Hot Air and the 2015 Honey Crop

I extracted the 2015 crop in August and September. As my number of hives had increased this year I'd had to make some extra clearer boards. I read a post in the Diary of a Nervous Beekeeper suggesting painting different hive components different colours so you can easily see what component are in place from a distance and decided to adopt that idea for my clearer boards. It's handy being able to see clearer boards at a glance so you don't leave them by accident -the bees are a bit smart and would eventually figure out how to get back into the super. I used some Red Cedar Shed & Fence Paint for the outer edges. I'm not convinced it looks close to cedar but it certainly stands out (ok clashes) against the green components.

Hi-Vis Clearer Board

I gave the bees a few hours to move down through the boards before removing the supers. As the bees move down through the clearer it takes time for them to get between the frames below so I decided to have a little peek under the clearer to see what was happening.

Busy.

 Some of the supers were heavy but the ones from the more recently caught swarms were pretty light as evidently the bees had been a little busy in the brood nest getting settled, drawing comb and whatever else recently housed swarms do.

Supers, ranging from heavy to empty.

Removing the cappings from the completed cells is a bit a of a drag to put it mildly. You have to slide a capping fork under the cappings and lift them off sounds simple enough but in a warm room with honey dripping it gets tedious. Because of that there's a few different technological innovations to make the task easier from heated knives to mechanised solutions. I opted for something recommended by another user in the Beekeeping Forum, the hot air gun.
 

The WHGV2000, just shy of a tenner from Wickes

The hot air gun is pretty fast and seems to work through a combination of melting the wax and heating the air between the honey and the capping to push off the wax. It doesn't take long to uncap a frame this way and if you did it slowly you run a risk of damaging the honey. I did find that with a partially filled frame the airgun makes a bit of a mess of empty cells it hits so I'll not be completely ditching the capping fork just yet. I also found that with some of the cappings being blown off the frame there was some mess where the little blobs of  wax landed. I suspect that with practice and finding the right temperature both problems will diminish with time.

In total I got about 45KG of honey, most of which had come from three hives. Not a massive crop but my best so far.I decided to make Set Honey with some of it which I'll be waffling about a bit in a later blog entry.