You spin me right round baby
My wife has a deep-rooted aversion to cleaning the honey spinner; and she has an equally deep-rooted belief that I can’t do it thoroughly. I clean it, then it stands outside and gets dirty again… So we haven’t yet spun out the end of last season’s honey, and now with having to make space in the big hive for new brood, we were blessed with a further 6 frames that had to be spun out.
This is actually quite a saga…. I wrote the intro above in October 2020. So now, n months later (n being quite a large integer for those mathematically inclined) the story is finally unfolding. So fast forward to present time.
Let me get the bad news out of the way first. Sealing the frames in so-called sealed storage containers for n months (n being… never mind) is a really, really bad idea. The nett effect is we had to chuck the frames and the x kilograms (x being an even larger real number) of ex-honey they did once contain. It was a huge wax moth infected mess, so smelly and toxic, you didn’t even want to touch it to try and save the frames. Lesson learnt. When you take out honey, spin it out immediately and freeze the frames if you don’t quickly replace them in the hives.
On the positive side, on day, in between sitting in on-line meetings all day, I quickly slipped out during lunch break and helped Patricia get some frames out. Thank goodness Noel and Amanda, who were living in Dreamland for the past year, thanks to a little virus’ doing, were on hand to help Patricia scrape and spin out the first batch of honey. Here’s a little collage of the activities, thanks to Amanda the photographer:
But alas Noel and Amanda have since left to return to sunny SA…. So we had to make a day of it one Sunday to process the next batch. This day madam decided to wear her runners and socks while taking out the honey. Needless to say she got nasty sting on her ankle… luckily she didn’t go into any shock reaction (can’t pronounce the word…) although she did feel the effect for days after. But anyway, we had a good harvest of around 28kg. So far so good.
The spinner is now sealed, waiting for the pack-down harvest which should be any week soon. I guess, after that, we’ll have to clean it again…
My dream is to have a bee hive I’m not prepared enough yet & all the research & info I have read has never mentioned what to do with the frames after extracting the honey. Thankyou so much for your info I will go back & have a read over your bee blogs. The honey looks so yum, I remember as a kid chewing on the wax for hours, as that was a chewing gum alternative I was allowed. lol
Yeah we’re lucky we’ve got a very good mentor who is teaching us through the process. You don’t even pick up everything in the second year round. Yummy natural bubblegum! We got some great honeycomb too, off the tops of the frames before you take them out. Just didn’t add the photo. Good also if you’re into making wax and stuff.