Harvest Time

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 Harvest Time

I have to be honest, keeping bees is a lot of work and trouble. If you don't believe me just read my previous posts. So why do I keep on doing it. Because I love honey. There is no better honey than that which is collected around your own home. We decided to harvest some honey a couple weeks back and we got some excellent honey. We only harvested 6 frames and got about 15 pounds of the liquid gold. We are not in it for profit but for personal consumption. I enjoy this being a hobby and if I add more hives it will become a JOB! 

So the first this we do is go and collect  the honey super that we want to harvest from. A cordless blower comes in handy to get the ladies out of the super, it makes them a bit mad though.



 
 
Next we have to take the caps off, I use an uncapping fork. It is inexpensive and once you get used to it can become easy. It works well for me only doing 6 to 10 frames.


 

Next we have to spin out the honey. We bought a two frame extractor last year that serves our purposes quite well. Of course if we were extracting many frames it might be a bit slow.



Then we bottle. This process took two to three hours.





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