Extraction !

Honey extraction day. Very exciting.

It came as a bit unexpectedly. Talking to a guy who keeps bees very local to me, he said his association (actually not local at all, but in Barnet) was coordinating Apiguard treatment for tomorrow, so that all hives would be done at the same time to greatly increase the effectiveness against varroa across the area. The exact precision of coordination is probably a little unnecessary, but I'm keen to join the crowd on this one - anything to help battle varroa and keep the numbers at bay. So, since honey should really be taken off before Apiguard treatment, I dragged Nat down to the hives to help me juggle the supers and frames.

The hive inspections were interesting in themselves. We started in hive2 (brood box only, no supers). The bees looked healthy, and there were lots of capped and uncapped brood, some eggs, but I could not see the queen. What slightly bothered me though was the lack of decent honey stores. It seemed strange there was so much brood and so little honey. I was left wondering whether in the recent fiddly moves of the hive around with site some of the foragers had indeed gone AWOL.

Hive 1 (brood-and-a-half plus one honey super) seemed healthy and vigorous too. Again the queen eluded me, but the full range of eggs and larvae were present, and there were some decent honey stores too. Rather than taking away the whole honey super, which in any case was far from full, I decided to selectively remove super frames to get myself some honey to play with but leave a decent amount for the bees (quite a bit which anyhow was uncapped). Nat and I juggled 5 honey-heavy frames into plastic bags after shaking and brushing the bees off, sealing the bags quickly as we went.

Quickly home to extract the honey. I've got a pretty basic 2-frame tangential extractor. It's quite manual and a bit fiddly, and by the end there was honey on the kitchen work surfaces, the floor, me, everywhere. From the 5 frames I managed to get a motley collection of 13 jars, probably amounting to 11-12 pounds of honey (sorry - beekeeping still appears to be somewhat stuck in the imperial measurements age).

I'm delighted to have the honey now. For a season's work I don't have many jars, and of course most of it will be given away. The jars are few because the colonies are new this year, and I totally missed out on the decent honey flow of spring when the weather was pretty good this year. However, just to have something small to show makes me feel very satisfied, and has encouraged me further in this fascinating hobby.