Tuesday, I went to a new beekeeper to check his bees and he asked me to help pull his honey and to extract. I got there about 8:45 am and we proceeded to check his bees. The last time I checked them, colony #1 was strong and have a very good brood pattern. Colony #2 didn’t have any eggs nor brood. We took two frames of brood from the strong colony and placed them in the brood less hive. I didn’t see the queen and we would wait for a week and check again. I really thought that we would have to combine the two together and make one hive.

Well, one thing let to another and it was three weeks before we got back to the apiary. That was Tuesday. I was amazed that there were eggs and sealed brood. Still couldn’t find the queen. It may be that she is a small queen and that would make it difficult to find her since she would be about the same size of worker bees. Anyway, there was brood. They have not made an abundance of honey, but they were working on it.

The strong colony had two and a half Illinois supers of honey so we left the half super on and pulled the two full supers. Since this young beekeeper doesn’t have any extraction equipment yet, I was going to use my two frame extractor. The only trouble was, my extractor has not been used in over four years and was sitting outside in the weather and had been corroded to the point of seizing up and was inoperable.

I called a friend and he let us use his two frame extractor. Not having had the opportunity to use this extractor, we didn’t have all the pieces. His was set up to use a drain tube instead of a gate valve. Since we didn’t know to look for the tube, we had to jury rig using a paper plate, which didn’t work, and a funnel with 2 paper clips and 2 rubber bands. After a spill or two, we finally extracted about 4 1/2 gallons of honey. That is about 54 lbs. by weight. My young friend was very happy. This is his first honey from his own hive of bees.