You can tell that I have to much time on my hands....I am just writing and writing about this and that. Now, finally, I have come to the looking back stage. This particular subject though; is a special one for me personally, because I am very fond of my bees and the portion of honey they make which is allotted to me. I enjoy taking care of them and I enjoy the whole processing exercise. My mentor has the processing equipment and he needs help processing his honey. He had 11 colonies, I only have three, but it is a great fraternal undertaking and my bride joins with the lifting and centrifuging. His wife makes us food at the breaks. Our two brides get on well together so the whole day is pleasurable. We use a "bee outlet" in the hive to get the bees out of the honey chambers the day before we plan to sling the honey. This is helpful because with almost no bees on the honey frames I can remove them from the hive and place them in closed plastic boxes. We bring the honey frames to his house where his are already standing. To kick-off the process, I begin removing the tops of the closed honey cells. It looks like two piccies next to each other, but it isn't--the portion on the left side of the pic is his washing machine. You can see that the frame that I am uncapping is dark brown, right? From the three hives that I have, two hauled Linden honey and it is very light and thin...Here the darker honey was harvested and made by only one of the hives and they completely ignord the Linden Tree nectar and this dark stuff will have come from the flowers in the garden complex as well as private gardens from folks in the surrounding neighbourhoods. Once the frames have been uncapped they go into the honey slinger (centrifuge). When the slinger has filled with honey to a certain level, then it must be drained into the tapping bucket. It is strained through two fine mesh strainers...one finer than the other. Can you see them resting on the yellow table with their stabilizers laterally? After the days' work we clean up everything and eat supper before going home, where we put the honey away for 3-4 days to let it "ripen". Actually when we say, "ripen" it just means that you let all the fine bubbles rise to the top of the tapping vat. This will be skimmed-off after the resting period and then the honey can be tapped into jars. I neglected taking any pics at this sitting and the jarred honey disappeared quickly. I took a couple of jars up to Droopy when we went this past september. I hope that they liked it. The rest of our harvest that we kept back for ourselves we creamed. It is nice and stiffish now, and we fill small jars to eat from at breakfast.
I always find posts about bee keeping so interesting Sjoerd, so much that I am wondering if it is something that I would like to do! How much honey do you get per year from 3 hives?
Hiya NETTY-- Thanks for your response. I had no idea that you had (or are having) serious ideas of keeping bees. I can't tell you how delighted I am to hear that. About how much honey I harvest. It is a simple question, but the answer cannot be precise because of several factors. I will give you an guideline though. I have what we call a "spaarkast". I think that this may be called a "simplex" chamber, not sure about the terminology there. The honey chambers (supers) have 9 or 10 frames in them. Each frame (with honey) weighs about a kilo. Often it weighs more, but it can also weigh less. With the above figures you can quickly do the math and see that if you have a honey chamber with 10 frames of honey you could get 10 kilo's honey. Each honey jar that I fill holds 450 grams. To say how much I could get a year also depends on factors and thus I cannot give you exact figures. It depends upon the weather and whether or not I get a spring harvest as well as a summer one or not. Generally speaking, you will get more than enough for you and your family if things go well with your colonies. You may even have some left over for gifts or to sell. You may also be thinking .....well what about the honey in the brood chambers? The brood frames are twice as large as the honey frames (in my sort of hive), and there is always oodles of honey in the brood chambers. If I harvested this along with the honey chambers, I would have an enormous amount of honey. I never do that though--what is in the brood chamber is for the bees only. After all, they need honey for themselves. I only harvest from the honey chambers. If I did not take what was in the honey chambers, the bees could never use it all up. I know some beekeepers that take all the honey in both places, but personally I do not find that good because they must then feed the bees sugar water to compensate. I give my bees a tad of invert sugar too if I feel that they do not have enough stores. This depends upon the weather conditions. I sell excess honey and that is enough to pay for the hobby and keep the bees happy at the same time. That was a lot of words to answer a short question...but if you become involved with bees you will quickly discover that there will be lots and lots of questions and a plethora of answers because each situation has different causes and more than one solution.
