Honey Harvest - Part 3 - Extraction

It took about 4 days to bring in all the supers from their various locations in St. Louis.  It was hot, hard work, although not as bad as last year; the temperature hit 41C one day!  It was still pretty hot and on one day I lost about 5 lbs I was so dehydrated (yes, I measured it!).  I learnt from last year's experience and I'm very glad I paced myself this time.  I reckon I would have been unable to do all the extracting if I had to bring all the boxes in just the day before.

So, once all 13 supers were in the house the extraction process started.  A huge thank you goes out to everyone who came round on Saturday July 6 to help me extract all my honey (and drink all my booze!).  We gathered in 376 pounds (170 kg) of liquid honey from around the area, but I also have about 5 frames of cut-comb honey as well, so that probably brings the total to around about 400 lbs (180 kg).  I simply must give a special shout-out to Maddie and Eleanor for bottling 74 honey bears and about 20 other assorted bottles!  Wonderful job girls! Thank You!  Anyway the breakdown was like this:

Backyard = 81 lbs (36.7 kg)

Diane's yard = 46 lbs (20.8 kg)

Botanical Gardens = 195 lbs (88.5 kg)

Ladue = 54 lbs (24.5 kg)

Cut-comb = 5 frames, so about 20 to 25 lbs (10 kg approx')

A very tidy haul indeed!  That's about 400 lbs from 5 hives, or an average of about 80 lbs (36 kg) a hive.  Quite impressive! Last year I got about 255 lbs (116 kg) from 3 hives, which is slightly more per hive, but there is still some honey on all the hives. I intend to take that off in September, so long as the girls don't need it. I'm sure there's another 10 to 20 lbs per hive out there! but I mustn't get greedy.


So as I said, the backyard honey is partially bottled, but the rest of the stash is in about 9 buckets in the basement!  I'm going to make some set/creamed honey as soon as I can and perhaps enter that in the Missouri State Fair.  Some "chunk" or cut-comb honey (jars of liquid honey with cut-comb inside) will also be made. But I'll need more jars and bottles, and fairly soon!

It was a wonderful weekend.  I'm now in the process of taking supers back to the hives to let the bees clean up the frames.  My car smells devine!!  However my forearms, hands and fingers ache now from all the repetitive lifting, spinning and grabbing!  I couldn't do this every week!

Some Interesting bee facts:

400 lbs of honey takes about 20,000,000 "bee-miles" to produce.

Each bee can process about 1/4 of a teaspoon of honey in it's life. So something like 100,000 bees were responsible for this year's haul.

Honey Harvest - Part 2 : All Harvested!

Everything I can bring in is now in the house (including a few bees). There are however still a few supers out there in myyards and  I'm hoping they will get filled over the next couple of months. That, or the bees will consume it if the weather turns out to be anything like last August! 

13 supers so far, so with luck that'll be about 300 lbs! Yum!  All supers are coded so I know where they came from; look out for the blind tasting event...

Honey Harvest - Part 1

It's time!  The busiest, and best, time of the year for us beekeepers!

I started harvesting at the Gardens on Wednesday and hauled in 6 supers with the help of some friends. Thanks so much to everyone it made a tough job much, much, easier! 

Once I was done there I managed to bring 2 more supers  from Diane's hive. Tomorrow (July 4th) I'll harvest from the back yard and then I'll finish up in Ladue on Friday! 

It's looking like a good year!

The Extraction Party is Saturday. Super busy, but my favourite day! I hope to see at lot of people!