Hey everyone, bees glorious bees, what a wonderful privilege to be able to harvest free honey straight from your own bee-hive this way you are guaranteed to have pure, raw natural good honey.
The above pic is somewhat rare, this is drone brood in the super frames which shouldn't really happen as they usually grow drone combs in their brood chamber but now in the super. No "biggie" the drones will hatch and the bees will clean out and replace with honey.
We inspected around 7 hives only, 3 had honey and sadly they were not full however a much welcome 17 odd kgs is most welcome, with great promise of many more kg's in the following few weeks.
Coming out-of winter it's such a privilege to just be able to have my own honey again. Buying it from the shops for the last 6 months at double the price we retail for has been terrible and not knowing what's actually in the bottle even worse. Our honey is just so delicious and pure we don't have enough in stock through winter it simply sells too fast.
My un-capping fork and a few frames that need some work, cutting and separating the brood from the capped honey which I normally do with a knife or a hive tool.
Bees wax goes at a premium in the shops. I have to date still not been able to successfully solar extract the wax from the combs. I guess the only way would be with gas or electricity?
Here we have some mature capped honey and some uncapped honey yet to mature. I normally harvest it all as our honey is so thick and crystallizes so fast that it's worth putting a little uncapped running nectar-honey in the mix to thin things out. Most other bee-keepers add water, be sure where you get your "raw" honey from out there, as there's alot of rubbish too on the market labeled as the "good stuff".
This happens normally when the bees have run out of space in their hives what they now do is create extra space between the frames and lid for more honey storage.
I normally feed the remaining combs of brood in the supers to the bees and birds, if we don't remove them the bees keep building brood in their super frames and we get much less honey. This is normally gone in a day or less and solve multiple problems.
Loving the bee-keeping adventures, this promises to be an epic productive season.
Love light and blessings.
Cheer$;)