More Basswood Honey

The hardest thing about beekeeping, other than wearing the bee suit in the heat, is picking up the honey supers. While I was delighted that the third super was full of capped honey, my main fear was that it would be so heavy I would stagger and drop it.

Still being a short person, lifting the top super is the biggest challenge. It's about neck height. After that, the lower ones are easier. I only had to go a few steps to the cart on the ride-on mower. It wasn't like I had to carry it all the way back to the house. A few bees remained on the frames of capped honey. I brushed them out.

Of course, I always love the advice to have a separate honey house to do the extracting. That would be lovely. When I can afford to have one built, I'll get a swimming pool, too.

Coming inside, there was another moment of uncertainty. My bee hat and veil had slipped down over my eyes as I carried the full super across the living room carpet, headed for the kitchen. Peeping through the vents in the top of the plastic pith helmet, I saw one dog and one cat snoozing serenely directly in my path. For a moment, the picture of all of us lying in a tangled heap, covered with honey, flashed before my eyes. It's so hard to get honey off carpet and furry animals. My yells caused them to scurry away.

Here is the super, full of light honey. That refers to the color, not the weight of the full frames and the box itself.

After a good night's sleep, I extracted the honey. Twenty pounds of fabulous basswood honey were mine.

I knew it was basswood because I put that last super on right before the huge basswood tree was in bloom. The other frames below were full of capped wildflower honey.

Here is my pride and joy, viewed in the sunlight. Beautiful!

Basswood Honey

The first super has been extracted, and the honey is exquisite! The basswood blossoms gave the honey a fruity flavor and light color that makes it a premium honey. The new extractor proudly stands by  its work.

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..