Extracting Honey

Honey Extraction

This past Sunday, August 10, 2014, we took our frames of honey from our backyard beehives to be extracted down at Dakota Bees in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. We'd removed the frames from the supers the day before and stored them in the back of car so the bees couldn't get to them and take the honey back to their hives.
Taking the supers and honey frames off the hives was pretty exciting in itself as the bees don't really like their hard earned winter food supply being taken from them. We smoked the bees a little to calm them down and used Bee Quick to chase them down out of the supers and into the lower deep boxes. It worked sort of well, but would've worked better if the weather had been warmer and sunnier. As it was, we got 3 supers and 25 frames full of honey off of the hives. Most of this came off the two older hives. We didn't get much of anything off the 3 hives that are new this year, but we didn't expect to.

Frame Before Uncapping

Frame After Uncapping

We headed over to Dakota Bees in the morning with our frames. Greg showed us how to use a heat gun to uncap the honey cells on the frames. This worked very well for most of the frames, the heat quickly popping the tops of the caps off of the honey. The heat gun doesn't heat up the honey, but heats the air gap under the cell cap, popping it off. For the few cells it didn't work on, we used a honey pick to open up the cells.

12 Frame Extractor

Extractor and Honey Bucket

Next, we loaded up the large extractor with the frames and spun the honey out of the cells. The extractor is basically a large centrifuge, pulling the honey out of the cells with centrifugal force and then letting it drip down the walls of the extractor and out the spigot at the bottom, where it then goes into our honey bucket.

Bucket of Honey!

Chris took a video of this process. After we got all our honey extracted, we headed home to put the honey into jars for permanent storage. We washed a bunch of brand new pint jars and some half pints (they mail easier than full pints) and filled them up from the brand new 5 gallon pail with a honey gate on it. Filling the jars by ladelling it out would have been much messier. Now we have enough honey to last us a very long time.

Bucket with Honey Gate

Honey!

Bee Town USA: An Educational Tiny Town of Beehives

Honeybee - Apis melifera   photo by C. Netter

Greg, the beekeeper has started a Kickstarter project to fund Bee Town USA. This will be a project to promote bee conservation through art by creating a curiosity that attracts the community to visit. Read all about it here. Greg is the person who educated me about bees - both honeybees and our Colorado native bees. Beetown's purpose is to educate the public about these bees in a fun way.

The Anythink Library Bee Cam

Greg, the Beekeeper, just sent me a link to the Anythink Library Bee Cam. He has two hives at the Commerce City, Colorado location and the library put a video camera on these hives.
http://beecam.anythinklibraries.org/view/index.shtml
Not only can you view the hives in real time, you can control the camera by zooming in, tilting it up and down as well as panning right to left. You can watch the bees as they enter and leave the hives. Very bee geeky.

The Beekeeper Inspects His Hives

Today the beekeeper came over to see how the hives are doing. I stood back and took lots of pictures which can be seen in this slide view:

Some of the comb is held in the frames by chicken wire.  This comb came from the original hive that was removed from somebody's house and the chicken wire holds it in place until the bees have glued it into the frames with more wax. When the comb is sufficiently fixed into the frames by the bees, the beekeeper removes the chicken wire.

Some of these hives came from swarms and some from hive removals from buildings. So far, they all are making brood, which is a good sign.

Bee Hives in the Yard

Back in late May a local beekeeper advertised on Denver's Craigslist that he was looking for places to put his hives in exchange for some of the honey. I've wanted some hives in my yard for some time now so I jumped at the chance and contacted him. Greg, of  Dakota Bees (Dakotabees.com) came out to check out the yard and found lots of flowering plants, plus water gardens that would provide water for the bees so he said he would be happy to put some hives here.  He removes wild hives from people's homes and also captures swarms and puts them into hives.
The following week on May 26 the little yellow hive in the front of the picture above show up with a newly captured swarm inside. He showed us how to make sugar water for the bees to give them a start until they have made comb inside the hive. We took a video of them their first morning:
Hive video
On June 3, two more hives showed up. The first one contained bees from a wild hive removal from a home and the second one contained a very large swarm. June 4, another hive showed up with a medium sized swarm in it. June 8, the fifth hive showed up with another wild hive removal from a home.
I hope the bees do well in their new home.