Hey everyone, this will be my first winter in the bee-keeping trade, we are learning so much daily. One thing which I have recently learnt is that honey is far harder to work with and manage in winter for what reason and how can this be? You may ask? The viscosity of the honey is just much more and it crystalises really fast which can be a problem when you are selling it per kg out of a settling tank, which we do!
This is quiet a cool pic, what we have here is the honey extractor spinning the frames to gently remove/extract the honey from the comb. This unit has a built in 'safety' as it is opened much like a washing machine it cuts out. As I opened the lid snapped the shot to get the unit in motion.
As a bee-keeper this is exactly what you want to see when you open up a hive. On our last harvest a few weeks ago this is what we took out of 3 hives, 12 fully capped, ripe, raw incredible honey.
As per usual before putting these frames into the honey spinner I take the cappings off the comb with a specialized un-capping fork. This allows for the honey to easily flow from the combs into the machine and settle at the bottom once spun off!
My South African mates here will know what this means! I took this frame from a super which is faulty, every time I put frames in it they fell through which was not optimal. Marking faulty frames and supers is always a good idea as to avoid downtime, a disorganized hive etc.
From the main tank the honey flows through these two sieves and into the settling tank to be bottled. These simply remove the bigger parts that may be floating around the honey!
Inside the machine if you look closely at the bottom lies the freshly spun off honey and wax. The sides of the unit now just have the empty combs and frames.
This is the winter problem we experience. This honey is literally not more than a few days old, very hard already, a good sign of true raw honey. I enjoy it like this too is certainly has a different taste it is just a little harder to manage. I normally simply bottle it and when needed which in my case is a daily activity, simply put the bottle in a glass of hot water, it melts and becomes viscous a few minutes later.
Here we have a combination of wax and honey probably around half of each. The honey to be extracted from here is a little tricky, the only way is to press it out. We generally just feed it back to the bees or sell it off. The residual left from the filtering process.
Be sure to stay tuned for more of my epic bee-keeping adventures!
I trust you have an incredible week further.
Cheer$;)