After the last hive check, we thought it was time to harvest the honey. So I spent a warm sunny afternoon removing the honey supers with the assistance of some Bee Quick and my shopvac set to blower mode. It's amazing how well that Bee Quick works; gets all but a couple stragglers out of the supers and then I blow the rest out with my shopvac.
Based on the weight of the supers, I was guessing we'd have our best harvest yet. That evening I went through the first four supers and extracted only the frames that were 90% capped. We only have a cheap 2-frame hand-crank plastic extractor, so it takes a while because I have to keep flipping the frames to prevent frames from breaking. Even so I always end up breaking a couple frames which just increases my resolve to start cross-wiring the foundation. I returned those four supers to the hives the next day. Then I extracted the honey from the next four supers the next evening and returned those supers the next night (including a couple replacement foundation frames). In all we got over 76lbs of honey, which equates to around 25 quart jars. Woohoo! We're in the honey! We're in the honey!
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