A Sweet Production Line

Fordism and child labour at its best.  Just saying, you are never too young to be put to work here on Gael Glen Farm.

Today was the last honey harvest of the year.  We always take the honey supers off the hives on Labour Day weekend in preparation for winter.  It has been a weird growing season this year with everything being delayed about three weeks.  That means that we are closer to the beginning of the goldenrod flow right now when we would typically be near the end.  Even so, just because the fall flow is late this year does not mean that winter will come any later than usual so we decided to stick with our usual fall management practices.

On Friday Kerry and I took all the supers off of the hives except one.  Standard practice is to leave only the two deep brood boxes over the winter but, so far, predictions are for a long, cold winter so I decided to leave an extra shallow honey super on each hive like I did last year.  I often hear the criticism that this is too much space for the bees to heat, but bees do not actually heat their hive at all.  They live through the winter in a cluster around the queen that moves through the hive eating up their honey stores until there are none left at which time hopefully it is spring.  It is my opinion that leaving extra honey stores cannot hurt and may well help if the Farmers' Almanac's predictions for winter come to fruition.

Saturday morning I removed the last few bees that were left in the supers and moved them into the mudroom.  On Sunday, the real fun began - extraction.  Thankfully we had lots of help again this time.  Jennifer, now a pro extractor, returned again.  This time she brought her daughter, Alessa, to assist.  Ms. Kerry also came to lend a hand.  Liam and Seamus were involved in every aspect of the extraction process.  It required some extra patience of the part of the adults but participating in things like this is so beneficial for them that it was all worth it.

We made quick work of the extraction and the subsequent clean up.  Now all the frames are ready to be frozen for 24 hours to kill any wax moth eggs that may be in them.  Ian will then bag them up and store them in the garage until spring.

It was one heck of a sticky day but we got the job done!  We are very grateful for the extra hands that came to help.