We got an Extractor

We finally broke down and got a honey extractor. Doing scrape and crush was just wasting too much time and wax.

We got it from Amazon, here it is. Hmm, the price has gone up..
Honey Extractor



And a picture of it in use:

So far we have extracted 41lbs of honey and sold 17 lbs.. Anyone want to buy some raw honey?

Honey!

Collected 2 drawn and capped frames from the 2nd super down. Did a crush and drain to get the honey out of the wax. I don't like wasting the honeycomb like that, but I don't have an extractor now and cannot get my hands on one right now. I'll work on making an extractor for myself.

Here are a few pics.
Me with a drawn frame:

Giving the wax to the bees to clean it up:

10 half pint jars of lovely golden honey:

Extracted honey frames from SJ hive

I spent a few hours last Saturday night extracting honey from the frames in the medium supers that I saved from being robbed out at the SJ hive. Ended up with about 30 lbs.

Honey from SJ

Fuzzy/I removed the 2 supers that were temporarily put on Fuzzys hive (next to mine that was robbed out). One super is full of capped honey, the other has only about 5% capped. I'll be extracting these shortly. Fuzzy/I used a leaf blower to get the bees out of the supers, worked quite well and the bees were not upset about it

I talked with Fuzzy about the wax moths and he suggested using BT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_the_honey_bee#Wax_moths). I purchased 2 oz of BT from him and followed directions to make it up and spray the extracted brood frames (only). Shall see how that works. I also think I saw a small hive beetle in the frames so I am going to cycle the frames thru the freezer to kill anything left alive.

Hive status: SJ and MH

Inspected the hives yesterday/today.

The MH hive is strong, lots of bees. I removed 4 super frames and consolidated the 2 supers into 1 super with the remaining partially drawn frames. The 2nd deep has lots of bees in it and capped brood cells in the middle of the deep with 2 frames of honey on each side. Looks good.

The SJ hive is kaputt. I checked it yesterday, the supers were only partially drawn/capped. The top deep was full of honey and there were very few bees in the top deep/supers. Looks like they had a late season swarm. The population seemed to be very low from what I saw going in/oiut and in the top deep/supers. The frames in the top deep were attached to the sides/bottom deep with lots of bur comb. In removing the frames for inspection, I tore open quite a bit of honeycomb. That was a mistake in robbing season.

Today when I came back to the hive to remove the supers, Fuzzy and I saw a cloud of bees all around my hive. They were at the seams between the supers trying to get in, they were bombarding the entrance, the hive was being robbed.

I decided to put the partially drawn supers on Fuzzy's hive next to mine to see if his bees cap off the honey. I removed the top deep and put it in a box to extract it tonight. I put an entrance reducer in the hive to try to help any of my bees who might be left (slim chance).

Fuzzy just sent me this email:
About 6:30pm, (sunset), I suited up and went over and popped the top and innercover on your hive. I figured that most of the raiders would happily head for their respective homes. Sure enough there was an immediate cloud of bees exiting.

Went back (suitless) at 8pm in the dark with a flashlight. It appears that there are now fewer than 100 bees left inside the hive. So I put the cover(s) back on and sealed it up.

Looks like I helped kill my hive. Darn!
The picture above is of the robbers.

Busy time of year

Life has speeded up, lots to do at home.

Right now we are having a mini heat wave, my mentor said the heat will persuade the bees to cap off any honey they have left open. He also mentioned that the nectar flow has dropped off and they bees will be robbing until their numbers start to go down.

Yesterday I was mowing the lawn and left the garage door open. I have a nuc with 2 drawn, extracted medium frames in it. A few bees found the frames while I was mowing and I decided to put them out when I was done and let the bees cleanup what they could. That was a surprise. A few hours later I had hundreds of bees buzzing the nuc. The frames were full of bees! I waited until 10pm to go out and bring the nuc back into the garage. It was cleaned out of honey! This am as I left for work I could see a handful of bees buzzing around where the nuc had been, looking for the nuc.

This weekend I want to move the inner cover below the supers with the bee escape installed so I can get ready to collect the supers.

Update: I left the frames in the garage, they flew into the garage to get to the honey and wax.

Honey collected!

I borrowed a 3 frame extractor from the beeguild and extracted the 14 frames of honey last night. I have about 4 gallons of honey settling that needs to be bottled. Wheh! That's a messy job. You have to be vigilant to get every drop of honey that wanders or it makes a sticky mess.