In my third year of beekeeping, I believe I have found the magic formula for an enjoyable honey harvest.
- Use a bee escape
- Remove frames from hive
- Harvest honey
- Enjoy a delicious meal and a honey and spirits based beverage
- Bottle honey
Even though it has been near 100 degrees for the past few days, the bee escape did its job, and I had minimal bees in the supers for the harvest. I was able to pull two full eight frame supers off my Baab-Brock Farm’s hives.
My spring time harvests have typically been a very light floral honey, and this harvest was no exception.
The bee escape does remove all the bees from the super so pests will try and take advantage of the situation. In my case, I had to deal with small hive beetles but there was no place for them to hide.
After the harvest, you do need to wait to let the honey separate from the wax if you are using the crush and strain method. Brenna found a delicious cocktail recipe that uses both honey and scotch called the Penicillin, and it cures what ails you.
We probably pulled close to 50 pounds of honey today.
Here is a great shot that shows 3 seasons of Worker Bee Honey with today’s harvest in the middle.
There is still a bunch of uncapped honey in both hives so I expect at least one more honey harvest before the Texas summer kills everything. I only hope we will get some good fall rains again this year so that our fall nectar flow is as good as our spring one.