FRAME COUNT: 30 FRAMES
HONEY HARVESTED: ~200 LBS
STING COUNT: 1
Keeping it short and sweet, this year's second honey harvest was an overall success! Maryland July honey is a deeper amber color than typical spring honey since the bees are now foraging for pollen in summer flowers. There's a fair amount of clover and asters around here, and I'm always seeing our ladies hard at work bringing in pollen from the garden.
Once the basil in our garden starts to bolt, the girls will be all over it (like this one on the right from 2021).
Depending on the native pollinator -friendly plants, the honey produced throughout the season will be different colors. Typically, the darkest honey is harvested towards the end of the season. Our last honey pull will be in August- photos to accompany it!
For those who don't know us, this is a dad/daughter effort and the labor of extracting the honey takes several hours. Several more hours of sterilizing jars, bottling, and labeling then follows.
The harvest for us begins with gearing up, smoking down the hives, and doing a quick check of the hive health. We're looking not only to see how many frames of honey are full, but also for any indication of disease and a quick check on the status of the queen.
We carefully load all of the frames into a homemade box we use to carry the frames to the extractor. Leaving the honey out in the open or moving slowly in the harvest process can encourage robbing and put your hive in danger. Our bees are just darling angels, but honey bees typically get most aggressive around the time of harvest. Basically, you want to move through the process swiftly. Of course pause for a quick photo op after all the bees are shaken off and you're away from the hives (below).
No images or videos of this, but the frames are loaded into a manual extractor and hand-spun then strained to remove any bee debris, bits of wax comb, etc. Absolutely no heat is used in the process, which would kill off most of the enzymes that make raw, local honey so healthy!
Bottling, labeling, and admiring come last in that order. Voila!
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