I harvested Justine and Ethel. I have to get to Martha and Connie this next weekend. I have honey to fill about 120 bears. I ordered a case.  At $6 a bear that’s about $720, which brings the cost of each bear down to about $15. I figure to break even in the Spring.

People complained that they searched Google for Rockland County Honey so I created a web site. It’s not done yet, but it should be mostly there soon. I is “West Nyack Honey” dot com.

It is interesting how different the Fall honey is from the Spring Honey. Autumn Honey is dark, hearty and spicy tasting. The Fall flowers make for a chestnut brown honey. The Spring Honey was almost clear. It was mostly from trees like Maple, Oak, and Apple. The fruit trees gave it a flowery perfume with a subtle taste.

I took another super off of Justine. It was 7 very full frames of honey and it gave me about 25 pounds more honey.  There is one more super full of honey on Justine, but I may leave that there for the winter. She has two hive bodies full of honey and combining that with the super she should be more than fine. I’ll rob the last super in the Spring after she wakes up again.

I ran out of bears. I ordered a case of 12 ounce bears – that’s 285. It is hard to imagine that I will pack up this much honey.

I have 4 hives with three supers on each. Justine and Ethel had 4 supers, but the top super had drawn comb but no capped honey.

If I take two supers off of Ethel, Connie and Martha,  that is 150 pounds of honey that would well over 200 bears, depending on how much honey I get from each super. I have about 20 pounds in a bucket waiting for bears. I am not sure how to sell all of this honey.

I will take off a day maybe this week or next to do some more harvesting. I am getting better at it so I will try doing 2 supers at a time and maybe I can do all 6 in a day.

The honey was very dark as apposed to the spring honey which was practically clear it was so light. The honey was from summer and fall flowers, although I never see the bees on out garden flowers. They come in with baskets of dark red or orange pollen, but I can’t guess where they get it.

My honey spinner worked, but it tends to buck when I have it loaded with full frames. When I do the second side, there is less of a problem with it. I am working out the bugs and taking pictures. I’ll try to post a few here when I get time.

Yesterday I robbed a super from one of my hives in order to test out the honey extractor I made.

I have pictures and some information about building it, and I will post that is soon as I can.

The extractor worked better than I thought. My last one screwed up like an accordion when I tried it. This one stood up to five heavy frames being spun at one time.

What I learned was that when I did fewer than4 frames, the frames tipped over and sent the cage out of balance. I had to load empty frames back into the basket in order the spin them.

I bought a variable speed drill so that I would not have to spin the frames at very high speeds. I learned that I could get the frames up to a good speed (about 400 RPM) and it took about 45 seconds to completely dry out one side of a frame. This is very quick.

I will go back and create some kind of system to hold the frames in place when I spin. I expect that this will limit me to 4 frames. The extractor can hold up to 6 medium frames with just a slight overlap. It can easily hold 5 medium frames or 4 deep frames. I will set it up to do just the 4 frames in case I need to spin the deeps from a dead hive.

I was afraid that the light weight construction would warp when I spun the heavy frames (and they were heavy – most frames were 100% capped honey!). The basket took a beating, even when the frames moved about and it started to buck. At one point I put my knee on the top to hold it steady and while I spun a bucking bronco.

On the negative side, the bees found my spinner and the box I used for uncapping and I could not keep them out. I filtered out dozens of dead bees when I poured out the honey. Last night, the uncapping box was full of bees, too gorged to fly.

When I do this again, I need to find a way to keep the bees away from the works.