Time to Open the Hive(s)
We've got cravings for some sweet & sticky stuff!
Give them a good whiff of smoke to send them into forest-fire-mode.
The bees were having a hard time this year. The weather wasn't too kind, they were swarming heavily, plus me and my apiculturist friend have been neglecting them a bit.
This will be the first and only honey-harvest this year.
The girls are healthy, though. No mites, plenty of brood and heavy frames with a decent amount of honey.
Everything looks fine, so let's pick out some frames without brood, but with a decent amount of this delicious gooeyness.
Leave the Bees at Home
We'll take those frames away, but the bees can stay!
a little bump will do
To get all those bees that are still working on their comb back into their hive, it's easiest to just hold that frame above the hive and give it a nice little bump. Most bees will simply fall off into the hive below, but they will also notice something is quite wrong. ;)
Up to now things usually stay calm, but as the girls have been shaken up a bit, tension starts picking up! Even after several years of doing this, it's still a good adrenaline rush to stand in between those stirred up, angry, armed ladies!
So let's brush off the last overly-attached bees and get out of here.
This is Where it Gets Sticky
Back at the apiarist workshop, we'll start extracting the honey.
yummmmm
To get at the good stuff, we'll have to uncap the honeycomb. This is an oddly satisfying thing to do. It feels a bit like slicing butter with a hot knife.
The uncapped frames are then rigged into the honey-extractor. That thing is basically just a huge tumbler spinning the frames so quickly that all the gooey sticky fresh delicious golden honey gets forced out of the comb by centrifugal forces.
Time for the Moneyshot!
We're almost done, now let it flow
We made 12kg of greatness today
There are some small chunks of wax left in there, so it will have to be screened through some progressively finer meshes before it's ready to get jarred.
Now Look at This:
Yummy!
Time for toast with butter and honey!
Did you come to see #GooglyEyes? I've got you covered: Meet Gooey Gerard
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