Honey harvest preparations

Friday turned out to be another busy day.

After an early morning walk down the lane to empty the dogs, we loaded Hobson and his brother in to the car and headed over the Cheltenham. 

I wandered in to the Motorrad showroom and was promptly relived of a couple of hundred quid. My bike was brought from the wash bay, and I was soon heading back down the M5 towards home.

I then turned my attention towards the upcoming honey harvest, and got the extractor assembled. Then it was a case of preparing the hives.

I planned to take three supers from each of Hives #1 and #2.  Obviously honey extraction is a whole lot easier if the supers are free from bees, so the hives need to be configured to get the bees to move out of them.  The hives were given a few puffs of smoke to calm the bees, and then the three supers were taken off the hive. An empty super was added to hive to give the bees space to move in to. I then added one of my newly constructed clearer boards and replaced the three honey filled supers.

All being well, the bees will move out of the supers overnight and be prevented from returning by the clearer boards ... fingers crossed!

The rest of the day was taken up with watering the veg patch and mowing the lawns at the back of the cottage.

Apparently the forecast for the Bank Holiday weekend is not great, so I wanted to get the lawns trimmed before they got out of hand.