When I take off a super from a hive, I shake each frame to free it of bees and put the bee-free frame into an empty super to take inside. When the super is filled, I carry in the frames to harvest. Because I have NO empty boxes, I didn't know how I was going to clear out the super from Mellona today. Looking in my bee equipment in the basement, I found this box from a bee order that was just the right size to hold honey-laden frames. It saved the day!
Mellona makes gorgeous honey - this hive produced lovely honey last year and this year is no exception. The frames from this super were perfectly capped frames of honey - what great bees grow up in this hive.
The frame below is sitting on top of a queen excluder because I am about to make cut comb honey with this lovely comb and the queen excluder is the best drain rack there is. The wires are close enough together to avoid causing damage to the comb.
When I cut the honey comb off of the frames I stacked the dripping frames in an extra honey bucket. The small amount of honey that drained off into this bucket will be unfiltered. I don't want to mix it with my beautiful filtered honey so I will save it to be fed back to the bees. The opaque looking sheet is my flexible cutting board from the crush and strain I did today. (Note: less than 8 ounces of honey drained into this bucket and I put it in a small bottle to give to the bees, when needed)
After I had harvested all 10 frames from this super, I put the dripping leftovers into my only empty medium super (the one I took off of Mellona to harvest these). I put the medium box with the dripping frames on the new swarm hive (whoops, need a name for this one!) The bees there will have the advantage of the dripping honey since I am not feeding them and they can use the frames to build new comb and work hard.
I believe I'll call the new hive Hyron² since it is a swarm hive and is exponentially vigorous compared to the original Hyron.
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