First honey harvest

Long time since my last post. Living in the garden house without internet makes it a bit expensive to use the phone...

Never the less I could hardly lift the first honey compartment mid june, so then it was time. Some friends helped out which made it a very enjoyable day

A week prior to the harvesting day I had inserted a plate with a one way passage to empty the magasine to be harvested for bees. It is the narrow plate between the two top magasins in the pic below

At the day of harvesting there was only about 100 bees in the magasin, compared to the typical 10000 to 15000 usually in there.

My little helper an I dressed up and got started

Almost completely sealed plates - all 10 of them. Then the lid on each cell was scraped off, an the plates was then placed in the sling, 2 at a time

The honey passes through a sieve inside the sling and is then collected in a bucket.

The bucket is then emptied into another sieve into the final barrel.

A very simple process, and the smell in the kitchen was just fantastic. So great that the extensive cleaning afterwards is all worth while :)

All in all we collected 23 kg from just one magasine (12x10) - EXCELLENT!  8 kg for one batch og mead has of cause already been set aside.

This is my early summer honey. I expect to harvest once again in July and possibly also in August