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I think I’ve found the electrical fault — looks like the heater element in the uncapping tray has died — possibly shorting neutral to earth. A quick check shows it to be in its eleventh year, so perhaps I can’t be too upset about that. What I can be upset about is the £46+P&P that the supplier wants for a replacement. Having removed the offending item it appears to be a standard 1.5kW kettle element so I shall be purchasing a new one from an electrical spares site for less than £15 all in. Finishing off will have to wait until that turns up.

Sometimes life just doesn’t want to do you any favours 🙂

I started extracting the rest of my honey this morning. By lunchtime I only had eleven more frames to process. I shut up the shed and came in for lunch. Only I perhaps didn’t shut up the shed as well as I thought, and when I returned after lunch it was full of hundreds of bees and wasps 🙁 Over the course of the afternoon I managed to evict most of them, but they’ll almost certainly be back before I get up tomorrow now they know there’s something of interest inside and I’d really prefer not to have the harassment of trying to keep them out when I’m working, so I decided to finish off this evening after dinner.

I switched on the cappings melter and started spinning nine of the remaining frames to extract the honey when the main breaker for the shed popped. Fortunately it’s a manual extractor so I could finish those frames by torchlight, but I really need daylight to sort out the reason the breaker went and to finish melting down the cappings and deal with the last two frames.

So, I’ve just brought all the honey I’ve already extracted back into the kitchen to filter and pack, where it is at least safe from being stolen back by the bees. I’d best be careful not to get any on the floor…

Today was intended to be honey extraction day. For once I was hoping that the weather wouldn’t be warm enough for bees and wasps to want to be about, but it didn’t happen and things just went downhill from there, really 🙁

I had all my frames of honey gathered together and all the kit was ready. The plan was to extract today and put the empty frames back on the hives tomorrow for the bees to clean up anything left over. Because my wife doesn’t like a sticky floor in the kitchen and gets upset if honey and wax are trodden all over the house (fair enough, really) I now do extraction in the beer shack, where it’s relatively straightforward to sluice the floor down afterwards. Only when I went out and turned on the water supply to the beer shack, it started spraying out of the incoming pipe all over the wall. Some damage to the pipe that must have been done years ago that I’d never noticed had suddenly given way. So I spent the morning cleaning up and doing plumbing instead.

The afternoon went reasonably well after I managed to remember everything I’d forgotten since last year, but I’ve not finished yet so I’ll have to get the rest done tomorrow.