The honey harvest is finished as of this past weekend. I was a bit dissapointing this year as the yield was 40% less than last year. Considering I had more hives in production than last year and the average per hive was probably 50% of normal (and perhaps 60% of last years average). But it is done and we’ve recovered from the mess of a few weeks earlier. I will need to start melting down the capping wax in the next couple of weeks as well as begin creaming the completely raw and some strained honey for sale. We also saved several buckets of the cappings (with honey) to cream because we have had several requests for honey with more ‘stuff’ in it. We only did a few and we should see how it sells. The Really Raw Honey company gets a pretty premium price for the stuff ($1 per ounce).
The weather has turned cooler with the past two days not getting above 60 and some mornings there is a little ice on the truck’s windows, but no real frost yet. This weeked we’ll begin feeding the weaker hives that didn’t build up because of the poor honey flow, and we’ll be crossing our fingers and hope that the frost holds off for a few weeks so that the stronger hives can work the golden rod. With some luck those hives won’t need any feed.
With the finish of honey harvest our workshop is set back up which means we’ll also be busy filling orders for woodenware that came in over the past couple weeks.
