Well, my girls are doing all right. I took 7 frames for extraction and got about 12 liters or so, maybe a bit more. Here's the 5 gallon (20L) pail. I use a kitchen strainer to get most of the cappings wax.
Another shot, a little blurry
Our honey jar on the counter was about half full, so we topped it up. You can see that the new honey on top is darker than the first-harvest honey below.
This honey is much more complex-tasting than the first. Different flowers in bloom, I guess. I plan to make a couple or three batches of mead with this honey, and doing a parallel experiment comparing wine yeast and ale yeast.
And, while I was working the bees today, I missed the emergence of one of the monarchs I've been watching. I did find the new butterfly below the empty chrysalis, though. The remaining one will probably emerge tomorrow. Pics here : http://imgur.com/a/ER82x
I take joy seeing these photos and hearing about the bees and the honey they've provided you. It's been really interesting watching the process. Fresh honey on the table must be wonderful. How do you normally enjoy it? Simply with bread and butter? What's your chosen honey vehicle?
To be honest, I rarely eat it, except when I work the hive. It is really good with butter on toast, though.
So what sort of hives are you using? I've been following this stuff idly and I recall some people (random people, on the internet) were blaming conventional hive construction for colony collapse disorder and stuff. Meanwhile the permaculture freaks are advocating building things out of 55 gallon drums. You got pix of yours?
I use conventional Langstroth hives, and plastic one-piece frames. Full-depth and 3/4 depth, 10 frames per box. Some imgur albums :
http://imgur.com/a/E2bXp
I don't know, and I've often wondered. When I lived in Oklahoma, we would sometimes see the seasonal migrations of the monarchs, and it is quite an awesome spectacle.
According to Wikipedia, it seems that they don't migrate in New Zealand. Also, I learned that for those in the Americas that do migrate, no one monarch makes the entire trip. Apparently, the migration time is greater than the butterfly's lifespan. That's kind of tragic and poetic.
My house is full of bees! Really, they are flying around in here everywhere. Many dozens. Good thing they don't bother me. My wife was boiling some water mixed with the cappings-wax from the strainer, so she could cool it and extract the beeswax. Cappings beeswax is the cleanest, freshest you can get. After boiling a few minutes, the smell of beeswax is filling the house - and the bees seem drawn to it. We've removed the pot from the boil and opened doors and windows so they can get back home. It's a bit of 'turnabout is fair play', I guess - I was in their house a few hours ago, and now they are visiting mine.