Second Year Honey Harvest

Lots of hot sweaty work, but I brought in the first honey. There were more bees still on the frames, but an offer of help from  my daughter Lissa made me decide to not wait another day for them to make their way through the escape screen. The supers were brought into the laundry room, otherwise known as the main door that everyone comes through. Then came the process of escorting the hitchhikers outside, brushing them off the screen with the bee brush. I kept my bee suit and veil on for the process, being a big sissy about stings. I don't think the bees would have stung me, since we were away from the hive.

The claustrophobic veil and sweat dripping down my glasses sent me in to the kitchen a few times to get out of it and put a cold bandanna on my face.

The following day, Lissa came up to help me with the extracting. She really enjoyed the process, so much so that mostly I watched as she uncapped the frames and spun them around in my fabulous little extractor. The honey then went into the strainer on the bucket. The whole setup was a package from Brushy Mountain Bee Farm, and a huge improvement over how we did it at the farm.

Notice my bare feet, a good way to find the spots of honey on the floor before we tracked it all over the carpets.

Later, I showed her how to fill the jars from the honey gate on the bucket, which was set up on the freezer. There was much more honey in the bucket than I had last year. I guess that resulted in more head pressure. The honey surged out and ran down the outside of the jar and onto the floor, all in a whoosh. We had a good laugh over that. Lost about a quarter of a cup of the precious honey.

Lis made a discovery when she suggested that the two pound honey jar seemed much less than the quart jar. Looking online, I found that the quart of honey weighs 48 ounces, so my honey estimate for last year was more than the 27 pounds I got figuring "a pint's a pound the world around."

Here is the honey. The bees evidently got some of the basswood, although rains during most of  the bloom confined the troops to their quarters. It was mixed with the wildflower honey, quite a delicious blend. Pay no attention to the beekeeper's baggy pants; they are my favorite garment. Breezy, roomy, hideous.

Forty pounds of honey so far! I am taking back the sticky super for them to clean out and the frames that had uncapped honey for them to finish filling. Makes me feel like the Grinch bringing back the presents he swiped.