Honey Extraction Party

This little photo essay was posted a while after the event. Thus some comments in the next installment of my blog are repetitive.

I didn't have any honey to spare, but I still attended the big extracting party in Dick LaForge's barn.

Margaret, Joy and others uncapping honeycomb.

Uncapping is a messy business, but cleanup is delicious.



Mike, Dick and Elyse wait by the extractor.


Spinning out the honey



Second wave of honey harvesters

Being an often negligent photodocumentarian, I failed to capture the food table. There were many tasty Humboldt-style offerings. The most notable item was a honey cake baked in a skep mold. It was beautiful and delicious. I believe Naomi Klass baked it. I also missed out on the adventure into Dick's bee yard, when he collected his honey supers.

Phew!

A week after Garrett helped inspect my hives, and we saw eggs in my original hive, I looked in again. The queen was nowhere to be seen, but they can be pretty elusive. But then I found no eggs, and only very mature larvae and capped pupae. That means the queen is probably AWOL or dead. To make matters more definite, the vast majority of the capped brood was drones. That means she didn’t mate well, and is thus a dud. Make that a missing dud.

No worries, I thought. I have two brand-new bought queens with which to requeen. Unfortunately neither of them were laying, and I couldn’t see them. How can one miss a marked queen in a nucleus hive with only 8 frames? I wondered. Oh dear, did I release them from their protective cages too soon, and the bees in the nucs assassinate them? I’ll bet my swarm queen is a dud, too Now I’ll have to recombine all these hives back into two, and be out $45 for the queens. I’m kind of getting used to the insomnia.

I got reassurances from some other beeks, and got a little sleep.

After about a week, I reinspected the nucs. After all that fussing and worrying about my new queens, they seem to be fine. I found eggs and larvae in both nucs, and saw the queen in one. On Saturday night I combined one of these with my original hive, the source of all this melodrama. In about a week I’ll look in and see how they’re getting along.

My swarm queen is also laying. In about a week I can check on her too, and see if she’s “right”. I’ll need to see mostly worker brood rather than drone brood. If she is right, then I need to find a home for my other bought queen. …Or just keep her, and wait to see if Karin notices ; )

Yesterday and today I tended the beekeeper’s booth at the county fair. Yesterday was rather busy, with lots of people asking about Colony Collapse Disorder, how to get started in beekeeping, and who can they get to remove a feral hive from a wall or a desk (!). It was really tempting to collect that desk hive, and hope Karin didn’t notice. She’s probably lost count, and would figure that it had always been there - don’t you think?

Maybe I should be looking into Bees Anonymous.