Beautiful Honey

Thursday I had the day off work and took a drive out to the mountain to check the bees, see how the one honey super was coming along, and do some other work; mowing, pick wild black raspberries, etc. I ended up working Memorial Day weekend and it was my last chance to use the saved holiday. Yikes! It hit 100 degrees in Washington! Perfect weather to pull on a thick denim bee suit! The talk around here is that it has been so hot and dry the nectar flow has all but stopped and while my girls are putting the honey away slower than a month ago there still seems to be some coming in. The honey super on Hive 1 is beautiful, almost white comb and a light colored honey. I wish I had a picture but it was so hot I was minimizing the time in the suite and I still had to mow inside the electric fence. I guess the next step is figuring out how to get the bees out of honey super and then extracting it. I hear that is a messy, sticky, good time!

I also made a couple of nuc bodies. Nothing fancy but I figure I can make them (without counting my time) for about 2/3 the price of ordering them and save all the shipping costs. Plus I buy a 1 x 10 and rip it down to medium body size so I used the ripped pieces to make shims or other things. And that is my with my typical screwing up measurements that make a piece of 1 x 10 into a piece of firewood. Measure twice, cut once. Or as I do it - measure twice, cut once, wonder why the pieces don't fit together correctly, realize my mistake, measure twice again, and cut again. Good thing I don't do this kind of stuff for a living. This time I lucked out on my mistake in that I was cutting the side for a hive body, but when I cut it too short I could still use it for a nuc side, so I only wasted a couple inches of wood. No fancy dove tails, but they are cheap and this can be an expensive hobby if you do more than a couple of colonies. Check out the jig I made to help me at Ed's Experiments and Stuff. Now I can always cut the long sides of the hive bodies correctly!