Honey Harvest

Today we did another honey harvest, with some brand new honey helpers! Special thanks to Shawn, Amanda, Laura and Eirik (and of course thanks to returning helper, Brandon, mandated to help because he is marrying the beekeeper).

We harvested 27 frames this time, split into two batches. The first batch was new spring honey (about 22 pounds collected). The second batch was honey that has been in the hive since the fall (I'm still waiting on the filtering, so no final weight). I tried to divide up this honey because the fall honey crystalizes so quickly. Brandon and I really want to get some nice clear spring honey to use as wedding favors, so that 22 pounds is going straight in to some adorable glass jars. The fall honey we'll either sell/gift/brew or use ourselves.

Here is the honey extraction team in action:

With the new extractor, we can spin the frames much faster. Since this is a radial extractor, there is less of a  risk of destroying the comb by spinning too fast. In a tangential extractor, you risk the honey on the inside of the frame pushing through the middle of the frame - destroying the comb on it's way. However the extractor can get really wobbly when we spin faster, but luckily the legs have holes drilled in the bottom so that you can bolt it down. So some of the men folk ventured to the hardware store to find a solution:

They were pretty close to solving the problem - but the screws that they got didn't quite work out. We'll probably grab some bolts before we try to harvest again.

Queen Cups

When we were taking the frames of honey to harvest off of Thistle, we found two frames of brood and A LOT of queen cups. None of them seemed to have any eggs in them, but that is probably because these frames were above the bee escape. One of them had some white waxy looking substance in it, I think it may be royal jelly, though it looks a lot more solid than I thought royal jelly would:

I suspect the bees are preparing to swarm - meaning the existing queen is preparing to leave with a large portion of the bees in the hive. They've run out of space and want to find a new home. The bees that remain in the hive would raise a new queen in one of these queen cups.

This would be the perfect time to split the hive. Splitting is essentially me swarming for the bees. Since Thistle feels like it is out of space, I would split it's resources in half and create two hives. Unfortunately I don't have the resources or time to perform a split right now. Though I have been preparing to split Thistle into a new yellow hive, I still don't have an extra bottom board or inner cover - so I have no where for a new hive to go. This means I'll probably end up losing my queen, which is too bad since she is obviously doing an amazing job since her hive is so strong.

Tall Tower

Today we put the bee escape on the Thistle hive so that we can harvest honey over the long weekend (the bee escape makes it so the bees can move downward, but not upward - so they'll empty out of the honey supers so we can harvest the honey). We can barely even call it the "Thistle" hive anymore though - I've already used my extra white box, cannibalized some supers from the Mint hive, and now I've even started using the boxes from an un-named third hive (we haven't named the yellow hive yet - perhaps sunflower, buttercup or sourgrass).

Here is the crazy multi-colored tower Thistle has become: