Having bees on my property to help pollinate my fruit trees was a goal. I also wanted to have “on property” honey in hopes of easing my husband’s hay fever symptoms. It has not been easy, but finally we harvested our first batch of honey. You may recall from a previous post, I originally started with two hives. I lost both sometime last January.
In April, I brought home two more colonies hoping that this time they would like living at The Ranch and produce some honey. Again, I lost one hive! Yellow Jackets took over the hive and chased the honey bees away.
I did have honey to be harvested this fall from one of my hives. I have been lucky enough to travel a lot this Fall, so I had to rely on my gardener Jose to pull the frames and take them to have the honey extracted.
We took about 60% of the frames, leaving the remainder for the bees to survive through the winter.
After scraping each frame to open the cells, it was placed in the extractor and spun to remove the honey.
After removing the honey from the frames it had to be filtered and canned.
Jose and his brother-in-law processed and canned the honey. The hive yielded about 30 pints of Ranch honey.
