Bee club hive check and honey extracting

Today Zack and I had a look at the Bee Club's bees. My hives at home aren't drawing much new comb, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that almost all of the deep we installed them in was drawn out.  Not the straightest of comb I have ever seen, but it was drawn.

Zack has been feeding them 1:1 sugar syrup every week for the past couple of weeks and it looks like it's paying off.  We added another deep and plan to keep feeding so they have a nice strong colony to go into winter with.

After we added the other deep to the bee club bees we checked on my hive's stores.  We pulled six frames of capped honey and replaced the frames with drawn out frames that I had on hand.  I needed some freezer space to put more frames, so I pulled out all the capped frames in the freezer and started extracting.  What a messy process!  All of the frames I extracted weren't wired at all, so I wasn't sure how they would do in the extractor.  Most of them did fine, out of 15 probably, 12 made it intact.  I think I got about 4 gallons.

The frames were decapped and then spun in the extractor on both sides.  Then the extractor is emptied into the strainer bucket to catch any wax cappings that got into the honey.