For six years I've been looking at the huge basswood tree, smelling the fragrant blossoms in springtime and thinking bees could surely makes some good honey from them. I wanted some guy to come bring a hive. At last, I did something about it, all by myself. Now, I wonder what took me so long.
Putting the honey in jars was easy. I just filled them from the honey gate in the bucket that strained the honey from the extractor.
Uncapping the super frames was rather a sticky process, but not bad for my first solo harvesting effort.
The bees had made some burr comb between their hive body and the super. That broke apart when I took the super off, making things sticky from that point. In front of the hive, a nice chunk of comb honey dropped from one of the frames. I picked it up, getting honey on my gloves and my trusty lawn tractor's steering wheel. I whisked the super away, covered by a towel, in Rosie's cart.
It is a beautiful sight and somewhat irresistible. The second super may consist of some basswood and some wildflower honey, perhaps catnip. Some is already capped, but I await the completion of it by the bees.
The day after I took the one super, I returned it, empty of honey, to the hive all sticky and ready to be cleaned up and reworked by the bees. Bless their tiny hearts, they had cleaned up the honey from the burr comb, which is sort of a bonus storage area for them between stories of the hive. They were calm, not seeming to hold it against me that I had marauded their food stores the day before like a big clumsy bear or maybe a Sasquatch..
