On Sunday I harvested two supers of honey from Colony 1. They had filled three supers during the spring and had started building comb on top of the crown board.
Harvesting is fairly straightforward now. Cut; spin; strain; put into containers. Easy.
Colony 1 has been very busy. I opened the top today to find three full supers. The bees were even building above the crown board and would very soon have run out of space.
I lifted off two of the three supers and put two new ones in their place. Then I put a Canadian Clearer Board and replaced the two full ones on top. In a day or two there will be an early harvest.
I harvested a super of honey from Colony 1 a couple of weeks ago. I also had some uncapped honey in frames which had been Hive C containing Colony 11 before I went through all the complicated rearrangements.
The conventional view is that the bees will thoroughly and carefully clean comb if you put it on their hive. In my wisdom I found an exception to this view.
We took some honey off our long established Hive (A) over the weekend. It amounted to 12Kg including extracted honey and comb. As always, it tastes fantastic. It's so strong that I can't eat very much.
I use National frames but mostly without foundation. There is evidence that chemicals leach from the wax in foundation and get transported around the hive (NB: I don't have a journal article reference for that claim, so treat with care please). I wanted to avoid that.