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Honey Extracting

Friday I took off 36 frames of full honey - I ended up with about

1-1/2 5-gallon buckets of honey.

I did the old take one frame out and put in an empty super that was in the wheelbarrow. Then cover it quickly with a sheet so the bees would stay out. Then push that wheelbarrow up to the house and unload the super. I can carry about 3 frames of honey - that stuff is heavy. But this works for me and I've done it the same way for years. Cover the table and floor with plastic and get busy!

After the honey is taken from the frames, I put the supers out in the beeyard - there's a feeding frenzy. This year I put sawhorses out and sat the empty supers on top rather than on the ground. It's worked really well - the bees can go in and out and all around.

This is where I took the honey:

Nuc #2 - took off 1 full super of honey

Swarm '09 - took off 1 full super of honey

Nuc #1 - took off 1 full super of honey

Hive #4 and Hive #5 - I took 4 full frames of honey from each of these hives.

I must have left two frames somewhere and maybe I put those back or switched something around cause the extractor can hold 9 frames and I filled it up 4 times. Oh well . . . some things are unexplainable.

Splitting Hive #4

Hive #4 (the skyscraper hive) has just gotten so large I felt I needed to rearrange some housing. Mr. Buzz (aka Ben) had some extra Italian queens so I decided to buy a new queen and split Hive #4.

Here's the two brood boxes - the one on its side will be the brood box for Hive #5 with the new queen. We had to look thru each frame carefully for the queen before putting the new queen in her new house.

And Ben put the queen on the bottom between two frames rather than the top as I've always been told - he said he does it either way - just depends on circumstances at the time.

Two frames from the brood box - all of them looked just this good.

There were four supers and a brood box on top of Hive #4. We got them sorted out and put two supers on each hive and the brood box on top of Hive #4 - they had not done much in the top brood box since that was put on 5/29/10. All the supers were full of honey and bees.

So Hive #4 on the left and the new Hive #5 on the right with all the bees hanging out and you can see bees all over the ground around the hives. They were everywhere - had to pay attention to where you put your feet.

Now here they're all settled - Hive #4 on the left and Hive #5 on the right. We put a screen on the front of Hive #5 to keep the bees in during the night - we smoked them and got as many in as possible. I took the screen off Tues morning around 9 per Ben's instructions.

Working with Ben was great - every person does something differently or will make comments regarding their beekeeping that helps you learn and understand more about the bees.

We'll open Hive #5 Tues or Wed.