Beekeeping: Harvested honey for the first time in many years

Yesterday, I finally got around to opening our backyard beehive for the first time in about three years. The hive was chock full of honey, so I decided to harvest one shallow super (a super is a stackable box of comb on removable frames; generally, deep supers are used as brood chambers, shallow supers for honey storage. Each super has 10 frames in a standard hive). I got about 29lbs of honey and there are two more supers still on the hive, just as full. Twenty-nine pounds of honey will last us for years, though, so I may or may not harvest another super when I have time. 

This was the first time I've taken honey from the hive since 2013. The long pause in harvesting was partly because of losing the colony three times in the past ten years or so, but also because we had so much honey it took us that long to use it up. The honey this time is very dark in color, but it tastes pretty much the same as honey harvested in the past that was considerably paler.