Honey Honey Honey Honey

Guess what I did today?

OK, well -- yes -- first I worked my Sunday market and made all of $100, but THEN I rented the bee club's extractor, brought it home, and Bee and I got to gettin' us some honey!


I donned me now my gay apparel (the bee suit; sorry, I was too busy to take a self-portrait) and painstakingly removed 10 frames from the top bee box on the wild hive.  I used our handy smoker to drug the girls, then brushed them off each frame.  Now, mind you, they actually make something called a "bee brush" for this exact purpose; but I wasn't about to pay more money for one of those.  Instead, I used the little plastic brush we usually use to clean our fireplace.  I don't think I killed too many bees, either.

After dragging the 10 frames (weighing about 60 pounds, all together) away from the bees and into our garage, we started the next step:

We used a complex tool called a hot knife (which, in case you don't know, is a knife that is hot) and ran it over the capped frames of honey.  This melted the wax cappings off, allowing them (and a bunch of honey) (and a few bees) to fall into a pan to be sifted out later.

Bee was in charge of handling the hot knife, because that's Man's Business.  He actually got pretty good with it.

The bottoms of the frames had some good fresh comb filled with honey, which Bee, S.B., Mr. C and I mercilessly ate.

Then we loaded two frames of uncapped honey into the baskets of the extractor and spun them around:

Thanks to the wonders of centrifugal motion, the honey flew from the spinning frames and oozed down the walls of the extractor through a hole in the bottom, then into a bucket with a sieve (whose purpose is to filter the honey from things like, say, the odd bee leg or broken abdomen [protein!]).

Now empty of most of their honey, the frames were ready to be cleaned of the rest.  I graciously decided to let the bees have the leftovers, so I brought the empty frames back towards the hives and let the bees have at 'em:

(this really doesn't show the pandemonium; you could just hear the bees shouting, "Hey, guys!  FREE HONEY!!")

Now the hive has one less box on it, so all the bees are trying to figure out how to squeeze themselves into the bottom two boxes:

This is where they will live for the rest of the year.  Inside the boxes are 20 frames, filled with brood, pollen and honey, all of which will (hopefully) help them survive the winter.

All told, the process of extracting honey form 10 super frames took us about 3 hours.  Although, technically, the honey is still filtering through the sieves; looks like that'll take all night.  THEN I'll have to bottle all the honey and melt the wax for the candles I want to make.

But we're not even near to being done: we still have the second hive's honey to extract tomorrow!

Good thing we're having fun with this.  Bee is practically giddy at how homesteady we are!