Birds and Bees? Honey!

In other news, we harvested our first batch of honey!  We started with bees 18 months ago with a friend of ours.  Since then, we’ve been caring and fretting over them, all while hoping that we might get honey, but knowing that it probably wouldn’t happen.  Also I use the term “we” very lightly – in this context “we” means “David, while Lina watches from afar chewing her fingernails.”

We’ve been scrounging up jars to put it all in, this is a picture of just a couple of them.  We’ve gotten about a gallon from one super and I am astonished by the amount of honey that each of the ten frames holds.  We used the “crush and strain” method because don’t have an official extractor.  They look awesome, but too expensive for us right now.

Here’s David and Danny with a full frame of honey.  There’s honey on both sides of the frame and there are 10 frames.

A close up of the capped honey.  The bees collect nectar from the flowers, put it into each cell and when the cell is full, they cap it with more beeswax.  Honey is basically dehydrated nectar. Who knew?

We scraped the honey and wax into a big bowl and then strained out the wax with a strainer.

Not very fancy method but amazingly sweet and delicious result.  And it only took a year and half of planning and work!  :)

Then we made THE rookie move of the year so far.  The crush and strain method is not very complete and we didn’t want to destroy the frames completely because we can still use them so there was still honey left on the frames.  The neat thing is that the bees can and will re-use the frames, build the cells back out, and use all the honey that was left.  We figured they’d be much better at getting the last bits of honey than we would.  We put the frames back in the box and put the box on the front porch last night.

The bees found the super this morning.

Guess we should have put it a little farther from our front door.  And maybe not kept the bee equipment by the front door.  On the other hand, the bees are probably more effective than any guard dog we could have.  I just feel bad for the UPS guy who brought us our math books this morning.  :)