Out of 17 years of keeping bees in Alaska's interior, 2021 has been one of three BEST seasons! Our honey flow has peaked and will continue throughout August or until temperatures drop below the middle 40s outside the hive.
We pulled one deep and three medium honey frames this past weekend. After extracting the honey, we have 3.5 gallons from these five frames. When robbing honey, we bring our spray bottle to mist the bees with 1:1 or less sugar water to distract them from our harvesting activities.
Using a tote with a lid placed 20-50 feet away from the hive(s), we take one frame at a time out of the hive, make sure both sides are capped/sealed, tap and brush the bees off of both sides of the frame and place the frame into the tote, replacing the lid as quickly as possible.
We are careful to rob only frames with capped honey cells to ensure the honey is 17% or less moisture content. This affects how soon the honey becomes sugared. The less moisture content, the longer honey remains in a liquid state. Heating honey much over 100* kills valuable enzymes needed for digestion. We never heat our honey, only using gravity to extract the raw liquid gold.
After the honey is extracted, the sticky frames are given back to the hive from which they came so the bees can clean up the frames. Frames that are not sticky are much easier to handle and store through the winter months.
Our honey extractor and accompanying tools can be rented for $25 per day. Just shoot us an email at alaskabees&brew@gmail.com
Any colonies not being wintered over will require caging the queen. Our next blog entry will have tips on wintering honeybees and a possible wintering workshop date.
We will demonstrate queen caging on Friday, July 30, 2021. Please email us if you want to sign up to attend this demonstration. We will email the location address to the first 15 people who sign up. All participants must wear a bee suit. alaskabees&brew@gmail.com
When selling honey, we properly label any containers with our name and contact information.
