New stands

I went to paint the old bee stand and found the legs were starting to rot. The bees should be arriving back this weekend so I had to rush to make a new stand. Since I am planning on splitting the hive when they return, I went ahead and made two new stands with a larger front porch. I noticed watching the old stand that the bees really did not have enough room to land and hang out before they went inside.

I will be going with our local apiarist to remove the boxes of honey from the hives located throughout the orange groves. He will then extract the honey later at night when it is cool and all the local bees are in their homes.

Getting ready for orange blossom honey.

The warm weather has finally arrived,and the orange trees are in full bloom, it is time for the lazy kids to finally stretch their wings and fly. I contacted our local bee apiary about having my bees take a road trip with his and he agreed. First, I had to take the rest of the left over Pepper tree honey from last winter and extract it. This time I recruited the help of my sister to accomplish this task. All was going well unitl one of the bees decided to checkout her foot.

                              

We took of the entire honey super and one frame from the next box down. I would have taken more but majority of it was brood.

                                  

We then extracted the honey with the hand crank spinner and strained it through several layers of cheesecloth.

                            

                             

After all was done, we ended up with a gallon and half of honey.

The kids were then boxed and transported to a grove during the evening time to join their cousins to explore strange new areas, and make some orange blossom honey. We will extract thhe orange honey sometime in the middle of April.