The Dadant extractor and comb sieve that I borrowed from the Somerset Bee Association worked like a charm.
The new hive has a few capped queen cells. There is brood, but it looks old. There are drones, too. I did not see a queen bee. When I opened the hive up to pull honey I looked at almost all of the frames. There is lots of burr comb. The bees did not like the plastic frames at all. I would say that there was no brood in the top deep super, and only one truly full frame of honey. They were drawing out both the deep and the medium. I guess they need sugar water to build out more and to repair, now that I have taken honey for them. I was not wearing my glasses, which is a real problem for seeing eggs- I can't
When I do the Formic acid treatment in a day or so, I will look for the queen and eggs.
The Old hive was less clear. There was almost no drawn comb on the top medium honey super. The second medium honey super was quite full. This is where I got the majority of my honey from. Of nine frames, eight were almost completely capped. One was not capped, and I left it. I got stung once on the R thumb, so I did not work the brood frames on that side. I have to. They need to be checked for queen cells and splits. I think I will be doing that for the other hive. Also the old hive needs to be treated for mites, too. I think there is one frame with a double comb that I need to put on the outside and cleanup sometime later this year.
Using the extractor: I set up a sawhorse near the hives and a card table in the garage. I used smoke and a bee brush to get bees off the honey combs. Next time I will use Bee Gone, very carefully. I placed the honey combs on the card table in the garage until I was done with the first hive. I then put it back together. Then I took the old hive apart, and started clearing the medium frames of honey. They took much longer to prepare than the plastic frames, but then I don't think the bees really liked the plastic frames at all.
The decapper worked fine, though we unplugged between comb spins because I was worried about overheating. The carmelized sugar smelled very nice. I set up in the recumbent bike corner of the garage, so that everything was pretty much in one place. My hands got tired after holding and decapping 18 frames. The plastic survived the centrifuge better than the foundation. The first time we were very cautious about how fast to turn the crank. BC did all of the turning. We didn't pull much honey out, so BC turned harder. There was some unbalancing issue. I stood on one of the leg blocks and BC stood on one and Gram helped. It took three spins for most of the sets of frames. I put wet frames back in the medium honey super as they got clean. The extractor handled 4 frames at a time.
The honey filled the bottom of the extractor, then we opened the honey tap and honey poured into the grandma cleaned bucket and nylon net sieve. There were visible honey comb bits that were caught and a couple of bees. We also put an aluminum foil tray in the bottom of the decapper. It nicely held the honey from the decapping. That also got strained in the sieve. Next we have to let the honey settle for a few days before we bottle it. It looks like we got between 2 and 2.5 gallons of honey.
I wore gardening gloves for most of the time, cause I got pretty sticky. We tried to have me be the sticky one and BC and Gram be unsticky. That way they could hold lids open, unplug things, and I could turn frames and use the hive tool without too much cross mess. I think that worked pretty well. I changed gloves when I got stung. I also took a Benedryl. Then took a nap while the honey sieve was draining. We returned the setup to Watchung by 2:00pm, and I just left an email.
The smoker did its job just fine. I am afraid that the unwired foundation in the next round of frames will be too fragile to spin. Time will tell.
