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!

Night School!

I’ve discovered a marvelous set of books at the library called “Let’s Read and Find Out Science” Level 1 and Level 2.  They look wonderful! 

I have been a bit apprehensive (ok, very apprehensive) about teaching nature study.  Usually the teacher is supposed to know something about her topic!  But I am discovering that learning alongside my children is perfectly ok.  Tonight we read this book called “The Big Dipper.”  The big dipper is one constellation that I CAN spot without help!  This book took that basic skill a step further.  It showed how the big dipper looks one way during the summer, but looks different during the other seasons.  It taught the names of each of the stars in the big dipper (Alkaid, Mizar, Alioth, Megrez, Phecda, Merak and Dubhe… in case you’re wondering!)  It showed how to how to identify the North Star using the Big Dipper as a point of reference and then showed that the North Star is one of the stars that make up the small dipper!  It also showed that the big and little dippers are part of larger constellations.  Two days ago I had no idea how to identify the north star and the Little Dipper.  Now I will never forget!  Look how clearly the illustrations explain this:

                    

Now here’s the neat part.  Last night was the night of the Perseid Meteor shower so of course we went outside for a star gazing party!  Immediately, after having read “The Big Dipper” only once, my Little Duckling spotted the Big Dipper in the sky! 

We saw several meteors… one in particular that was too big to miss!!!  Most were fast and burnt out quickly.  If you blinked you might miss it!  But one streaked straight across the sky, right in front of us!  How cool is that?!

This morning we followed-up by making pages for our nature journals.  This is just star stickers on black construction paper, labeled with a white crayon:

               

(The white dotted line shows how to identify the North Star using the Big Dipper as a point of reference.  It was in the book, so of course the children wanted it on their paper, too!)