We got finished with the honey harvest for the year and had some extra help this year. My neices and nephew showed up to provide some help and get all the doors sticky. I split my hives pretty hard this year so we did not end up with too much honey but still spend four hours extracting and bottling…then ran out of bottles! The little ones really wanted to help and I think they got hooked. They claimed they didn’t like honey before we started but kept licking their honey fingers before they were done.
Learned that the homemade wax capping tub worked great, thank you Ryan for the idea! And yes, why doesn’t every manufacturer put their gates on the side so you can lift the tub on 3 sides and have it drain to the corner?!? I learned that the cheap amazon honey gate is not very good so that will have to be upgraded before next year. Also the hand crank extractor is really too slow. I have it because it can do Layens frames but I suspect that next year we will have three times as many deep frames as Layens and will probably rent our clubs 18 frame powered extractor!
You can see how the Columbus honey is darker than the Frelsburg honey. Those colonies are only about 10 miles apart.
Thank you to all the family that showed up and let me know if you need any more honey! Was really a fun time away from the shop and, yes, the door knobs and floors were sticky but it was worth it!
