August Bee Bulletin
August is extraction month when I remove the ‘supers’ full of honey, remove the frames and put them in an extractor to spin out the honey after which I filter it and put it in jars. That’s the plan at least. Some beekeepers will extract in July and some leave it as late as September but I seem to have settled on doing it in the last week of August – most of the flowers are done by then but there’s still late flowering things like Michaelmas Daisies and Ivy to come so the bees can top things up (I like to leave about 15-20kg of honey per hive for winter).
A few weeks ago I didn’t think we would see any honey at all this year – the weather has been so grim – but by mid July things had improved and nectar started flowing into the hives. Queen Rosie started laying again and if you’ve been down by the beehives you’ll see her hive (on the left) looking much taller than it was. This is because I’ve been adding more ‘supers’ (the boxes for the honey) and it now looks like we might have a harvest.
Not sure how much honey there will be but if there’s enough I might try for a ‘Rosamund’ batch – that is, rather than blending it with honey from my other hives I’ll do a run just using honey from the garden. If there’s any budding artists out there who would like to produce a label just let me know. Don’t worry about the legal stuff like country of origin/producer/batch/use by etc – I can add all that. I’d just need a JPEG/PNG file with something colourful and suitable for the side of a jar.
Also if you’ve been down to the hives you may have seen some activity on the other hive on the right. If you recall we lost Lady Lonsdowne in mysterious circumstances but I added in a swarm a few weeks ago and they seem to have settled in well. I’ve lost track on where we are with names so any new ideas welcome.
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