Honey Harvest 2015

by Alan Cole · Saturday, September 5th, 2015

We managed to harvest our honey today. I popped out this morning and put the clearer board on and then again early evening to collect the frames of honey. There’s only one hive in our apiary and it had two supers on it with capped frames in, but only about 14 frames in total worth harvesting.

The Association has a new extractor so we had hired that for the weekend.

New Extractor

We then set to uncapping the frames of honey, arranging them in the extractor, spinning out the honey and sieving it into bowls. Meanwhile we were sterilising jars in the oven. Once the honey was extracted from the frames, they went back into the supers and I took them back out to give them back to the bees so that they could clean out any leftovers. The bees were getting a little annoyed by now, which isn’t surprising, not only was this the third time I’d disturbed them today, but I’d stolen all of their honey stores as well. Not the best of times to notice that my veil had a hole in it, but that’s what I did notice! I fed the bees with syrup and closed them up to leave them to get on with it. We’ll now feed them like mad so that they can replenish their stores for winter.

Anna then continued with the harvest, decanting the honey into jars and cleaning up.

Not a huge harvest, just over 18lb altogether from this single hive. Unfortunately our other apiary has been unproductive this year, but it does have 3, hopefully healthy, queenright colonies in it, whereas we started the year with just one.

As you can see, stocks are limited so if you want to buy some very rare Ynyslas Honey then get in touch quickly.