The 2008 honey harvest has begun.

As expected, we won't have a full crop of honey this first year.  We were able to harvest some honey from a few of our hives so far.

On July 26th we pulled 2 full supers of honey off 2 of the hives. We uncapped the frames, extracted the honey and let it settle in a settling tank for several days.  This yielded about 60 pounds of honey (the equivalent of a 5-gallon bucket). 

On Aug 2nd, we took another 2 supers off of 2 different hives.  Not all of these were capped, so we suspected a higher water content than we'd accept.  We tested it with a refractometer and it read 18.1% (where 18.5% and lower is good), but we felt that we'd give the bees a chance to dry it out and cap it for us.  As a result, we only harvested 11 of the 20 frames on these 2 supers.  I expect when we check next week, the others will be ready to go (and perhaps the rest of the frames will be loaded as well).

This second harvest yielded about 31 pounds of honey, which we added to the settling tank. 

We bottled and labeled a number of 12-ounce bears, 1-pound bottles, and 3-pound jugs.  We haven't marketed at all, just word of mouth with co-workers and friends/family.  We're going to start going to the local farmer's market here in Panora soon.

I'm planning on adding some honey sticks (possibly as samples) and some honey lemonade.  It seems to work at the State Fair, so I figure it can't hurt.