great compliment! That made my day.

Honey 2009

I know this happened a long time ago but I forgot that I had not made a post about the honey extraction. Because this was so long ago I have forgotten many of the details (good thing I took some pictures).

The black thing on top of the hive is a fume board. on the inside is a felt fabric that I spray a stinky liquid called Bee Go or Honey Robber. The top is an aluminum sheet so that when the sun hits it it warms up really fast and vaporizes the liquid. The bees really hate that smell so they want to leave the hive for a few minutes. That is why you can see so many bees on the outside of the hives.

Here is my setup for extracting. Full boxes of honey on the left then the uncapping tank, next comes the extractor followed up with the bucket with a filter in it.

Here I am using my electric knife to cut off the cappings on the frames to get it ready for the extractor.

My wife was a good help.

After you spin the frames the centrifugal force pushes the honey to the outside of the extractor and it drains into this cool bucket with a filter. The filter is there just to make sure all the little wax pieces and bee parts are not in the hone when you eat it.

My family had a lot of fun helping me out.

Getting every last sweet drop out.

Here is what my hives looked like when I left them with only their brood boxes for the winter.

My hives are at my house for the winter so I don't have to trudge though the field to clear off the hives when it snows.

And in case you are wondering, I harvested 180 lbs of honey from my two hives. That is the same as 7 gallons. I cant wait till next year.

Holy Bees

Today I did the last check on my bees before I pull off the supers for extraction. I mostly just did a quick check on things. I decided to remove the queen excluder to see if they will draw out he honey comb any faster. It looks as if things are going well.

I found out the hard way that jeans with holes in them and lots of bees don't mix well. Well the pants I usually wear are old ones so I don't have to worry about getting bee stuff on them and ruining them. It turns out that the ones I wore today had holes in the knees. Now I have never had a problem with them before while checking my bees, but today was different. I felt a little something on my leg and thought to myself "that had better not be a bee in there, and it had better not sting me". Just as I had thought that, I felt the little stinger on the inside of my knee. At this point I was right in the middle of checking one of the hives and I could not just stop and take care of it very good. I decided that even though I know bees die after they sting you I still wanted revenge so I slapped my leg where the bee had stung me to make sure it was extra dead. I had to stop for a minute to stand there and wait until the pain subsided enough for me to continue working. That was the first time I have been stung this year. Ouch!

Honey super #3

WOW is all I have to say! I went to check on my hives this last weekend. Three weeks ago I placed a second honey super on my hives. In order to see how the hive was doing I had to remove the top box to check the new box underneath it and boy was I surprised.

This is a picture of my hives with 2 brood boxes and 2 honey supers.

Here are my girls all hanging out on the front porch.

The big surprise was that when I checked the box I found that all the frames were full in the whole hive and not just one hive but both hives! There must have been an awesome honey flow going on, because they filled it up so fast. That meant that I needed to make an emergency run out to Eagle Mountain to get some more honey supers and quickly assemble them. I thought that the ones I had before were enough until I was ready to extract, boy was I wrong. Just like the other honey supers, I needed to place the new one just above the brood boxes so it will have a closer access to the hive entrance. Well a full honey super weighs about 70+ pounds each and I had to move the two full supers off of each hive in order to place the new one. That was tricky by myself because they were so heavy , but I managed :) I will be extracting my honey in about 4 or 5 weeks so I hope that the honey flow continues until then so I will have this new super full of pure golden sweetness.

My hives are now 5 boxes high. Just to give you a little perspective, that is almost 5 feet tall!