2011-02-15 There's gold in them hills!

Adrian had discovered in a quick check that the "Tree Hive" in Mt. Evelyn was full up!

he also reported that there was bugger-all brood in the bottom box....

same thing happenend to me a few weeks ago.

Time to spring into action.

Bit of a beard out the front, it was a 30 degree day and some of the girls were cooling down out on the porch.

Smokin'

Some of the frames in this box are from Adrians folks old hives.

They had bees maybe 30  years ago, and they still had the bits.
Plastic frames, where you sandwich the foundation between, no wire, still in good nick.

Adrian had cleaned up the frames, put them through the dishwasher and back into service.

Some frames chock full....

Strangely, some of the frames in the top box had big sections of brood.

Had the queen somehow got into the top box?

That would explain why there was no brood in the bottom.

In the end we got 9 frames of honey out, a couple of them were a bit patchy and one had a bit of brood,

but we thought we'd try to spin just one side of these frames, instead of both.

Would the brood be damaged? I'd heard someone say that you could spin them when they had a bit of brood, you just don't uncap those bits, and take it easy.

We did the job in the kitchen, not as messy as I thought it was going to be.

A grub stuck it's head out of a tomato to check us out...

That's one happy beekeeper, and the new spinner.

12 litres of honey, all up, or 16 kilos. About 2 kilos per frame, or a kilo per side.

The ducks.

Dasher checks it out.

She was licking some of the spillings out of the grass, hope she don't get stung.

After we'd got the honey, we put the stickies and the other box back on.

While we were doing the extracting, the one remaining box was absolutely covered in bees.

Putting it back together was a bit tricky, and this time we made sure that the queen was in the bottom box...

...or at least we made sure she wasn't in the top box, because we didn't see her in person.

Massive overflow beard.

I was gonna call this entry "there's beards in them hillls"....