Adventures In The Northeast: Honey!

So honey is a thing we do here at my parents' house. And by that I mean we've had the boxes (supers- white boxes stacked in the fields) for as long as I can remember at this farm, and the bees have come and gone. We used to purchase a hives including a queen through the mail which was also exciting (as cool as when we used to get baby chicks in the mail!) and taking care of the bees and harvesting the honey was 4-H projects for us. A few (or 4 or 5) years ago the resident bees swarmed and left our boxes. Then a couple years ago, apparently my dad noticed a hive in a nearby tree....and he captured them and put them in the boxes....I have no ideas about the details or how that works, but I guess I believe him. Anyways this is the second year that we've been able to harvest honey from this hive. And I was present (Yay!) and I love the whole thing. It's hard work, but pretty darn rewarding.

So here is the deal: The white boxes are filled with frames that have beeswax combs ready to be filled with honey. On their own the bees would make their own comb structure, but with the ready made ones they can focus all their energy on making honey. These ready made frames also make harvesting the honey five million times easier as you will see the equipment is designed for them.

You do not take all the boxes away when harvesting. There is a box at the bottom of the stack where the queen lives, and where there is enough honey for the bees to live off of. The boxes we take for harvesting our extra.

So once the bees have deposited the honey in the little combs, they seal each comb with wax to hold it there.

This wasn't super great year, so not every hole was filled. You can also see we had some different colors in there. The color of the honey would depend on what plants the bees were pollinating. Different times during the summer they would be pollinating different plants and later you can see there was a color gradient this year. Our boxesare sit in the field with our orchard (apple, pear, peach trees), which is also near some native prairie, and a wooded area.

So the first step is to remove the wax caps that the bees sealed the honey in with. And there is a super fun hot knife to do that with!

After you've removed the caps from both sides of the frame you place it in the 'spinner'(I don't know what it's actually called- extractor maybe).

Looking down on the spinner...there is room for four so we had to get some more ready to balance it out.

And I got to use the hot knife! So much fun!!!!

Once there are four frames inside the spinner...YOU SPIN! It's pretty fun.

After you've spun, flipped all the frames around, and spun some more, you can see the honey splattering out against the walls. And when you remove the frames you can see that the combs are now empty.

These empty frames will be placed back inside the boxes and put back outside for the bees. They will clean off any leftovers and they will be used again next year.

After the honey splatters all over the walls of the spinner, it moves down (gravity is magic!) and you can open the little spout to let the honey out and into a very high tech bucket and strainer. The strainer is going to remove any wax chunks or in some cases bees that didn't leave the comb when they were suppose to (disclaimer: no bees were purposely harmed - they failed to vacate the premise when they were being smoke out).

And then you keep removing the caps with the hot knife.....keep spinning.....We had two box fulls of frames which isn't a ton, but my back was hurting afterwards. Below is the full amount of honey we harvested.