Honey

Honey Day! Last year we built 4 Langstroff bee hives. We weren’t sure how they would do since we’ve heard stories of all your hives dying during the winter. Spring came and all 4 had made it through the grueling winter. We left the bees alone and just let them do their thing…

Around the beginning of May Jesse noticed tons of bees bearding around the outside of the hives…were they swarming? Did they not have enough room? Oh no! For our first adventure into honey extraction we went out there and removed all the full frames of honey and replaced them with some ross round frames. We’ve never tried these before but they’re basically round frames that you can remove circle sections of honey and comb. We’ll see how they work once the bees fill those up.

We bought a non-motorized honey extractor from Dadant that actually worked out really well. You scrape to uncap the comb to expose the honey, put it in the extractor and turn the crank to spin out the honey. We spun about 2 boxes/16 frames and we got 4 and a half gallons of honey!

It was such a long day, we spent the whole day in honey heaven. At first we were really careful not to get our hands sticky and to keep the boys clean. That lasted about 5 minutes. Soon the boys were covered in honey and they were actually helping out with everything. They would bring us the frames and put the done frames in a pile, as well as eating their body weight in honey and comb. We have to admit we ate our fair share throughout the day as well. It tastes so good!

After honey day we sprayed off the deck and stripped the boys down and got them into the outdoor shower. Overall, a very productive day.