Honey Harvest!

Two weekends ago, I pulled honey off the hives.  Two hives were very strong and yielded 2-3 medium supers of honey each (about 40 pounds).  My wife and I got really hot and dehydrated so we decided to stop and I came back later to find that the last hive was queenless.  It's still got 20-30 thousand bees, but it's not strong, and I only pulled about 1 medium super off (all they had).

Without a queen, the hive will die soon, and this close to winter, there's no point in introducing a queen who won't have enough time before the cold to build up hive population.  I'll tear down the hive for storage when the temperatures get a bit more reasonable.

I put sugar-water feeders on the two strong queenright colonies, and I'll check sometime this week to see how they're taking it.

At the Acreage, we also pulled between one and two boxes of honey.  That's pretty disappointing, but it might be inevitable due to the surrounding wetlands.  My dad will expand to other locations when he has more time (i.e. retired) but until then, it might just be a low-yielding hobby site.

We left the honey in the honey room for a week with a dehumidifier at high temperature to ensure the water content was low enough to be "honey" (18.6% or less water) and extracted the honey in a centrifuge last weekend.  All together, we got about 200 pounds.  My wife has sold a couple dozen pounds before it's even been bottled, so if you want some, let us know ASAP ($7 per lb.).

In other news, I'm deep into my hivelogger project.  It'll log hive weight, temperature (at nine points per box) and ambient temperature directly to a google document from which I can graph the data in real time.  I'll post more on that when I've got it fully built, and I'll put a guide up on Instructables.