2011-09-10: Spinning Gold

My parents' had tried to keep the bees out of the supers, but either some got in or some stayed in and I tried to air out the supers some before loading them into my car and drove over to my mentor's. There I sliced off the caps and loaded them into the honey extractor. After a few minutes honey started to dribble out. It was my first taste of fresh honey! Both my mentor and I wondered a bit about the sour note to the honey.

I brought the bucket of honey to my parents' place and my mother and I filled up pint jelly jars with it. We got about 25 lbs all told.

 

 

 

I placed the post-extraction frames out for the bees to rob out the remaining traces of honey. I also experimented with a bucket feeder with a floating platform. The bucket was a failure with a large number of drowned bees. But the resulting frenzy of activity around the frames was hair raising!

Also, I put in the second round of Apistan to the Ceres and the double nucs as well as finally breaking up Juno by opening up the box and pulling out the frames and brushing off the few bees that were left.