Our family has really enjoyed keeping bees. Greg and Enoch love checking their bees and taking good care of them. Bees are fascinating creatures and we can learn a lot from them.
It was finally time to harvest honey! Hooray!
We currently have four hives, with two mature enough to give honey this year. Greg and Enoch started by gathering all the frames that were loaded with honey and bringing them into the garage. You can't extract honey outside beside you will be overwhelmed by bees trying to get back to their honey.
Bees cap off their honeycomb, so in order to get to the honey, you need to break the cap by cutting it with a hot knife.
Then, the frames go into the extractor (we rented ours). It spins at a high speed and the honey flings out of the comb. Yeah, it gets sticky. Everything is sticky.
Out with the empty frames and in with the full. We did this over and over. We had over 40 frames of honeycomb to extract.
Once the honey is extracted, it is strained twice. At this point, we had to get Guard his own bowl because he wanted his honey so badly and we couldn't have him sticking his fingers in the honey bucket!
After the second straining, the honey is ready to be jarred. It is so satisfying to see the honey being poured into jars. It is just liquid happiness.
We enjoyed homemade bread and fresh honey for dinner that night. So delicious!
We were able to get 39 1/2 pints of honey this year. We kept 20 1/2 pints and are going to sell 19. It's such a learning year for us, but overall things went very well. We are so happy with our bees.
(Update: We listed our honey on the RS Facebook page and it was sold within 30 minutes. So happy we could share our bounty.)
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