A newbee's extracting experience

[daknoodle]

Well yesterday was very fun and educational! We finally found time to extract the honey from the hives I took apart last weekend. Oh, I was wrong about the extractor that I'm getting, its only a 4 frame (newbee mistake... smile.gif ). So I found that extracting can be a very messy job, but I thought it was fun too. We even ended up having about 10 bees come out and play with us (no earthly idea where they came from considering both of our hives were completely dismantled and it hit 17F for two days so all the bees were dead and we were in a bee house).

Well, we ended up from the two hives with almost 5 gallons of honey (no idea if thats a lot for two hives or not, but its the most I've seen :D ). Talk to you all soon.

doug

[Michael Bush]

>Oh, I was wrong about the extractor that I'm getting, its only a 4 frame (newbee mistake... ).

I kind of wish mine was a 60 but it wouldn't fit through my kitchen door if it was. smile.gif

>So I found that extracting can be a very messy job, but I thought it was fun too.

VERY messy.

>We even ended up having about 10 bees come out and play with us (no earthly idea where they came from considering both of our hives were completely dismantled and it hit 17F for two days so all the bees were dead and we were in a bee house).

I would assume they were stragglers in the supers and I assume (I hope for your sake) that it was warm where the supers were stored, at least for a couple of days before you extracted them.

>Well, we ended up from the two hives with almost 5 gallons of honey (no idea if thats a lot for two hives or not, but its the most I've seen ).

In a bad year, it's great. In a good year, it's disappointing. This was a bad year here. I had at least ten hives or more this year that I got nothing off of and now I'm feeding them. :( In an awesome year I've had 200 pounds off of each hive. Which would be about 3 1/2 five gallon buckets. smile.gif

[daknoodle]

Yes, we heated the bee house the entire night before so it was nice and toasty in there. Would have been a pain if we hadn't.

And this was the second time the hives had been robbed this year, so it was actually a somewhat good year.

Doug