I did an inspection today – first time for about a month. Everything is well. There are brood, eggs and larvae – not huge amounts but some none the less. There were certainly a lot more bees than before and feels like a growing colony.
There is also a lot of honey in the brood box and 4 full and 2 half frames in the super. In the end I decided to take off 4 frames of honey to extract and leave the rest for the bees to eat over the winter as well as build up.
Now comes the fun bit -extracting honey. As i only have 4 frames it wasn’t worth getting an extractor so we did it the hard way. We cut open the honey and let it drain into a sieve. Unfortunately this meant that a lot of the comb was cut away. In the we got 8 jars of honey – not bad for our first year. Anyone for honey?
http://www.keepingbackyardbees.com/extracting-honey-without-extractor/
