Honey harvest, part 2
I
picked my beekeeping mentor's brains this weekend, and decided to go
ahead and harvest
a lot more honey out
of the overflowing hive. My mentor told me that when he harvests
honey, he takes the super off the hive, closes the hive back up, turns
the super on its side on top of the hive, and blasts the bees out with
a leaf blower. Wow!
I was a bit too scared
to do that (and don't have a leaf blower), so I tried the same method I
used last week, carrying the frames around to the other side of the
trailer to confuse the guard bees, then brushing off the frames one at
a time. Since I took two whole supers off the hive this time,
though, rather than just a couple of frames, the method didn't work so
well. There were gobs of bees present, and when I brushed them
loose, they flew around the front door in a writhing (and not very
amused) mass.
No major stings
resulted, but I had once again riled up the hive. They began to
harass Mark in the garden so much that he had to come inside, and when
my cousin-in-law stumbled in from the yurt, he was a bit surprised to
be divebombed on his way through the door.
Apparently I'm still
making basic beginner mistakes. Next time, I'll try brushing the
bees off near the hive so that they can head home quickly. It
also turned out that only five of the frames were fully capped, so I
probably would have been better off picking frames out of the hive
rather than disrupting so many workers' lives. Still, no harm
done, and we've now harvested about five and a half quarts of honey.
I still haven't even
opened up the most productive hive, though. Maybe in a few days
once my poor cousin-in-law flees the farm.
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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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