Robbed the hive with very little problem. The fume board and the Fischer's Bee Quick emptied the bees out of the supers in only a couple minutes. The only effort was using the hive tool to pry the supers apart where the bees had industriously glued them together....and the heavy lifting. Wheelbarrow helped there. Had one super (pictured above) with capped honey on 8 out of 9 frames. Left the 9th frame intact and extracted the other 8.
Isn't that beautiful? The white is the beeswax capping they put over the honey when it is dehydrated to honey goodness.
We just sawed the cappings off with what is basically a very sharp bread knife. Went back over the low spots the knife didn't get with a cappings scratcher...something that looks like a metal version of a hair pick from the 70's. Sort of.
Put two frames at a time in the simple plastic extractor...
Turned the handle and spun it around....
And voila! The comb was empty and the honey was in the bottom of the extractor bucket.
Then opened the gate and let the honey flow through the filters into the bottling bucket.
You can see white comb remnants there in the filter. There are actually three filters on the bucket top.
If you look at the bottling bucket, you can tell that it is almost half full....just from 8 shallow frames. Tonight we let it settle, then tomorrow we put the honey into jars. Which reminds me...time to go to store for some jars!!*
Update later on combining the hives...I think that went well, too.
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