Honey!

One of the things we do at our farm is keep bees.  It’s a bit late in the season but yesterday was the day to extract honey!
We are definitely amateurs, so this is not a post about how to extract honey.  It’s just the story of what we did.  Consider it a “don’t try this at home” post.  =)
We began our “lesson” by reading a book about bees.  It was an old book that I picked up for 5 cents at a thrift store last week, but it was a nice introduction.  Then we got busy!
It was 105 degrees here yesterday, so the first thing we did was set the extractor up in the living room.  The last time we extracted we did it outside, but it was a lot easier to deal with ooey gooey honey in air conditioning!

Then we went out to the hives. 

That metal gadget you see in Papa the Farmer’s hand is a smoker.  You stick a bunch of leaves and branches in there and burn it.  You can pump the smoke out the spout.  It is stinky and the bees think so too!  It makes them sort of drowsy and less inclined to sting big intruders in strange white clothes!

Did you know that all the bees in a beehive have different jobs?  Here is the picture of the guard bees.  Their job is to make sure no intruders get in:

Would you like to peek inside a beehive?
  What you see here are called frames.  We put a thin piece of wax as a foundation and the bees build it up with hexagon cells.  They use those cells to lay eggs or store honey.  All that white you see is the cells capped in wax to hold the honey in.  Here’s a closer view:

You can see the bees really built up these cells, far past the frames:

Here’s something else that is amazing.  Bees actually build those cells at a slight angle.  If they built them perpendicular to the foundation the honey would ooze out, so they build them at a slight angle.  I tried to capture this in this photo:

All this wax makes the frames stick together, so it was some work to get the frames free!  Once we did, we brought them inside where we used a heated electric knife to melt the wax caps off the frames.
The first glimpse of honey!  Isn’t it beautiful?  To get the honey out we place the frames in the extractor.

We have a very old, manual extractor.  (But hey!  The price was right and it works!)  So we all took turns cranking, turning the frames around and cranking some more:

Our extractor only holds 4 frames, so we had to repeat this process several times.  Eventually enough honey collected for us to drain the honey out of the extractor into a 5 gallon bucket.  We strain it through two strainers (one on top of the other) as we drain to remove any imperfections (like dirt or a bee wing or something like that).

For the more inquisitive blog readers, here is a close up of what you never see:  The stuff that gets strained out!

You see?  It’s really not too bad.

With all this honey inside the house, it’s inevitable to have a bee visitor or two.  Here was our little visitor:

He was too full of honey to be a concern!