I did my summer honey extraction recently… so much honey. In Virginia we hit the dearth in mid-summer, so early July is a good time to pull your supers and extract the honey. This year I pulled some supers in the spring so I was interested in comparing the early honey with the summer honey as well.

Historically, I get a handful of honey boxes. There are a lot of beekeepers in our area, so the bees compete with each other. I often get some swarms, and make some nucs, and it all leads to a reasonable but not excessive honey yield.

Our local club has a shared extractor, tank, and hot knife. It is nice to borrow and I don’t have to store or pay for such equipment. So I picked everything up on Friday and was ready to go.

Pulling the honey on Saturday was a problem. The dearth must be intense, as the bees were very interested in the honey. I couldn’t seem to get the boxes clear of bees, and was at a loss. Fortunately I have a very nice neighbor down the road (Karla), who loaned me a couple fume boards and Honey-B-Gone to chase the bees away. This worked great, and I was able to clear whole supers to get them off the bees and into my house.

I also had some issues with the extractor. It worked, and then it didn’t work, and then it worked again. I only have one filter and one honey bucket, which is real problem when you’re trying to process different sets of honey. I ended up running to WalMart to buy a couple food-grade 5-gallon buckets. These were useful for storing and moving honey around, but still only the single filter. Let’s just say I was very unprepared for the amount of honey I had to deal with.

We finally got through most of it, and ended up with about 125 pounds of honey. We ran out of time so I haven’t bottled the spring honey yet. I also have three more supers of honey in my freezer for another weekend, which is probably another 60 to 70 pounds of honey.

The next step is to figure out what to do with oh so many jars of honey. I do not yet have a reliable way to sell honey, so will have to give this some thought.

May you prosper and find honey (I did!).