2016 Honey Crop

This years honey crop has been removed from the hives. Contrary to what some people seem to think thanks to Flow Hive advertising removing and extracting honey doesn't actually kill bees. There's different ways to do it but I use a clearer board which is basically a board with a big hole in the top and a couple of smaller holes underneath. It sits under the Super and the bees go down through the big hole, exit the the smaller ones below into the hive below and can't find the way back up. You then return and remove the Super which now has no bees left  in it. Actually there's often a couple of bees still in the Super but they're not a problem. I remove the supers in the evening when few bees are flying and stand the supers on one end, after a few minutes the remaining bees fly back to the hive -any that take too long are poked out with a blade of grass and once displaced also fly home to the hive. It's simple, bee friendly and easy to do.

A Worker Bee taking an interest in my boot.

Once removed from the hives the supers were hauled home and put on my purpose built trolley so I could wheel them into the utility room. The honey buckets and extractor were cleaned in anticipation and I covered the floor in newspaper bought specifically for the task -next year I'll probably put a plastic sheet or tarpaulin down first too as spilt honey is awkward stuff to clean up.

Supers ready for extraction

The last batch of supers included uncapped honey. It passed the shake test indicating it's probably ripe but if you leave uncapped honey sitting around it's likely to draw in water from the air so I bought a dehumidifier and sat it in the room behind the Supers with a few bits of wood to seperate them letting the dehumidified air circulate in the stack.

Frame of capped honey.

On the first batch of supers I used a hot air gun to remove the cappings but on the last lot I reverted to using an uncapping fork. Whilst the air gun works it means you have no wax cappings to harvest. I've also found with practice I can get almost the same speed with an uncapping fork as the heat gun anyway.

There's a lot of videos of people using uncapping forks on the internet but I'm not sure they're all doing it the best way. A lot of people use the fork going up the frame (from bottom bar to top bar) which takes  lot of passes, some keep lifting the fork off the cappings every inch or so which must take them forever and some people seem to be pushing the cappings so they come off dark which means they're taking a lot of honey off with them.

Using and Uncapping Fork.
Bit of Tiger Army playing in the background

I prefer hold the frame at about a 30-40 degree angle and remove the cappings in two passes going across the comb without pulling the tines away until the end of the pass. I keep the fork almost parallel to the frame so the tines aren't going very far into the comb and use a rocking motion to help pull the cappings upwards as I go. In the video you can see the removed cappings are very pale which indicates the air gap below the cappings is still empty rather than having had honey pushed into it.

Other ways to remove cappings include using a large knife or heated knife to cut them off although looking on youtube I'm seeing a lot of people cut their comb so deeply a lot of honey is being lopped off with the cappings. Probably gives you nice flat uniform comb for next year though. This year I also tried an Uncapping Roller. It's a spiked roller on a wooden handle that looks a bit like a WWI Trench club. The idea is you run the roller down the comb and the pins make holes or cuts in the cappings for the honey to come out of when it's spinning in the extractor. My experience with this was that it was a waste of time. The roller left some cappings intact and those it did cut the edges of the cuts seemed to be closed up by the sides of the cut wax and the pins rolled out. It took a lot of passes with the roller to make an appreciable difference but that left loads of tiny wax particles to come out in the extractor and clog up the filter.

Bit of a wast of time.

After spinning frames I'd used the roller on I noticed they still felt heavy so wound up going over them again with the uncapping fork and spinning them a second time to get the honey out. I was quite surprised how badly the device performed in use and shall be popping my roller on eBay at some point.

Spinning honey in the extractor.
Listening to Green Day now.

My two frame plastic extractor performed excellently as per usual. Thornes no longer sell this model but at the time of writing it's stocked by Maisemore Apiaries. As some of the frames had contained uncapped honey the water content of each bucket has to checked individually with the refractometer.

One of several buckets of honey.

I extracted a little over 80 kilos of honey this season. Best yet. Next step is to covert some to set honey then get it all into jars asap.