Chris and Peter,

Over many years it has been my experience to suffer during the Rape
nectar flow as follows:

Flowers, perfect, bright yellow, smelling good and worked by the bees -
for 5 - 8 days. Combs are starting to be filled.
Then on comes a period of about 5 - 7 days, 7-10°C, rainy days with a
cold east wind. Bees sitting inside doing not much (apart from
finalizing swarming procedures!).

Then there is a resumption of the Rape nectar flow for about 14 - 20 days.

Result: Frames originating from the later flow are perfect for
extraction , but those  that were started before and interrupted by the
poor weather quite often had a core of granulated or granulating honey
surrounded by liquid honey from the latter flow.

What a pain to extract!

This was done achieved by:
a. Cutting out the whole frame and melting in my wax - honey separator.

b. Extracting slowly until most of their honey was out of the frame,
then soaking the said frame and leaving for bees to clear out. The
apiary that collected this then had their supers harvested at a later date.

c. Extracting nothing from affected frames, and used them to feed during
the June gap - after having any wax capping thoroughly scraped to expose
the honey.

Cool conditions favoured Rape granulation!

Regards, Peter

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