8,000,000 flowers

I've run out of boxes.

With quadruple the number of hives this year and a lot of healthy bees I'm finding that I always need more wood then I have. As the bees fill the boxes with honey I have to keep adding more to the stack. This means the hive grows taller and taller as the girls collect honey.

I'm trying something new this year, a friend of mine has a very nice honey extractor that I can use. We've come to an agreement and I'll be picking it up in the next week. Until now I've only done the "crush and strain" method for getting honey out of the hive which basically consists of using a knife to cut the honeycomb out of the frames and then forcing the honey through a filter which separates the wax from the honey, or I leave the honey in the wax as comb honey.

An extractor spins the frames to pull the honey out of the comb without destroying the comb (when done correctly). It takes four times the energy and resources of 1lb of honey to make 1 lb of beeswax so keeping the wax intact lets the hive produce more honey. More importantly though having drawn comb ready to put in the hive lets me manage the bees better, I can use it to better convince the bees to do things that I want them to do. I try asking nicely but that doesn't always work!