i know and i feel bad now because i forgot to let him out because i was busy playing tanks and he died in the bottle

soundtrack:

So anyway, 2 days after Sreegs was busy lying to the world about us, I was doing this...


This, is a brand new 9 frame honey spinner. Not many folks have these, they usually get their spinning done by the local beekeepers association, because spinners cost a bomb.

This happened, seemingly, so long ago now, the nightmares have subsided, but I had to make a lot of trips to and from my lockup to fetch this piggy out and a whole load of jars, buckets and so on. Amongst other things as well, which are far less interesting than honey.

(The 3 stainless cages come out, they're for people who are spinning honey out of brood frames so they're irrelevant to me since I'll never do that)

Uncapping the honey is hilariously messy, taking photos is impossible without a cameraman who doesn't get covered in sticky crap. Sadly, anybody with 10 feet gets covered in honey, so uncapping photos will always be a rare thing.


And the 5 frames of honey are loaded in. Spinning is pretty easy, turn the handle and the insides spin.

ACTION SHOT!

At the right hand side you can see the honey whipping off the frame edge. It's probably going about at ummm, 3 revolutions per second in there, but the camera made a pretty good picture of it.

The honey is forced out of the frames and drips down the sides of the spinner, gathering in the bottom.

Newly emptied frame.

It's pretty late at night at this point so we decide to leave the honey draining down the sides and maybe we'll come back to it the next day, tired and sticky felt really unpleasant.

damn, thats a cool machine. how long does it take to spin the honey out?

About 2 minutes.
It depends on a few important factors.

1. The composition of the honey (this was runny honey)
2. The speed of the spin (It's pretty tiring if you go Balls Out)
3. The temperature of the honey (warm flows faster)
4. How much fun you want (It makes a sweet noise as it plings of into the side of the steel drum!)

Once it falls silent at full speed, the show is over. Although, as I found, when we left it like this at night, the next day I found that I could spin it some more and also, spin the other direction. It's radial, rather than tangential which they say means you only need to spin it in one direction for full extraction, but they're lying, you get a load more for going backwards.

Two days pass before we get a moment to deal with the honey in the bottom of the spinner.


It comes out this tap at the side. My filtering bucket has a metal gauze in the lid with a mesh size of maybe 1 or 2mm. Under here we put a regular baking muslin cloth for the fine filtering, maybe 0.2mm, depends on how much the cloth deforms under weight I suppose.

It's recommened to not filter any finer than this otherwise you'll filter out pollen which is supposed to be in there.



This was pretty exciting, it was fast flowing, but slow to filter of course so we had a few hairy moments when we thought we were going to have a little honeyflood, but all went well. Until I realised we hadn't got any jars out of storage so, no place to put the honey, it had to have a little stay in the filter bucket


BAM! The most expensive honey I've ever had! About £500 and 3 months per slice!

After my little toast break, and having filtered the honey, I go back to the uncapping station, because I know honey drains into the bottom of it, it has about a 5mm gauze it drains into, the wax remains above that mostly.
And I scrape the honey into one corner and I remember a little friend I found when I was uncapping...


A live spider living in the comb. I took the opportunity to not mention it to Fledge because, well, you know what girls are like, one tiny bit of mould on a slice of bread and they toss the whole loaf instead of just picking it off. Anyway, the spider drowned in honey and got through the gauze apparently.


With my luck it'll break up get through the next filter, so obviously I fished it out and binned it.

This honey was put through the filter bucket as though it came out of the spinner.... and that is where the honey remains until I get the jars from storage and cleaned.

And there is my first crop of honey.

This has been a bit of a scrappy update. The main reason was because I wanted to delay the honey extraction even further than we already had, specifically until we'd won the alliance tournament, I was going to label it all up as "Hydra Honey, 2012 Tournament Winner Edition" or some such.

Then of course Sreegs happened, so that plan pooped, with no tourney testing to do any more, I figured I might as well extract that honey.
There was a brief plan to make an "arty" photo with the original honey labels screwed up in the bin, slightly blurred in the background, with the new "Hydra Honey, 2012 Stolen Tournament Edition" label on the jars. But :effort:, Sreegs destroyed much more that day than Soundwave's wildest dreams.

A little about this Honey.
Golden runny honey like this is late-year, from the Autumn. So this honey was produced when I was still living in Nottingham.
At the time of my moving to Stratford, the bees were out of sync with me and I did not get chance to harvest this honey last year.
Over last winter I fed the bees far too much, as a result, they didn't touch this honey, in the meantime they had managed finish off these 5 frames I harvested this spring.
So this honey is definitely 9 months old. The area it comes from is urban, within range of a natural river and a nature reserve, the choice of pollens and nectars was extremely varied. This honey is exceptionally floral in it's taste. I figure it's mostly from things like wild black berries. Honey bees do not routinely favour garden flowers, as flowers are not very numerous, remembering that it takes 2 million flowers to make 1 pound of honey, so what's the point of flowers right?
Honey bees like trees and crops mostly.
It's bumble bees that live in colonies of 50 that like flowers.

These 5 frames got me about 7 pounds of honey. That's 14 million flower heads.

spider bro

rly cool

a massive amount of work but u got alot more than i expected would come out of the 2 hives

i feel rly shitty for buying supermarket honey now lol, that stuff is honey hardcore mode