Not that I am complaining. Right before Patti and I were going to start processing apples Roger called and wanted to come out, and take me out to the hives to pull a super of honey off. Not going to turn that down.
So I had another day of watching Roger pull a hive apart while I stood back a ways and took photos. The way he does it (compared to how I have done it in the past) is pretty slick, and involves a leaf blower. However, first he did some prep work to have another whole flat of honey to harvest in a week or so.
We had some honey left over from last year, as well as some comb from when we moved the bees earlier that had not been put into the new hive. Roger took all of it, and inserted it into the hive after cutting open all of the honey cells so that the bees would re-manufacture the honey. Pretty slick if you ask me, though I am not sure the bees would have expressed the same enthusiasm over doing work twice.
The super Roger was pulling off was the one above the one shown. The one from above he had set on the short new hive next to the large one. Once he was done setting the purposeley damaged slats in, he set the full super side-ways on top of the one he damaged and took a leaf blower to it.
I don’t know how easy it is to see there, but Roger is blowing from behind the hive and downwind. It blows nearly all of the bees out of the honey super and then they return to the lower entrance of the hive (second picture, though it is hard to see) and slick as anything, there was about 4 gallons of honey all clean and ready to go home bee-free.
He loaded it all up, and drove us back. He uses a centrifuge to extract honey when he is dealing with it, but I felt up to standing for a while so I used the spoon method, which works fine but then necessitates the bees rebuilding the comb when you put the slats and supers back on before they can set more honey.
I would scrape a flat into the bowl, then dump the bowl into my pasta boiler, and then move to the next flat of honey comb. Patti and Nell taste tested every side of every flat, and swore they all tasted different. I could taste some difference, but it seemed more striking to them. What was more obvious to me was viscosity and color variations, which I assume is due to different pollen sources. Overall, the stuff tastes fantastic.
The kids and Patti had fun scraping the flats once I had scraped the comb off for extra honey, and then the kids went nuts scraping the big bowl with spoons, cleaning up the pint or so of honey that had clung to its sides after I was done.
Now I am simply filtering it through cheesecloth I tied over a stockpot to rid it of the wax, and once that is all done we will bottle it all up.
