By Allison Laws – Committee Member
Hi, just took the honey frames out of my super today. I took a short sunshine break from the rain to nip out and rob my hive, bees weren’t too impressed I can tell you I managed to get 5 full frames of honey and a couple of partially full frames. About 2 or 3 frames had some uncapped honey which I left for the bees (not that they were grateful). I cleaned everything in the kitchen got the dozens of containers (a bit ambitious I know;-) washed and dried and was raring to go. Because I didn’t have many frames I mashed half the combs and filtered through a coarse sieve. I then poured the cloudy mix into a fine sieve. The mash was not running all that well so I applied heat by putting the bowl and sieve into a cleaned plastic chick brood box with an overhead heat lamp, which seemed to do the trick quite well.
It only took me about an hour or two to do this and I got about 2 lbs of comb honey and the same in filtered honey. However the clean up is still going on, just when you think you have wiped, washed and dried every possible tool, surface and even my phone you find another sticky patch, the last one was the cat who was innocently walking along the kitchen floor looking for mice when a dollop of honey fell on her head. Not sure which was more scary bees protecting their honey or a cat trying to avoid a bath!
