Summer Honey Harvest over!

It has been a busy week.  Sue Neal was gone to an Advance Kentucky meeting for two days, I took the mower back to get fixed, tractor was repaired, Sue Neal had a 36 hour virus of some sort (may have been food poisoning) on return home.  But, yesterday, we extracted the honey which was a lot of work but fun.

On Friday, I went to all our hives and pulled off full supers.  I could have gotten more frames off but left the frames that were not completely capped and supers that only had a few frames full.  I might go back a take some more off in September or October.  Below ... Franklin and Gaye decapping ... looks like Frank is giving some instruction!  NOT!

We had several helpers for honey harvest this year.  Our good friends Franklin and Gaye were great at decapping as was their son Paul.  John and Claire helped a bunch.  Sue made a recovery from her virus to fix some great food and help with decapping,  her cousin Jeff came by for awhile and decapped a couple of frames.

We all had lunch a Granny's ... LOTS of food.  The day was full of work but mostly, good conversation.  It reminded me of the days in the tobacco stripping shed or garden work.  We finished up about 4:00 with between 30-35 gallons of rather dark but good tasting honey (bees must have gathered a lot of tulip poplar nectar).  Even though we currently have 18 hives, two are new, five are from splits, one is from a swarm ... and the two I got from the Mennonites have not done well ...  best hives were an Italian hive (bees from Kelly's) from our Big Maple yard and the two of the Texas (both Buckfast hives) bees ... one from the goatfield yard and one from the top field yard.

Extracting problems was mostly the fact that the extractor could only take six frames at a time ... I should have gotten a second extractor since I had so much help decapping.  Everything else went well.

It was a fun day ... clean up continues today!