Misstep

Yesterday I extracted honey from the dead hive, and as I was doing that I got an email response to my question about whether or not it was safe to use that honey. So now I have a bucket of honey that I can't use for myself. Let's go back to the beginning...

I had emailed my local master beekeeper about the honey in the dead hive, but he did not respond immediately so I asked the YCBA Google Group. I got one response from the group and that response was that it was OK. So I rented the manual honey extractor from YCBA and started extracting honey. I then got the email from the master beekeeper that the honey should not be used for people if the bees were medicated with thymol, antibiotics or fumagilin. I used fumagilin last fall so he recommended feeding the honey back to the bees. Now I get to figure out the best way to do that from the bucket of honey that I now have.

The good part of this process is that I got more practice at extracting honey.  I like this extractor better than the one I rented last fall. It is smaller and yet did 4 medium frames and is easier to clean. I extracted 15 frames and decided to split my hive and give the wet frames back to the bees to start them off better. The main hive is doing really well with brood and eggs so it seems like a good thing to do.