Honey!

Last week of August I extracted my honey. I put a clearer board below the honey supers - this has a valve in it that allows the bees to go down into the main brood chamber but not back up into the supers. The following evening most of the bees were out of the supers so I brushed them off each frame and brought the 4 honey boxes home. The following day I uncapped each frame and spun each one in an extractor that I borrowed from my local association.

This was then poured into a bottling tank and the next day put into proper honey jars that I bought. I now need to get some labels sorted.
I put the empty supers back on top of my hives for the bees to take the last bit of honey out and tidy up the comb. However, they have decided to store more nectar in their instead! I think they are getting nectar from the heather on Guss Common as it is too early for Ivy. I will probably leave the supers on over the winter to increase their stores.

All change

I now have a third hive! This was ordered earlier in the year from a local commercial keeper. I was a bit concerned about getting a nucleus quite late in the season and so I asked my mentor about this. He suggested swapping it's position with one of my other hives. This would mean that the flying bees would return to the nucleus hive and so boost their numbers. This sounded like a good idea so I did it. However, the following week I did an inspection and found no queen! Aghh! The flying bees had killed her! Oh well, I won't make that mistake again. So, the hive went back to the supplier for him to introduce a new queen ( more money!). This worked well and the hive is now building up numbers well in  preparation for winter.