Happy kids

I

have finally brought the kids home from their extended work vacation and have supplied them with a fancy new water source so they will hopefully stay out of the pool. I hope to extract some saw palmetto honey Thursday night to add to my orange blossom honey.

New sunflower water supply



Happy at home.

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.

Still on winter vacation

Sorry for the lack of posting but with winter still here and no plants blooming the kids are still on vacation. Once the orange blossoms are in bloom there will be no rest.Time to grow up and start earning their keep.

Final wax product

After melting down the left over capping, I used a double broiler to melt it down, then strained it. After cooling down and separating the water that settled on the bottom, I have about as inch and half of wax.

Getting ready for some wax

I finally got around to cleaning the left over capping from extracting the honey. I rinsed all the honey off and will use a double boiler to melt the wax and strain it through cheese cloth to get the impurities out. After that I will make a couple of beeswax candles. Good to have around during the hurricane season.

Getting some honey finally

Thursday afternoon we finally managed to get together and take some sweet bounty form the kids.  After carefully pulling the top off and deciding how much to take, we decided on four deep frames.

After bring the frames in the house after removing the many stubborn little creatures from hiding in the comb, we started to use the uncapping knife to remove the outer layer of wax to expose the honey hidden inside.

After uncapping the frames they went inside a hand crank honey extractor which flings the material on the side then it runs down  and collects at the bottom.

When the extractor was full, I then poured the honey through several layers of cheese cloth to remove the impurities. When the cloth gets full of wax and thick honey, I needed to squeeze the rest out by hand, boy what a sticky job.

After all the sticky extraction was done, the extractor was placed outside for the bees to clean up the mess that I had made. The bees took all the left over honey and returned it back the hive from where it came from. I lost a couple of hundred bees doing this so I do not think next time I will let them clean up.

Here is one of my little buddies saying "Hello".