The First Loser!

Our honey was awarded second place at the state fair, very exciting! We've got all sorts of plans on entering multiple categories in the future, but we'll see how well that motivation holds out over the next year.

Most notable is the 15.1% moisture content of the honey. Honey sold in a supermarket typically has about a 20% moisture content and really good honey has a 16% moisture content. Given the wet year we've had I'm quite impressed that the bees were able to bring the moisture down to such a low level. I'd bet that with a more careful harvesting we could bring that number down below 15%, although I'm not sure if there would be much benefit to that.

For our large fall harvest I borrowed a tan-genital extractor from a friend, it needs significant cleaning but all he asked for in return was a portion of the extracted honey and a clean extractor. I thought I was getting an amazingly good deal but now that I see how much cleaning is needed I think we're both getting a good deal!

Participation Ribbon?

This year we're trying something we haven't done before, we are entering some of our honey in the Nebraska State Fair. We had grand plans to enter in multiple categories: Extracted Honey, Comb Honey, Beeswax, Photography. When the deadline came (today) all we have ready is 4 lbs of honey. Since we haven't done this before we're not sure if it should be categorized as "Light" or "Extra Light". A little searching on the web brought up this wonderful image which clearly indicates we have "Extra Light" honey in this particular batch.

People are sometimes surprised to hear that honey has different colors and tastes that depend primarily on what flower the honey came from. The honey most people buy in the supermarket is blended from many individual colors and flavors, they do their best to keep any variety out of the honey so the consumer knows they are buying the same honey every time.

If you haven't tried varietal honey yet head out to your local farmer's market and see what you can find, there is probably someone there who will has free samples of at least three different varieties. They can give away tastes like this because once people realize what they are missing they are sure to make a purchase!

The National Honey Board has a great pdf available that describes 21 of the most popular honey varietals in the United States:
http://www.honey.com/downloads/varietalguide.pdf

Plants put sugars in other places too.

I got some interesting news from a friend who has a couple of my hives on her land. The mid-summer dearth has arrived and the bees are finding other sources of sugar for their hive as the flowers become fewer and farther away.

There are many grapes planted a short distance from the hives and the bees have been spotted collecting grape juice and taking it back to their hive! Birds peck holes in the grapes and this gives the bees access to the juice inside. I know that bees will collect most anything sweet when flowers aren't available but this will be the first honey I've dealt with that is from a fruit and not a flower.

If I'm lucky the honey will be a very odd color, in some areas bees will produce blue honey from local berries.

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!

An early harvest

A hive that was started from a package this spring was getting too tall to work alone so I decided an early harvest was in order. Normally I would wait until September to harvest honey. There are two popular methods for getting honey out of a bee hive, one is to put a chemical into the hive that drives the bees down and away from the smell. Another method is to use a blower to blow the bees out of the boxes you want to take. I used a leaf blower to do this in the past and it does work but I wasn't happy with the results, the bees were upset.

My method for getting the honey out of the hive is to remove it one frame at a time. I then shake the frame about three times over the entrance of the hive which removes about 95% of the bees when done correctly. It also doesn't seem to upset them at all! I then use a brush to quickly brush off the few remaining bees. This also doesn't upset them when done correctly. At first I used the brush to slowly push the bees off of the honey, this got them quite upset. A quick flick with the brush though and they don't seem to mind.

I removed nine frames this way, leaving the tenth frame because the honey wasn't completely capped. Bees know to cap the honey cell when the honey has less than 15%-20% water in it, depending mainly on humidity. The reason they cap the cell with wax is to keep the honey dry, the bees remove so much water from the nectar when turning it into honey that it will actually draw moisture out of the air! A capped honey cell is airtight so the honey stays dry enough that no bacteria or fungus can grow in it. That is the reason why honey will keep forever, as long as it is kept in a sealed container.

In a commercial honey operation they will harvest any honey/nectar, even when the nectar isn't cured into honey yet. They put the honey into a "hot house" to evaporate off the water until it is under 20% moisture content and then they extract and bottle it. Smaller honey producers will instead choose not to harvest a frame of honey until it is at least 70% capped. Since I plan to enter this honey in the state fair I decided to only harvest fully capped honey to keep the moisture low. I also plan to avoid heating the honey because that also degrades the quality of the honey.

These nine frames are now sitting on a counter, if I wasn't going to harvest the honey from them yet I would put them in a freezer to make sure any wax moth eggs that are hiding on the wood frames didn't have a chance to hatch. Once I separate the honey from the wax I should end up with 40-50 lbs of honey.

1 lb. of Honey

A worker bee will live for one month.
During that month she will fly for ten days.
In those ten days she will visit 2,600 flowers.
In her lifetime she will produce 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey.

750 bees work their entire lives to produce 1 lb. of honey.
2,000,000 flowers are visited to produce 1 lb. of honey.
55,000 miles are flown to produce 1 lb. of honey.
A farmer's market asks $6 for 1 lb of honey.