We've had a honey bee hive at the farm for two years now, but this is
the first year we harvested the honey. We are total novices, but we are
learning and loving the process...and the honey!
The bees at the base of the hive before we began
the harvest...little did they know what was about to happen!
We have five super/bee boxes. The queen stays in the
bottom two boxes and the honey is made and stored
in the top three. You can see we added additional boxes
as they are not all uniform. The new box wasn't painted
either. This helps to keep them from deteriorating and
turning yellow.
We filled the smoker with pine needles to
confuse/calm the bees so they wouldn't be so
spunky (read: ready to sting) during the process.
Each box holds ten frames, though we only extracted
honey from six, as the other frames weren't full.
Using a bee brush to gently move the bees off the frame
Taking the frame to the golf cart to take back
to the cabin for extraction
Sneaking a taste!
Our new extractor
Putting two frames (one at a time) into the
extractor. Before you put them in, you heat up
a special knife to scrape of the beeswax.
Liquid gold!
Every one took a turn spinning the extractor
and posing for a picture!
Next step, straining the honey from the
honeycomb/beeswax
Then we brought everything home so we could
fill the honey jars
Kiera picked the bears out!
Using a funnel to fill the honey bears
Our first "jar" of honey!
Kiera took this to her teacher, Mrs. Sauto along
with pictures of the honey extracting process. She
was able to share the pictures with her class, but not
the honey, as her school doesn't allow food to be
brought in to share.
We have plenty of honey to share...If we didn't give you any yet,
just wait!
