Sunshine Honey

We brought the first trailer home last night. Two more to go. Then mite treatments.

This video shows Sam using a hot knife to uncap a frame of honey. When he’s done, he finishes up anything he missed with a scratcher. The problem with the scratcher is that it leaves a lot of little pieces of wax that end up in the extractor. They get filtered outas I showed in the last videobut that’s why he uses the knife as much as possible.

First things first: that’s a leaf, not a dead mouse on the floor LOL! I didn’t notice it when I took the video, or I would have moved it . I took the video to show all the small pieces of wax mixed with the honey. The strainer filters those out. Fall extraction 2020 is in the books, and we harvested 2001 pounds of honey! (Sam was bound and determined to get there so he squeezed every drop out of the last few frames to make it .) We did 1617 pounds in the spring so our total... for the year is 3618. For the last 9 years our yearly average is 2882 so the bees were good to us in 2020 . Sam looked at his records tonight and found that since 2012 he has harvested 25,953 pounds of honey. From a different perspective, a gallon of honey weighs 12 pounds, so that’s roughly 2163 gallons. That’s a lot of milk jugs full of honey! And when you realize that each bee makes a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime...that’s A LOT of bees that have gone through our hives!!

One more day in the books. We processed 22 boxes which produced 456 pounds of honey. That makes our total so far 1502 pounds. We have 18 boxes left, and they should be pretty packed with honey because these came from the bee yard behind our house. The first picture shows a frame from one of the boxes out back. Almost end to end capped honey. Beautiful! The next picture isn’t exactly prettyunless you’re a beekeeper . That mess on top of the frames is called burr comb. Bees... build it when they are running out of room to put honey. So as a beekeeper, when you look at that box, you know it’s going to be full of honey even before you pull out the first frame . The last picture shows a frame that had brood mixed with capped honey. In this pic, Sam has already uncapped the honey, but he’ll leave the brood alone for now and remove it next spring. W a

Today we processed 23 boxes which produced about 466 pounds of goldenrod and aster honey. The total so far is 1046 pounds, and we have 40 boxes left. (We started with 93 boxes so we’re roughly 60% done.) The last boxes we will process are from our home bee yard, and they are heavy...so we still think 2000 pounds is a possibility.

Here’s the video explaining a bit about using the extractor .