Quote:
Originally Posted by Iowanian
This weekend I was reminded of an old MadTV skit.....Lowered expectations.
We sang that theme a few times as we gathered the honey supers from our hives.
I had hopes and expectations for 20-25 gallons from my five, first year hives. The final tally from my first year of bee keeping was a little under 10 gallons. Some people don't get any from a first year hive, and we experience a drought that burned out the white clover and dandelions which is a major source of honey, so I should probably be happy to have any at all.
I know you're all watching for the crashes....I only took a couple of half stings through the gloves and on my taint when I squatted down one smashed one. The wreck of the weekend was my brother again, who got stung in the eye lid. We had to pull the stinger with pliers, and I'm not going to lie....I'm guessing it hurt like a sonnabitch.
The basic process. We take th hive tops off, replace it with a different type of lid that has a few spritzer of a substance that smells like almond extract that bees hate. Most other leave that Super. After a few minutes we pop the Super off and place it on a stand and use a batter powered blower to blow bees out of the box and frames. We do this because you don't want a bunch of oissed off bees when you extract.
Once we do that, we take the boxes of frames to my buddies shop which is a nice setup. We use a leaf blower to blast as many of the remaining bees from the box as we can and take them indoors. When you're done with s load, a truck is almost unapproachable due to th volume of lost, confused and angry bees.
Once inside we use hot knifes to scrape the wax caps from the frames of capped honey. This is the uncapping process and there are other ways including using something that looks like a comb. The wax has to be removed to get the honey out. Then we put the frames into s machine that spins the honey out of the comb...we run that honey into a filter and into buckets. You have to filter to get the pieces of wax and comb out of the honey, as well as bee legs and hive beetles and other chunks of things you don't want.
We put the honey into buckets for storage and then it can be bottled at a later time.
Year one....I learned a lot. So far I've enjoyed doing it, like spending time with our small bee team and it provides a great conversation topic in both my business and personal life.
This year we totaled around 975lbs of honey as a group.
I'll share a few pics for those that like them.
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That is damned interesting. Nobody has ever told me how that stuff works. Partially nobody here does it. And if your drought will adversely affect bee production, it would be a joke around here. Thanks for posting.
And HOLY MOTHER ****. Anything you have to pull out of me with pliers I am not interested in. And sorry about your Taint man, LOL.