Honey Harvest

Best practice advice from the most experienced local bee keepers is that honey needs to be harvested by 14th July.  That way the bees get the remainder of July, all of August and any sunny days in September to gather in honey for themselves to last through to spring next year.
This year's super cold start meant that I decided to be cheeky and push the harvest back by 2 weeks in the hope that I might get a bumper harvest...

My hopes were in vain  :(

Despite the promising signs of the beginning of a flow a few weeks ago, it seems that building wax to put the honey in and making honey simultaneously was just too much to do.  So this years harvest is a humble 9 frames...

Here they are....ready to spin...

Now you see them full...

And now they're empty...

Just a small pond of honey in the bottom of the extractor this year...

 

And if I tip the barrel far enough and scrape the barrel well enough it will slowly drain through the filters...

 

Could it flow a-n-y  s-l-o-o-o-w-w-w-e-r?
I swear I've bought treacle that's thinner and runnier than this...

But eventually it makes its way to the bucket....

There's a whole 11 lbs of it.

I confess after expecting nothing and getting 15 lbs last year I'm more than a little disappointed with this humble 11.  But for now it will just have to sit in the settling tank and let the bubbles and scum rise out, I'll get around to jarring it up in a few weeks time...

In the meantime we'll just have to make do with what drains out of the cappings through the sieve overnight, who'd ever have guessed there would be nearly half a jar full in there...