Today we are extracting what little honey we will have this year. We ended up with a little over 100 lbs, which is very poor compared to the 400 lbs of last year. All the area beekeepers are complaining about poor harvests this year, so we aren't the only ones. The reasons are several. First of all we had a late freeze, which killed many of the wildflowers in the spring. What flowers did survive, had a tough summer. We had many sunny mornings, but then the rains came in the afternoon along with gusty winds. By that time the flowers were open fully, and the heavy rains washed away a lot of the nectar and pollen on the flowers. So there wasn't much "bee food" for the bees this summer. This, along with the terrible policy of our state of Minnesota to mow the roadsides constantly (because of 'noxious weeds' they say) made for very few wildflowers this summer. Also the bees don't get out to work in the rains and heavy winds. It was truly a very rainy summer.
Well, we at least got something! Honey will just be at a premium this year. We will have lots of disappointed customers who are asking for our honey. We bottle our honey in pint jars, which hold about 1 & 1/2 lbs of honey, so you know 100 lbs won't go far. We also need to keep plenty for ourselves, as I cook with honey and put it in all my homemade breads.
Perhaps next year will be better! Beekeepers are always hopeful!
So here is what today's process looked like:
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| Harold cuts off the wax cappings to release the honey for extraction. We use a hot knife for this purpose. |
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| After cutting off the cappings, there are sometimes a few left that didn't fit under the knife. We use a fork to break up the wax on them. |
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| In order to keep the knife hot enough, it is always soaking in a pot of hot water. The handle of this knife is stained with bee propolis from many years of honey extraction. |
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| We end up with lots of wax in the cutting tray. |
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| A tub of wax cappings still has a lot of honey mixed in. We will filter this through a 600 micron filter, and keep the honey for ourselves. The wax will be melted down into a block and sold or used for candle making. |
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| The inside of the extractor has lots of honey on the bottom. |
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| The extractor spins out the honey from the frames. The honey comes out of the honey gate at the bottom. You can see that we already have nearly 2 buckets filled. We have honey gates on the buckets, too, to make it easy to fill up the jars after the honey settles out bubbles. |
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| Taking my turn at the extractor. It takes about 5 minutes of cranking to empty the frames of honey. We didn't put a motor on the extractor this year, as it didn't seem worth it just for 100 lbs. We figured we could just crank it by hand this year! |
As you might guess, the kitchen floor gets very sticky after this process! It usually takes me a couple times of floor washing to get things clean. We usually have a "honey party" every year and invite folks to help extract, and also to enjoy a food buffet. But with such a low harvest this year, we decided it wasn't worth a party. Like I said earlier............"there's always next year"!
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