August is our Harvest

I’m a little behind the curve having just returned from vacation. I planned to get my honey off by the second week in July but this year it will be the end of July. The sign in southeast Nebraska is the smartweed bloom. If you’re not familiar with smartweed, it is the white and purple flower that takes over harvested wheat fields before the farmer tills the stubble in. Smartweed is pretty, but it adds a harsh flavor to honey that most people don’t care for. My thinking is to get the clover/wild flower honey off and let the bees use the smartweed honey as winter stores.

For this column, I thought I would pass along a list of “failed experiments” I have tried, so you avoid and make your own unique ones.

As far as clearing the supers, I am convinced the fume boards are the way to do it. I use Bee-Go and a helpful hint is to make your own fume boards using a wooden frame and a cardboard box as the top. When finished you can just burn the cardboard, if you store fume boards they will stink all winter! In July in Nebraska we don’t have a problem with insufficient temperature to activate the stink, so the arguments that one product works better than the other are pretty moot.

A couple years ago I tired to make a blower using a commercial size gas leaf blower, what a disaster, I had bees everywhere before I gave up. Spent more on a long hose and nozzle than the original blower cost. Your mileage may vary, but blowing leaves a lot of bees behind in the super, the fume board gets 99.99% to move down. If a couple bees are left, you can use a bee brush. Don’t try to use a brush to clear the entire frame; bee brushes irritate bees. Synthetic light colored bristles work ok as long as you flick them off and don’t “roll the bees”. If you find a brush about the house with black natural bristles you will learn a lesson, bees attack the brush; you’ll only try it once!

Last year I learned another lesion that you don’t need to repeat. Be ready! I came into Lincoln with a pickup load of supers, parked my truck in an empty lot and went to set up my extracting equipment, sink, tables etc. Who would have guessed that there are so many honeybees in the area around 31^st and “O” Street; I returned to find my truck and supers crawling with bees. Almost had to use Bee-Go a second time and afterwards we had lots of indoor company while we were extracting. This year I will setup first and unload the supers indoors immediately or at night.

You are going to spill honey, plan for it and be ready to scrape it up and wash it down. Also keep hot soapy water available. It has happened every other year, so assume it will this year as well. We have tried to cover the floor but we end up with the tarp all bunched up and tripping over it. You need to extract over a floor you can clean, end of story. Don’t know who suggested putting newspaper down, but I bet they walk about with paper stuck to the souls of their shoes all day. There is also some universal law that says spilt honey will always miss the newspaper by 5/8 of an inch, somehow this is related to bee-space but I can’t explain it.

I did a poor job of getting clean cappings wax last year as well and I wanted to pass along an idea I got at the wax workshop. I have made small hive size frames with an old excluder for the bottom in which I will put layers of capping and give back to the bees to clean up. If your cappings has honey when you melt it, you get a tan wax, not the beautiful yellow we want for making wax items. In fact my whole wax processing is going to be new this year. I bought a large coffee thing at a garage sale last year, filled it with cappings, plugged it and after about 2 days had a solid block of wax stuck inside the pot. Coffee pots do not get hot enough to use to process wax, another experiment I tired just so you can avoid. I cut the wax out and it was a dark brown due to old coffee stains. A crock-pot does work but is pretty slow to get up to temperature. Consider anything you borrow from the kitchen a sacrifice.

I use a heated honey knife to cut the cappings and this works well. I would like suggestions to resolve about how hot the knife gets between frames and if it imparts a slight burnt flavor to the honey as you will note each time you set it down, there is a smell of honey cooking. You can’t really keep unplugging it as it takes a while to get up to a useful temperature.

Coming from the extractor, I strain the honey through two layers of marquisette (bridal net). After the pails set a couple days, there is still some material in the foam, but its really pretty much ready to bottle. My fair samples will get additional straining using women’s slip material. My wife always has a couple inches showing, she’ll never miss it. I just have a two frame extractor and last year it was our “bottle neck” with 1000 pounds of honey taking about 18 hours to extract. I hope by the time you read this I have a new larger one to report on and all my honey is in 60 lb pails.

Good luck to you all, it’s the time we have been waiting for all year.