Oh honey honey

As it normally happens with me time slipped through my fingers and before I knew it July was gone.  I was suppose to pull the honey supers from the bee hives and collect that sweet delicious nectar of the (tiny) Gods. Now that it's August I finally got around to pulling the honey extractor out of the shed, cleaning all the equipment and suiting up on a cool evening to nab those bulging frames.

This time Austin helped me and could just barely fit in Amber's bee suit. Armed with the GoPro we set off to claim our prize.

Unfortunately for us the bees were lazy bastards this year and out of all the honey frames (the frames in the box at the very top of the hive that the queen can't get to) only 2 of them actually had honey. This is primarily do to the fact that we fed the bees very minimally through the winter. I think only twice did I fill their jars with simple syrup.  I knew they had stores of honey so I wasn't really worried about them.  My thinking, being the inexperienced bee keeper that I am, is if I kept their feeder full through the winter they would eat the simple syrup and save their honey stores. That way when spring comes there is less honey they need to produce to fill the lower boxes and they will start filling the top box.  We will try that this winter and see what happens.

As for this year I once again cleaned all the honey extracting equipment for nothing.  We used two colanders to strain the honey from the two frames into a bowl and then poured the honey into 4.5 mason jars.  

I really can't be mad about honey production. I almost literally do nothing with the bees all year. I don't use and chemicals or pesticides or any techniques to coax them into higher honey yields.  I like them to "bee" as natural as possible and so I am grateful for whatever they give me.