Hey everyone, what an incredible evening we had harvesting our last batch of honey for the season. Check out my first post I did here spinning the honey with a short video:
@craigcryptoking/our-last-honey-harvest-of-the-season
This is our settling tank, once we have spun off the honey we decant it into this stainless steel 25 litre container! The reason this is in the sun, the honey inside from 6 weeks ago has crystalized, we just put it in the sun for the day to heat up slightly and melt so that we can pour into glass bottles, my gorgeous little dachund 'Tinkie' shadowing me as she does!
As we arrived on site this incredible view we were greeted with, how sublime. The sun had just set, the perfect time to work with bees before it gets too cold and light enough to see a little, given that we have torches (red lights) this is ultimately also not an issue.
The smoker had just been sparked and we were ready to go...
This was a funny story. We randomly placed this box ontop of this pillar around a year ago in the hope that we would catch a swarm, hey presto would you believe we did, a BIG swarm, very nice, strong and active! We will super these up and maybe put on the ground come Summer!
After harvesting our honey around 8 supers we hit the honey room to start processing our honey!
Tinkie having a quick stretch and then off to her and my next mission. I had to now take this settling tank inside, decant what was left, clean with boiling water and then put in the new honey
After I had uncapped the frames spun off the honey, simply opened the tap on the bottom of the spinner to be filtered through two strainers and then into the settling tap to be bottled!
All this delicious goodness, I have so far processed 26 kg's and counting!
The supers on the left are full of honey still needing to be processed. I put plastic ontop as to prevent the bees getting into our harvest! The containers on the right are also used to store un-processed honey and frames!
This was such a bitter sweet evening. Bitter in that it was the end of our honey season, we will not be doing any bee-keeping activity for atleast 4 months and sweet in that we have such an incredible harvest, an incredible season and really looking forward to the next one come summer!
Pretty neat right? Bee-keeping truly is incredible, such fun, doing our bit for nature, selling honey and of course consuming many kilo's of our own freshly harvested goodness, EPIC!
I trust you have an incredible week.
Love and light, be blessed!
Cheer$;)