Honey!

So I mentioned last night that Charlie's hive was full of honey. After work today Troy decided to check ours. It's not ready yet.

I like the way he used the geranium tower as a hat rack when he put on the bee suit.

Since we knew Charlie's was ready to rob and he already had the bee suit out, and I really wanted to take pictures, we headed over to Charlie's.

We took a big plastic tub with us to collect the frames that were full of honey. He pulled them out and knocked off the bees. There was also a little bit of angry bee chasing going on, but since I was one of the people being chased, and I did not have a bee suit on, I don't have pictures of that.

Then we took the frames to the shop to extract the honey from the frames.

The bees cap off the cells of the honeycomb after they fill them with honey. That's when you know it's ready to harvest. But you have to scrape off the wax cap with a knife to extract the honey. Troy wants to leave the honeycomb itself intact so when the frames are reinserted into the hive, the bees can simply repair it and reuse it. Otherwise they spend a lot of time and energy rebuilding the honeycomb, rather than making honey. And nobody wants that.

Then he scrapes both sides of the frames with a wire comb to make sure none of the cells are still capped. Then two frames at a time can go into the big spinner.

And then we spin the honey out.

And we flip the frames around and spin some more.

These are the extracted frames that will go back into the hive.

 And this is honey flowing from a spickett into a two gallon bucket when we were finished.

It's filtered through mesh to remove pieces of wax and any dead bees that might have gotten in there.

We still have to put them in jars, which is my project for tomorrow. But how exciting!