This weekend we extracted the honey from the hives at my house.

The hives at my house started as two different splits earlier this year, so they were a little slower to gather their honey crop than our other hives that we were able to extract a few weeks ago.

Between the two hives, we had three supers that were ready to pull and extract.



We pulled the supers the night before (Friday) and had them ready and waiting in the basement. We thought that Saturday would bring rain, so by pulling the supers the night before it ensured the rain wouldn't bother us. As an added benefit, the actual extraction process today seemed much shorter.



With the equipment setup and ready, we set to work uncapping the frames. If you look closely to the right side of the picture you can see Maeve, who's learning how to walk, standing at the stack of supers.



The frames spun until they were empty inside our homemade extractor. When they were all empty we let Garrison open the gate and watch the honey flow out into the buckets.



When the extractor was empty and all the honey was into the buckets, we had 7.5 gallons that weighed 90 pounds.



After the honey sat in the bottling buckets overnight to allow the air bubbles to rise, we cleaned some mason jars and bottled it up.



Our current honey crop total for this year is: 17 gallons (210 lbs).

We put the supers back onto the hives and are hopeful the bees might refill them once more between now and fall...at least they have in years past.