We headed to the hive Thursday to steal some honey, but ended up deciding to wait another week.  Although there's plenty of honey present, I couldn't find a single frame that was completely capped.

Capped honey can be stored indefinitely since it's so low in moisture that microorganisms can't get a foothold in the gooey goodness.  Uncapped honey, on the other hand, can host several yeasts that ferment the honey, slowly turning the precious sweetener into mead.  You can get away with extracting frames with a bit of uncapped honey, but I decided to play it safe.

The last week has been cool and wet, so I'm not really surprised our bees sat around playing poker instead of making and capping honey.  Hopefully next week we can take our borrowed extractor for a spin.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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