Saturday was an exciting day for all those involved with the apiary at the heritage centre - it was our first harvesting day!

We’d already taken the ‘super’ off containing six frames of capped honey earlier in the week. This is done by placing a ‘clearing board’ with one-way bee entrances between the super and the brood box - the bees can go down away from the honey but can’t return.

The six frames of honey were heated using a heat gun to melt the wax cappings and then placed in the large spinner and spun. It took a good deal of time and patience to extract the honey, but eventually with some clever manipulation and brute force we managed to see the beautiful golden honey stream down the sides of the spinner.

The honey was filtered and left to settle overnight. We then poured 11 lbs of clear honey into sterilised jars ready for sale in our CHC shop.

We hope some of you get the chance to taste this wonderful natural product.

Meanwhile our bees are busy making more honey, so we may be able to spin more later in the summer.

Bye for now,

The CHC Apiary Team