A fantastic year for bees and honey weather wise has led many of my fellow beekeepers to break out a smile or two in the last few weeks. Now we know why, Honey!!!
Considering that one of our two established hives had an unexpected queen drama this year (now happily resolved) our honey hopes were resting firmly on the other. It didn't let us down and then, in proof that it's been a good year, one of our late nucs managed to fill a super too!
So by beekeeping standards our yield is pretty small, but our expectations for our bees this year were exceeded.
Karen did excellent work in uncapping all the frames without spilling anything on our lounge floor (an unusual choice of manufacturing site but the warmest room we have to help the honey flow) then our homemade and borrowed extractors leapt into action.
The effort was hardly back breaking but it still took a while - we eventually finished extracting and straining all the honey at about 1am fortunately licking it off of our hands and arms provided several energy kicks to help us through.
24 hours of settling and there we have it, our first batch of honey in jars and even labelled up - stand by for some big porridge orders to give us something to use it all in. We've been so excited about bees recently we're talking about plans for a few more hives next year - if this carries on we'll need a bigger pantry. Oh, and it tastes amazing.
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