Winter Honey Harvest

So in an attempt to salvage something from the failed Mint hive, I decided I'd try to harvest their capped honey. It's always sooooooooo hot when we harvest honey, so I was thinking it would be a lot more comfortable to harvest when it was a bit cooler. Oh man, this turned out to be a terrible idea.

I thought it would hit 70 over the weekend, but it was only 60. The honey was way too cold to flow freely out of the comb, so we had a very tiny heater aimed at the extractor trying to coax it out. Here is an in progress shot with happy helper, Brandon (fiance's are mandated to help with all terrible ideas):

It took forever to get the honey out of the frames, and once we did, filtering was a several day process:

All in all, we extracted about twenty two pounds of honey - about 44 small (8oz) bottles, or 22 larger (16oz) bottles. Rather than bottling in this cold weather, we decided to wait until it was warmer. I also want to see how this honey holds up, a lot of the honey in the hive was crystalized, so I don't want to go through the work of bottling this if it is just going to solidify and be a pain to use.