Honey at Last!!

At last, the time came to take off our first super of honey. The extractor, jars, strainer and so on were all clean and ready to go. The super had been cleared using porter bee escapes left on for just over 24 hours.
We collected the super on Thursday afternoon, covered it and took it home ready to remove the cappings and spin the honey off. Nine frames were beautifully capped- I used a sharp serrated knife to remove the cappings, this seemed to work fine- the cappings fell into a tray. Not to bee wasted, I later emptied them into a sieve and they filled a 12oz jar!!!


Capped honey



Removing the cappings






















Ready for extraction


The uncapped frames were then placed in the extractor ready for spinning. Lid closed and away we went- at first it was hard to know how hard to turn the handle but gradually it became clear that it needed a fair bit of effort and then you could hear the honey pattering on the sides of the drum.

We only had one lot of frames to spin so there was enough room at the bottom of the extractor to let the honey collect before we needed to take any out, so we finished the extraction and let the honey drain down before opening the honey tap to let the honey flow into the double sieve to filter out all the bits of wax.



Draining into the settling tank

It took quite a while for the honey to drain through in to the settling tank, so we just left it to pour through, put the lid on the tank and allowed some of the air bubbles to begin to settle out ready to put into jars.