today was honey extraction day. as i learned my first year of beekeeping -oh so many years ago, you gotta do it when its warm, or you will pay a dear price in labor to get at your honey.
2 hives produced surplus honey - the first serrano hive and the folsom hive. the rest are just cruising into early fall with, what i believe to be is enough honey to survive the winter. one more look into the hives in a few weeks to confirm, shuffle some frames to prep for winter and a dosage of essential oils to help ward off the varroa mite and hopefully we will see a good number of the hives make it into spring 2011.
between the two hives i had about 4 honey supers and once extracted and strained, we have a 5 gallon bucket that is brim full of the magic gold elixir that takes millions of bees to produce.
lets hear it for the girls! without the hard work ethic of those worker bees (all female - btw) and we would not have the abundant honey harvest we got this year.
in the attached picture, you see just 2 of 40 frames that held our 2010 harvest of el dorado counties finest honey.
Impressive!
ReplyDeleteBRAVO my man! BRAVO! As for my hive? Very active Garry. And I mean lots of activity. The hive appears to be doing very well. If I wasn't so darn chicken -- I might even check for myself.
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