Monthly Archives: July 2012
TwoBigCats Honey Harvest
Thanks to Ellen for helping us harvest, spin and jar just over ELEVEN gallons of honey this weekend!
The names of the harvest batches are:
Hive #1 – London Calling, in honor of the 2012 Olympics that began that day.
Hive #2 – Northern Lights, after the luminescent yellow color of the honey from that hive only.
Hive #3 – La De Da, after the song by Ringo playing on the Bose as we were searching for a name with meaning. 😉
Capping’s – All Shook Up, because we placed all of the comb cappings from all the frames in a big bucket and let them drain. The caps produced just over 2 gallons of very nice, medium honey.
Hello, Sunshine
Yesterday’s Harvest
London Calling
Ellen, Joanne and I harvested hive #1 today. Instead of my usual scrape & strain method, I used a hand-crank, 4 frame extractor.
I pulled the frames, brought them in via cooler, then Ellen and I used the capping knife to uncap the comb. The frames went into the extractor and Joanne cranked / spun the honey for ~1 minute on each side. From there, the honey slid down the walls of the extractor and pooled in the bottom of the extractor.
Joanne then placed a pint jar in front of the drain / spigot, opened the valve and filled 32 pint jars. Using this method yielded just a bit over 4 gallons of honey, a significant increase over what the scraping method would have given us.
In honor of the Olympics, we’ve named this batch, London Calling.
Calvin o’ Cool
Us Three Big Cats
CoyoteMarble
Should you eat that bacon?
Happy Birthday, Pop!
Dad would have turned 87 today … we speak of him often and miss hearing his friendly growl on the phone.