Honey Extraction + rainy weeks

It has been a while since I posted, as we had two rainy weeks.

In the first rain week, we had a great lecture on Microscopy, and learned all about how a microscope is put together.  On the bees we just did a little feeding, getting very wet in the process.

Second rain week, was not as bad, well the rain was very hard, and we spent an hour sheltering from the rain, chatting, and learning how rhombus boards work and talking about how we were going to use apivar life, which is the newly licence treatment   for Varroa this year.  After the rain we did manage to go out a look at the bees, but only the small nucs, did not really learn anything intersting apart from that one was no longer viable and therefore it was thrown out. All this rain meant that I had to make a special trip to the apiary on the Saturday to get a few jobs done.

On that Saturday; I went through any hives where we were waiting for queens to lay. I must have checked about 7 - 8 hives and only one of them was still waiting for the queen to lay; which was hive 10, which was the last split we did.  The two introduced queens where both laying.

Thursday 27th July  Clearer board -DAY

I am not sure what happened in the hives themselves, but any hive which had honey supers on, we had to put an Rhombus clearer board on. We first attach the rhombus to the crown board, which then becomes a clearer board, taping any unused holes up. This clearer board then goes directly below the honey suppers with an eke, (an empty super) below this, to allow space for the bees to move down into.

In the case of one hive instead of using an eke, we gave them a brood box of foundation to give them something to do. This led to a very very tall hive, Three brood boxes an eke, plus four suppers, see images.

Saturday 31st July - Extraction Day.


This was a Very busy and long day, the hardest day beekeeping of the year. Starting early to arrive at the apiary before 9. We remove all suppers all 22 of them and then sort them so that we only have to transfer home frames which have honey in it the extracted. 14 of them.  The bees are then squeezed back into their box and the eke and clearer board removed.  Then the uncapping, spinning and filtering all take place. Finally at about 9.30 at night we bottle/tub up the honey after it has been left for a few hours to float, any final bit to the top of the filtered honey.   The wax all then needs processing.  There was a fairly good crop of about 280 lb, however some of it had granulated (about 40lb) so we have choices left to make either melt it down or feed it back to the bees.

The honey moisture content was checked and came out at approximately 18.5%.using a refractometer
.

Finally above is an image of how bees if they don't like a draft will use propolis to fill the gaps, leaving us beekeepers a lovely stick mess, with it almost impossible to take one frame out at a time.