Nov 25 - Extracting Day!

 On November 25th we extracted honey in Dad's garage! This is always an exciting day, however, it's even more exciting when it's been TWO YEARS since you've had honey to extract! (We didn't get any in 2019!) 2020 may have been a bummer of a year for a lot of reasons, but not with honey!

Beautiful capped honey!

This is a pile of "cappings"...what we cut off to get to the honey. None of it is wasted! This gets melted down and we can separate the wax from the remaining honey.

Dad un capping some honey with his heated knife.

Dad's extracting setup! He got that extractor decades ago at a flea market I believe!

Pic of dad's branded frames

Me un-capping some honey

My boys taking a turn with the extractor. It's a full day affair so often times my family comes with and hangs out at Gramma & Grampa's while we extract!

Check out this quick 30 second version of what we did today!

November 2020 - Tucked in for winter

So back on Sept 21, I had put in the Apivar strips and left the bees some syrup. 

On Sept 24th I went back, and all three pails were empty! I accidentally brought only 2 pails with me instead of 3, but I put them out. 

On Sept 27, I removed the empty pails.

 October 7 I put on 3 more feeder pails.

October 10 I checked the pails...they were still half full so I left them.

November 2nd I removed the Apivar strips and we tucked the bees in for winter! Normally bees fill the hive from the bottom up, so for most of the summer we assumed the bottom box was loaded with honey for them to eat over winter. We didn’t dig into it as it’s better to only go in as far as you need to and not disturb them too much. However, the bottom box was pretty empty. So, we are experimenting... instead of three deep boxes over winter, we put a honey super in the center (shallower box), full of frames we were going to extract, that were full but not fully capped. So essentially we gave some honey back to the bees, for them to live off of this winter. So far I have never had a hive make it through winter, so I have my fingers crossed for this year! It was actually too warm out to do the oxalic acid mite treatment, so I will go back when the temps are in the 40s to do that!

Nov 14 - Here's a video of what we did over a couple different days to get the bees all treated for mites and tucked in for winter!