August 13th 2023
Beekeepers Wife Log: The honey harvest is here! At this point the girls have had 3.5 months of honey making and it’s the perfect time to harvest. We took 6 frames of the 20 in the top two boxes. This leaves enough honey for them to survive the winter (fingers crossed!). The 6 frames gave us about 13 lbs or 1 gallon of honey. Mason went through frame by frame and picked all the best ones for us to harvest. After picking a frame we shook all the bees off onto the ground in front of their hive and put them in a sealed box to keep the bees away.
The Girl Scout troop that uses the church has been very excited about the bees all summer and a bunch of them showed up to watch the harvest. Mason showed them frames full of honey through the window and they came over to the other side of the building to help with the extraction.
To extract the honey we had to use our fancy roller to poke holes in all the capped cells of the frame. Then two frames go in the big spinner and you crank away to get them to spin fast and fling the honey onto the walls. Then the honey drips down and is released into a food safe 5 gallon bucket. This part was a lot of fun. The Girl Scouts wanted to help roll the frames and spin the extractor. We all cut a bit out of the completely beeswax frame and had a bite to taste the honey. Beeswax is safe to eat so if you swallow a bit of wax with the honey you’ll be okay!
We had some bee stragglers come with us to the other side of the building so we decided to do the harvest outside instead of in the kitchen like we had planned. Unfortunately, one of those stragglers flew around and told all the other bees where the honey thief’s had gone. After about 30 minutes they found us and started taking the honey back. They got stuck in all the drips of honey, some tried to swim in our 5 gallon bucket. They were everywhere. We eventually decided it wasn’t worth waiting for the last of the honey to drip into the bucket so we closed it up early and sprayed everything down to get the bees off. Mason will take it all home and filter the honey and clean the wax far far away from the hive. Maybe we can get a candle this year!
While it may not be exactly as much honey as we thought we would get and the extraction process was not as smooth as anticipated I’m really proud of my handsome, caring, and smart beekeeper. He’s done so well this season and taken any mistakes as a learning opportunity. He’s been long distance beekeeping and has done so much research to provide the best chance for his bees to thrive. We have more plans ahead to help prepare the girls for winter and make sure they have a strong start next spring :)
We might even post some pictures of mead making in the next few weeks.
