Beekeeping Updates- 1st Redwoodshire Honey Harvest

A fun learning experience for the whole family

We're approaching the one year mark of being beekeepers.  We got our swarm in May of last year and enjoyed watching our bees build their comb and do their thing.  The colony seemed to survive through the winter, as they were out flying during some of the unusually warm days we had in February.  Then we got blasted with a bunch of wind and snow during March.  And then our bees were no more.  Totally gone.  A very, very sad reality.  This past weekend, we opened our hive to harvest honey for the first time.  We took some photos of the Top bars and dead bees to see if we can deduce what may have happened to our colony.

Cutting honey comb into the bucket

Capped honey & empty brood cells

This honey harvest is one we've been looking forward to since we got our bees last Spring.  It was quite easy considering we had no bees to work with, and just got to go into the hive, pull out the top bars of honey and cut the comb off into our buckets.  Sad as our loss was, we enjoyed dipping our fingers in the crushed honey comb for that fresh honey.  This kept the kids busy while we examined the hive and worked on cutting the comb from the top bars.  We harvested 8 top bars of honey.

DIY Crush & Strain bucket system

We built a 2 bucket crush & strain system for our honey harvest.  Here's a video of how we made our Crush & Strain Bucket System.  We used 2 buckets & lids.  The top bucket has a bunch of small holes, close together drilled into a circle at the center of the bottom of the bucket. The bottom bucket lid has a large hole cut into the center.  We also installed our own honey gate about 1 inch from the bottom of the lower bucket.  Then we placed a 5 gallon paint strainer in the top bucket and placed the honey comb inside that.  We placed the honey comb into the top bucket, inside the paint strainer.  Then we used a potato masher & knife to crush the comb and release the honey from the cells.  It took about 4 days to completely strain all the honey into the bottom bucket.   Bottling the honey was quite fun.  We bottled both 1/2 lb. and 1 lb. glass bottles with lids from BetterBee to store our honey for sale & gifts.

Honey Gate ordered from Amazon

Crushed & Strained honey comb- honey drained out

Since we got our swarm of bees last Spring, we have been talking about establishing a second hive.  The purpose of this would be to have at least one of the 2 colonies survive winter, and thus be able to repopulate our 2nd hive with our own bees (in case of loss).  We purchased a 2nd Top Bar Hive from Bee Thinking over the winter.  Now we have 2 Top Bar Hives and ZERO bees.  The friend whom generously gave us one of his swarms last Spring lost all 4 of his hives this past winter, so unfortunately for both of us, there will be no swarms to give for winter losses.   Davis Family Honey Farm is only a few hours from us and is one of the few places I found that was not sold out of packaged bees for this Season.  

So that's the update on Redwoodshire Beekeeping for now.  We should receive our 3# package of bees around May 8th, and will update our bee installation at that point.

Here is the fruit of our bees' labors!  We ended up with about 21 1/2 lbs. of raw, unfiltered, treatment free honey.  Considering we only harvested 8 top bars of honey comb, this was more than we knew to expect.  We would have double that if the whole Top Bar Hive were completely full! With fingers crossed we can find a swarm to fill our 2nd Top Bar Hive, and we will have an abundance of honey to sell next season.

Redwoodshire Honey (1/2 lb. & 1 lb.)- Raw, Unfiltered, Treatment Free Honey