Saturday, March 13, 2010

Casulties of Winter; Spoils of Winter

Monday, March 8th, 2010
The weather outside was sunny and 50 degrees. Whenever the temperatures begin to rise the bees once again become active. I decided to head out to the hive and see how things were going. When I got there I found dead bees on the ledge and no activity. So I took a screwdriver and brushed away the dead bees trying to create an opening for the bees to fly in and out. Except they was no activity. Nothing!
Opening up the hive, my suspicion were confirmed the bees DID NOT SURVIVE the Winter.

THOUSANDS DEAD! Casualties of Winter...

Here is the bottom of the hive were you can see layers of dead bees.

Since the bees were gone, we got to take the spoils. We told them in the Fall; Use it or lose it!
They did not use it all so we brought the hive boxes inside to extract the honey.

Here is a full frame of honey.

With a heated knife we scrapped of the wax cappings.

Then placed them in the extractor. Spin spin spin...

Once extracted we poured the honey off into a strainer.

The strainer bulging with honey.

Honey bears waiting to be filled.

The whole family took turns filling the bears and jars.

Honey anyone?

15 little honey bears all in a row. This here is about 10lbs of honey.

In all we got about 23lbs of...Sweet liquid GOLD!

Yummy, yummy honey!

2 comments:

Aubrey Malcolm said...

That last photo of the glowing honey is awesome!

momteacherfriend said...

Thanks Aubrey!