As Good As Gold

Beekeeping has been an amazing experience for me and my family this year. My husband was initially reluctant only because he didn't want to bother the neighbors, but he has enjoyed hearing the latest updates on what our girls are doing. I haven't gotten him in a bee suit. Yet. But our children have been excited right from the beginning to get up close to the hive and see inside.

It's an exercise in patience because the bees will do what they will do and there is no hurrying them up. I wasn't even sure I would get honey this year. Because of the unique circumstances of combining two hives, however, and since the bees from the queenless Elizabeth hive had already created so many frames of just honey -- 7 1/2 frames of only capped honey -- I elected to take four of those this year, leaving them with 3 1/2 frames plus whatever other stores they already had on regular brood frames (there is always a rainbow band of honey across the top of each brood frame) and whatever else they would collect between harvest and frost. My bee mentor also recommended feeding them a heavy syrup for awhile too, to allow them to save their honey stores for the winter.

But here is the process of harvesting and extracting honey. This is a frame of capped honey. It looks different from capped brood because the wax caps are all white, more level, and an even gold underneath:

Taking the caps off requires a capping knife, which heats up and melts the caps right off. You can see the white capped part at the top of the frame and the exposed golden cells of honey below the knife. It was slow-going because I didn't want to gouge too deeply into the cells. I also didn't want to slip and have the knife fly up and burn my hand holding the frame steady.

The frame is then put in a two-frame extractor, which is essentially a large centrifuge. The one I borrowed is spun by hand. It really picks up speed! Below you can see an empty frame except where the steel grid prevented the honey from spinning out of the of comb.

I put the mostly empty frames back out by the hive so the bees could collect what I didn't and store it for themselves. They cleaned the comb right out over the course of two days. The bees were pretty agitated for the rest of the afternoon, much to the chagrin of the lawnmowers who came to mow my backyard neighbor's lawn that evening. Next year I will warn my neighbor when I collect honey so her lawnmowers don't get bothered.

I placed the extractor right by my kitchen door so the sun shining through would heat up the metal extractor, making the honey flow more easily. The dripping honey is slowly being strained through cheesecloth stretched over an ice cream bucket. It took a day or so to filter everything out. I have a nice pile of wax I am going to attempt to render later -- once I find a stainless steel pot I don't mind sacrificing to the project (I foresee a trip to Deseret Industries, a local thrift store, in the future!).
The honey has a very light flavor and looks like gold in the sunlight. The kids have been very excited to show their friends what we have been doing, and I have to confess to the same eagerness. It's a miracle to me what bees can do and how they do it so well working together. I often go stand near the hive to watch the bees flying in and out. They come in loaded with packets of pollen on their hind legs and don't waste any time at the entrance. I try to follow the flight path of one leaving the hive, but each bee flies so quickly I can only keep track of her for a few seconds.

I'm pretty sure my garden has done so much better this year thanks to the bees' presence. Hopefully my nearby neighbors have also benefited.

It's amazing that we're nearly to the end of another gardening season. My children have been better helpers this year, which has made the whole thing much more enjoyable. They're almost as excited as I am to discover what is ripe out there, even if they're not quite as excited to eat it as I am. Oh, by the way. If anyone needs any caveman-club-sized zucchini I know where you can get some.