First Honey Harvest

As a prior post covered, we have had our bees since late April.  Since then the goal has been building up the hive and keeping them all happy.  Since they are a new hive we have been feeding them sugar water regularly:  for the first few months every three days and now every week.  As the hive grows stronger the bees can fend for themselves more and more.

One minor issue we had was ants getting into the hive.  This was easily solved by putting the feet of the hive into old coffee cans filled with canola oil.

This time we only harvested a relatively small amount of honey.  Primarily, we just wanted to try it while the bees have plenty of time to make more honey before winter.  But since we were in the hive, we took the opportunity to do a little comb maintenance which required some comb to be removed in order to help the rest of the comb be straight.  As the bees collect more nectar they have a tendency to quickly build comb to store it, and that can mean they get a bit lazy with keeping the comb straight.  Cross-combing of the honey combs can be bad because it makes the whole hive structure get out of whack.  A bee keeper needs to straighten out any areas of comb that may start to impact the adjacent comb on the next top-bar over. So, as we harvested honey, we were able to do some comb maintenance as well.

This being our first time harvesting, we were a little messy.  Everything got sticky, a few stings happened to the unsuited-up help and some bees died - drowned in the honey at the bottom of the bowl. We learned a few lessons, certainty, so the next time will be cleaner, quicker and less traumatic to the bees. 

Removing the honey combs from the hive

Harvesting the comb

Next mash up the comb to liberate the honey from the wax cells

Pour the mush onto cheese cloth to let the honey drain out from the wax through the cloth

Honey!  About 2 cups.