SPINNING HONEY FRAMES, THE HARVEST!!

Hey everyone, I trust you had an amazing weekend? We did our second last honey harvest for the season sadly. This will be done again at the end of March and then not again till August. Another of the down sides to bee farming, however if we decide to move hives around to more prolific honey flow areas over winter we may be able to mitigate this.

Below we have a picture of what literally constitutes a bee-keepers DREAM, a full capped frame of gorgeous raw honey!

We currently have around 30 strong swarms which for only been in this 6 odd months now is a fantastic achievement. We regularly check our hives for weight. This is the best way to know if the honey inside is ready for harvest. The heavier the hive the more honey. I now know just by lifting the hive if we can open it up and extract some full frames of honey. This technique is great as far less work for us and far less intrusive on the bees.

The frames are stored as we take them out of the hives in this large plastic tub. Here you can see how the bees build them together with wax, naturally before we spin these frames we need to seperate and uncap with our red comb uncapping below featured in a few of these pics!

Above and below we have a combination of nectar and honey. The very clear substance dripping all over and in some of the combs without wax capping's is nectar. This is put into the combs to be fanned by the bees and matures into honey. Nectar is far more viscous hence tends to drip more than honey as per the pics!

The said red fork as above mentioned. Here I am uncapping the honey combs and putting into the honey extractor. This unit takes 8 frames at a time. The larger the spinner the less work and faster turnaround times! Ours is an 8 frame spinner, these do go up to 40 frames costing around $3500 rather expensive but well worth it for commercial bee farmers!

This was my first time seeing this incredible work of natural art and so interesting to see. These are drone combs as well as worker combs. What made this so interesting see what the worker combs were filled and capped with delicious mature honey and then ontop these bees built drone combs (bigger combs created to lay eggs in to raise drones, male bees) and filled them with honey.

I have done some research and can't find anything as to what the reason is but did come up with my own analogy. My theory is the honey flow is so good and they begin to run out of space to store the honey hence make larger areas on top of the existing combs to store the honey, this illustrating just how it is done. Is nature not just too incredible for words?

Here we have our honey extractor loaded with 8 frames, spinning and centrifugally extracting the honey. This unit I have featured here before is the most effective way to extract honey from frames, they come in electric as well as manual units. Electric units are far better than the manual units albeit consuming electricity!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_extractor

We recently adopted a new technique and it works incredibly well for higher honey production per hive. How? Take some frames out, yes that is right, less frames in the super result in the bees building wider combs making for more honey production. Incredible, we at first thought but how could this possibly work, we did some experimenting and in sheer amazement it did. Here you can see how much wider the bees built these wax combs past the wooden frame and filled with honey.

9 frames now per super and not 10 renders us a few kilograms more honey on every harvest. The tricks of the trade one gains with experience truly the best teacher!

Let the honey flow, and flow it certainly does. Look at this golden brown delicious honey. This is tapped off straight from the honey extractor sieved through two stage sieve and into a settling tank. We let the honey settle overnight and then bottle, raw viscous healthy delicious super food honey.

This is what the frames look like with the combs having all the honey spun off. These are put in the machine for around 4 minutes a side to make sure all the honey has been extracted. We then put them back into new hives for the bees to fill with honey. Installing these already made wax combs back in the hives makes for much faster turnaround time. The bees now no longer need to re-make combs they simply need to fill with nectar and cap.

After around 10 kgs of honey has flowed and 'filtered' through the sieve the last wax capping's that float above the honey as they are lighter. These flow into the top sieve, settle over night for 12 hours odd until most of the honey has gravity fed off. We then feed all the remainder of the wax and residual honey back to the bees, which they love.

Trust you have an incredible week.
Be sure to stay tuned for more of me epic bee-keeping adventures.

Cheer$;)