Hey everyone, WOW just WOW, when I got into bee-keeping around 4 months ago little did I know that in a few short months I would be harvesting a whopping 35 kgs from 1 hive. This truly is unprecedented it really is. The average bee-keeper puts 1 maybe 2 supers on a a hive never 4.
Our thinking was to firstly put two supers on our biggest swarm of bees to free up some space for the bees, this is our biggest swarm and many bees sit outside the hive. For some reason they don't want to split (they normally split in spring to allow for more space in the hive and reproductive purposes)
A week later we then put another two on in order to be able to harvest in a few days time. We wanted all the bees to migrate to the top of the hive as to be able to make them more manageable in terms of having fewer bees to work with in the two supers we planned on harvesting.
Below we have a full frame of honey and an uncapping fork which I had used to removed the honey comb caps in preparation for spinning!
Harvest day arrived and we were in for a massive surprise. All the supers were just about full. I would guess around 80 % or more, It was truly incredible.
Below we have drone comb filled with honey and capped. Usually the workers (females) manufacture female honey combs and store nectar which becomes honey. My theory with these below capped honey drone combs is that there is an abundant nectar supply hence bees making larger cones to store bigger amounts of nectar faster!
We last harvested from this super swarm 2 months odd ago and removed around 10 kgs from this hive. Which was not bad considering that we had just finished the 'dearth' season, winter!
This time around we were really not expecting a massive estimated 30 kgs or more. Each honey frame here weights in around between 1.4 and 1.8 kgs. Without honey these weight in at around 400 grams which means you have around 1 kg per frame of pure delicious raw honey for harvest, amazing!!
Once the honey is spun off the comb and frames, we sieve it through a two grid sieve, firstly a larger grid then a finer grid which removes whatever solids may be in the honey. From there we literally bottle it. No radiation, no filtering no heating nothing. The best raw honey around! So healthy a super food not much better for you than honey exists, super vitamins never got better!
Here we have a full uncapped frame which I was just about to put into the spinner!
Weighing the frames full of honey to get a general average per frame as earlier stated a terrific 1.4 - 1.8 kgs per frame. There are 10 frames per super and we have 4 supers on this hive.
A general overview of the centrifugal spinner. This unit has different speed settings, it is always advisable to start off slowly and then increase speed to the max removing optimal honey volumes.
Here we have a few pics of capped honey in the frames as well as all the frames that we removed for this one super swarm.
Super Swarm, Super Aggressive, Super productive and SUPER honey.
Be sure to stay tuned for more of my epic bee-keeping adventures!
Have a super Sunday!
Cheer$;)