SEPTEMBER 2002
September again - time to harvest the honey from the bee-hives.
On Sunday, 1st September Paul began putting bee escapes on the hives -
the bees at Flaxton hives first - to separate the bees from the honey
supers, He returned on Monday, 2nd to remove 2 supers from them. Only
2 full frames were removed, not a very good result from both the Flaxton
hives! The bees also showed how wild they still could be, one following
Paul back to the car and waiting till he removed his protective bee suit
before stinging him on the neck. Ouch!
We repeated this process on the hives here at 19 Monk Avenue over the
next few days, removing the full frames as the bees filled them, The result
is quite a tall stack of full supers in the garage. It could be a good
honey harvest for us this year.
Dad And John get suited up in the dead of night
Clearer boards in place can clearly be seen
Paul Takes a full super of honey
And looks through the others by torchlight
Dad And John unload the honey crop in the garage
Shortly after we finished removing all the honey from all the hives Paul
and Lynn flew off on holiday abroad leaving John and Dad in charge of
the bees with enough sugar solution to replenish their food stores and
replace the honey we had gathered from them.
It was nearly the end of September, the 28th when we started extracting
the honey from the combs.
We decapped and extracted the honey from the Flaxton hives first, keeping
it separate - it seems to be quite a good light honey. We only got about
8 lbs. of honey from the bees at Flaxton altogether, I think we will give
it all to the people who let us keep the bee-hives at Flaxton.
It was a long, hard day's work spinning the rest of the honey from the
frames, but it was worth the effort. It is quite a good honey harvest
this year once we have bottled it all.
Lynn with the extractor
Filtering the honey