Bee season .... honey flow.

With a 30 degree temperature, yesterday was the perfect day for extracting the first honey for the season. I started off well at taking photos, but as the day progressed there was too much stickiness to touch the camera.

 
  








Brian uses a hot knife to remove the wax cappings
on the frame.

                                       

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
Guiding an up and coming apiarist. It's now our turn to teach as we were taught in our early days of  bee keeping. 

                                                Spinning the honey from the frames.

 

                         







 Available to buy in jars from various outlets OR here at the farm.  
 We'll fill your container or use one of our recycled jars.









 A long and tiring day, but very productive.
The final tally of the eight buckets weighed in at 96kg in total; the culmination of countless hours of preparation and tending of the hives throughout the year.
There will be more days of extracting the honey during spring and summer, usually every fortnight during the honey flow.
Beekeeping is a complex operation which would take a blog all of its own, so I won't be going into all the details here. There are the basic rules, but I'm sure all apiarists have their own ways of doing things.  We are still learning and discovering new things, although it's ten years this month since we collected our first swarm.
Gosh, when I look back at those early years and how difficult it all was it makes me wonder how we did it. Brian is a wizard at building and making things, he's a real do-er, so thankfully we now have a designated "honey shed" which has made life so much easier (and much less crankiness) on extracting days.
We are considering having a workshop on Beekeeping if there's enough interest locally.

                                 Brian uses his clever invention to make rewiring easier.