Saturday 2nd October was a fairly nice day given the weather we’ve been having recently, so we managed - at long last - to get the final harvest of honey done. We managed to take another 9 full frames and a bucket full of raw natural comb also completely full and capped off. This was the space I inadvertently left when I removed the initial three frames. The girls went mad and filled the gaps.

The moral learned was never ever give them any free space because they will fill it up!

Anyway, we have now got the supers off, the queen excluder off, the eke on, the apiguard (anti varroa) on and we are just about almost nearly ready for winter - just the mouse guards to go.

We intend to keep the honey in the bucket to use as winter feed rather than supplying them with syrup that they have to work on to convert into “honey”. I suspect giving them back their own honey is far batter for them in the long run.

Peter’s extractor was delivered by Helen last night (Sunday) so next Sunday will hopefully be the day that the kitchen gets extremely sticky as we attempt to extract honey from all 19 frames. Watch this space for details.

Next time, I need to make sure I get hold of a couple of Porter Bee Escapes to keep the girls from the capped off honey stores - it’s a lot easier to extract the filled frames when you don’t have to deal with a swarm of slightly irritated bees!

Cheers.