A whole year's patient bee keeping comes to a joyful conclusion; Today is harvest day.
Its an "all hands on deck" kind of a day and with 21 supers out on the hives in the apiary there was a need for military precision and efficiency to getting them all off the hives and into the extraction room without upsetting the bees too much!!
Some of the frames needed to be carefully examined to ensure 80% of the honey containing cells were capped...
Good job we had the refractometer on hand in case expert adjudication was needed....
So the process is simple and methodical...Take the frames one at a time from the hives, brush off the bees and get the frames into the spare super box, under the lid, without any lurking bees....
A final surge of multitasking (before the rain came) and we had the largest hive "K" on its way to the box as well....
Its been a while since "K" has been this small....
It took nearly 2 hours, but the old adage of "many hands making light work" is absolutely true....we now have 17 supers of honey waiting patiently to be extracted. Are we happy about that? I think a quick look at our trainees faces answer that question....
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