Well, folks, today is the day! I'm calling it My Super Day! It started out like any regular day, I was sitting at the table eating my breakfast just minding my own business until I got a VERY important phone call. Tim called me and said, and I quote, "YOUR GIRLS ARE READY!" You may be asking, "ready for what?" Well, the answer is the most important thing ever, otherwise known as, ready to make honey! Needless to say, I inhaled the rest of my Di's Egg McSammich (it'll catch on) and headed over to Tim's. Yay!
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| 3rd Brood Box was full and ready! |
I got to Tim's and we did some last minute touch ups on the honey super. There was a little too much space on one end, so Tim added a shim to the side of the box and voila! The super is ready to go!
There are six Flow™frames in my super. Each frame holds 3kg or roughly 6.6 lbs of honey. 1 pound of honey is different than one pound of, say, water. One pound of water is 15.3 fluid ounces whereas one pound of honey is 11.3 fluid ounces. So one frame fills 74.5 fluid ounces of honey. Multiplied by 6, that's a lot of honey! Nice thing with the Flow™ is once we drain it and there is still a nectar flow on, they'll just chew off the wax cappings and start over and refill the cells.
Everything went quickly and easy as we just added it to the top of the hive. Once the roof was put on, I took a quick peek in the observation window and a few girls were already investigating the new frames. I'm beyond excited to look thru this window and watch them work.
It's been very hot and humid and I noticed the girls were bearding a bit on the front of the hive.
They needed more ventilation and more room. The honey super will help with space but then I removed the reducer to help with air flow. Hopefully these additions will help them stay happy in their home.
After we took care of my hive, we went to Tim's big hive and took the 4 honey supers off. After brushing bees out of the frames, we brought them inside his garage. He bought a new extractor to process honey at home instead of going to a friends with a truckload of honey frames. It'll make things so much easier for him since he now has 6 hives to harvest.
This is his set up in the garage.
The two buckets have gates on the bottom so you can bottle the honey as it pours from the bucket. The gate stops and starts the flow to make it easier in between jars. There is a strainer on top of the buckets to filter out bee parts, wax, and anything other than honey that you don't want in your jar. The extractor (the big steel drum looking thingy behind the buckets) holds 9 frames and should extract honey in about 10 minutes.
Here is a closeup of the inside of the extractor.
If you put the frames along the triangle, three frames fit perfectly inside. After extracting 27 frames of honey, Tim got 70 pounds of honey! Fantastic, right? I'm so excited! 10 of the frames were not capped so they didn't get harvested. This means the bees did not put a wax capping on it so the moisture level is not right and therefore the honey is not ready. Honey should have around a 17% moisture level. The bees will fan the honey until it's just right, then cap it with wax. That super will go back on the hive until the honey is ready.
What a SUPER day! I'm excited that Tim's honey is ready on one of his hives and excited that we have a super on our hive. Our bees have enough honey stored for winter so I won't worry about them not having enough food. I'll check on them in a couple days to see how they're doing in the honey super. Having that observation window is going to make that really easy. And SUPER cool!
Until next time, bee kind! 🐝
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