Beekeeping

I've been pretty busy with bees for the last week or so. I set out last Tuesday to retrieve honey from my two hives at Honey Grove. One hive had died out. The other had lots of nice honey. I planted sweet clover out there a few years ago and every other year it blooms copiously, and this honey seems to have clover mixed in with the wild flowers. I also picked up several frames of honey from my friend, Dan's, hive so I could extract it for him.
Then I stopped at my friends, the Hubers (sadly, Harold died last winter) to pick up honey from there. I had two hives there and both did very well, but one of them has become Africanized, meaning the bees were MEAN, violent, aggressive, persistent, unpleasant jerks! I was wearing a full bee suit and still got 15-20 stings. Some of them got inside my veil, which I need to be more careful about.
My intention had been to take all three of those country hives to a new place with mesquite (it starts blooming now when most nectar flow is over and lasts about a month), but I was tired of bees and left them there.
At home, I unloaded the honey and the one hive I'd brought from Honey Grove and hit the rack. Next day I rested until afternoon, then took the Huber hives out to the mesquite. I had another experience with the mean bees, but at least it was short - all I had to do was drop them off.
Thurs. I got all my equipment washed up, bottles out and washed, all the flat surfaces in the garage covered with paper, and started extracting honey. That is a messy job. Honey gets spread around in small amounts and pretty soon everything is sticky. The process is this:

• Pull out a frame and put it over a tub.
• Use a serrated knife to cut off the caps (thin wax the bees put over each cell when the honey is ripe).
• Use a scratcher tool to remove caps I couldn't get with the knife.
• Insert the frame in the extractor - a plastic tub with a cage that holds 2 frames and has gears to spin them around - with the opened cells facing out. Centrifugal force pulls the honey out of the comb and throws it against the side of the tub, where it flows into the bottom of the extractor.
• Carefully spin the frames until the honey is out. If you spin too fast, the comb can break and send big chunks of wax into the extractor where it tends to clog things up. This year I have mostly all-plastic frames which are not so prone to breakage, but I have a few all-wax, unreinforced frames of comb and I broke most of them.
• Take the frames out of the extractor, and cut/scratch the caps off the other side of the frame, and put them back in the extractor.
• Spin the second side. Sometimes I only partially spin out honey on the first pass because there is so much honey and the total weight might break the frame. In that case I have to reverse the combs and spin again, then reverse a second time and do the final spin on the second side.
• Put the empty frames aside and start two more.
• After 4 or 6 frames are extracted the honey level is up to the bottom of the spinning cage, which makes it hard to spin, so I open the gate in the side of the extractor and let the honey (which has some wax in it, too) flow into a filter, which is two 5-gallon buckets. The top bucket has a bag filter in it with the top folded over the top of the bucket and rubber bands holding it up. The top bucket has holes drilled in the bottom to let the honey flow into the lower bucket. The lower bucket holds clean honey and has a pouring gate in the side of it. When it gets full I carry it in to the kitchen and fill bottles, using the pouring gate.

This is a photo of the kitchen after extracting honey from the country hives and the 2 hives here at the house. The double bucket filter is at right on the higher level of the counter. Notice lids in the foreground, bottled honey on the lower counter, bottled honey on the far counter, boxes of bottled honey, and you can't even see all the boxes.

Liz made a couple of movie clips of me extracting, so I hope she sends those out.


I made a mistake this year. I left honey supers on the hives at the house last year after I extracted. Here in TX, the good honey is in the spring (and summer if you have mesquite), but honey made in the fall is very dark and smells strong like molasses with a bitter aftertaste. My mistake was that the bees stored some of that Fall honey through the winter and it was still there when they started making new honey this spring. This is a photo of a decapped frame with an area where Fall honey was stored. It made a lot of honey a bit strong, but still usable. Just not as good as I like it.