Honey Harvest!

Some of the Honey Bear army

It has been a while since I have posted. I have so many things to share. I haven't been blogging because I have been so busy with work, and a pregnant wife. With all the stresses of the regular world I have continued to keep my apiary going the best that I can. I want to get some pictures out there about the harvest that I just finished bottling this evening.


A quick recap: over the winter I lost two of the three hives I had in the fall. It was a sad spring for me. One had too few bees and froze, the other didn't have enough food and starved. However the one hive that did survive was really strong. I split that hive by purchasing a mated queen from California and put her in charge of a few frames from that awesome survivor hive.

Sad frame of starved bees :(

I also purchased 3 more nucleus hives from Gilman. All of which are doing really well and are located at a farm that is close to my house. Which has been awesome and super fun. I will have to make a separate
post about all of the adventures I have had this spring already.Also, I had a crazy adventure at a farm in Vermont that I need to share with my bee blog.

A picture of a bee coming for a landing on one of the Gilman Nucs

The awesome thing at hand however is the harvest from that  survivor hive. I got a little over 5 gallons of honey. We rented an extractor and the accompanying equipment from our beekeeping club which was totally awesome. Actually, the club received a grant from the federal government to support local beekeeping to purchase this equipment and rent it out at a discounted rate. So all the equipment was only 25 BUCKS! What a deal.

The extractor

Cutting off the wax cappings with a hot knife

Anyway, we followed the procedure by cutting off the wax cappings and putting the frames in the extractor. We bought a few honey buckets to store the liquid gold, and we went to town. What we ended up with was a really light in color, rather dense honey, that tastes FANTASTIC. I know other beekeepers say this, but my honey is the best tasting honey in the world. I hope you enjoy some of the pictures and I promise more posts to come.

Liquid Gold

Maybe my next post will be an update on the baby that will be here any day now.