Well, after all the madness with the Swarms over the last few weeks it was a relief to settle down and extract some honey this weekend. I collected four swarms and apparently missed two more over the last five weeks and managed to sell one to a friend of a friend. That leaves me with five to manage which is more than I had planned but it is still do-able. If it seems to be too much effort I can always combine a couple to reduce the total number.

Using a friend’s two frame extractor I extracted 14kg from 9 frames, I was expecting a bit more but quite a few frames were not yet full or had brood in them. But that’s OK I wasn’t after a huge yield and I’m not currently using queen excluders.

I like to get a hive done in one hit and then return the extracted frames (stickies) to the hive for cleanup and refilling. It also helps me to keep the frames in the same hive as much as possible to minimise the spread of disease. Because I only have a few hives to manage it’s pretty easy. With a lot more hives I imagine it would be more difficult to keep track of the frames and hives.

Of course, while doing all this, I have been listening to a lot of honey related music including this old favourite.

What’s your favourite track with the word Honey?