You may be wondering what the big deal was in waiting. Bees are not an inexpensive thing to get into. To start, you need hives, frames, a suit, equipment, and of course bees. All of it costs a pretty penny. So to take a risk that I would starve my bees over the winter did not seem like the right thing to do. So I didn't.
Hence 2012. I was so excited to have not only my 2 hives, but 3 more packages. I had also purchased 2 packages for my mother's farm. Then, the early warmth hit. Those who have been following my blog know I picked up several swarms this year. FREE bees! I got up to 9 hives in my bee yard, and 2 over at mom's. That's a lot of bees. Of course, I'd have plenty of honey.
Then the weather turned. The Drought we had here in Ursa IL was terrible. The worst I can remember. It does no good to complain, true farmers were much worse off than my poor bees. Bees do not need water, but they do need plenty of blooming plants to collect from. With the drought so severe, I didn't even have the occasional white clover in the lawn for my poor bees. They were just foraging day after day, and not able to collect pollen.
Each time a beekeeper checks the bees, you distrupt the flow of the workers. So about the first of July, I quit checking them. They were under enough stress, they didn't need me smoking them up and causing panic just to see they had no honey. So I waited. And I waited. And about mid August we got some rain. So I waited until the goldenrod started to bloom. And I waited. And now it's the 22nd of September, and it's time. Time to check for honey.
I cleaned the equipment and set everything up. Really, I was just hoping for the best. I was very unsure as I went out the bee yard. I knew they were "Okay" I could see them flying in and out and working as hard as they could. My hopes were that I would get at least 9 bottles of honey for my family for the year. That would be plenty of fresh honey and at least I'd have some to enjoy.
When I opened up the first hive....nothing. No honey I could rob. So I went to my second strongest hive. I had 7 frames with honey. As quick as I could work I brushed off all the bees and put one frame at a time in my minivan and closed the hatch. The last thing I wanted was mad bees hanging out in the family van.
Gorgeous! The honey was beautiful. It was a nice yellow color, light and clear. That is what most honey producers are looking to harvest, light colored beautiful honey.Next was to ready the frames for the extractor. To do this, you need to lightly scape the cappings of wax off the cells. Be careful! if you scrape too far, the bees have to rebuild the wax comb. If you just scrape the tops, then they just refill the cells and recap. Save those ladies some time and effort!.
I used the uncapping knife I had purchased for this task. It was not so great. I found it to be a bit cumbersome and hard to hold while balancing my frames. The frames, by the way, are very heavy. Ladden with rich honey these guys look light, but weigh a lot. Plus, you want to be careful to hold just to frame to avoid smashing the comb. 
Eventually I said, "To heck with this!" and picked up a kitchen fork. It seemed to do the trick and was simple and easy. The caps just fell aside and the honey was exposed. I could have saved some moolah if I had just thought to use a fork the first go around.
My extractor is a second hand buy. I purchased it from Bernie of Andrew Honey Farm. It's perfect for a small scale harvest. It's a hand crank, which did give Avry and Me a workout. We both felt it was invigorating! Not bad since she's 14 and I'm ...well....it has a 4. The Extractor is basically a tank with a spin operation. We fling the honey out as it spins. Kind of like a salad spinner with a basket to hold the frames. Then at the bottom is a nice gate/spout to drain the honey and wax that has collected at the bottom of the tank.
Incidentally, I'm doing this right in the middle of my kitchen. Why not? It's clean, and I don't have to worry about bees getting in the house to track the honey. So right between the sink, stove and fridge.
Can you smell the sweet honey? I think it's at this point where both Avry and I end up sticking our fingers in the honey to be sure it's sweet. Yep. It is.
But maybe we should check again....
And Again....
Okay back to work. Now it's time to filter the honey. There are wax cappings, and a couple blades of grass, one stubborn bee in the pot. So we start to filter. We used a simple bucket purchased at Dadant's. We drained the honey from the extractor to the bucket and seive. We used a 400 micron filter. It was perfect. Cleaned the honey so we could eat fresh raw honey right out of the spigot. This is where having help pays off. "Avry, get in there and scrape the sides with a spatula. She was good help. But it looked fun, so I took away the spatula and did some honey scraping my self. Not too bad! It cleaned right up. We took as much honey as we could get from the extractor.
The bucket in the meantime was filtering slow. Which is good. It can take up to 48 hours to filter this honey. Yet, some was already accumulating at the bottom of the honey bucket.
Hmmmmm....Lets not wait! Let's bottle some up right now! So we did. We were just too excited. Professional honey folks will wait until all the air bubbles have settled (up to a week) Not us! We were too happy to have this golden honey and wanted it to be in these cute little bottles.
Here's what I found most shocking. I only took 6 frames due to the drought. And I bottled 28 lbs of honey. Whoa. That's a lot of honey per frame. I did not realize how much honey those bees were packing up in the hive. No wonder the hive weighs so much.
The other wonder, was how light the honey was. I expected to have good clover honey this year, which is light and valuable. But with the drought, I thought I'd have more wildflower and goldenrod looking honey. Or, an amber tint. This is was very light and had a nice flavor.
We lined up all the bottles, and even tried to make a pyramid with them, FYI that doesn't really work with these bottles.
The whole family got into the process, but my main helper was Avry. She asked what we are going to do with the "Ucky stuff" and I explained that beeswax is very valuable for making cosmetics. Her payment is the wax, she ordered some lip balm tubes on Ebay and she's going to make her own Beeswax lip balm. I'll let you see how that goes next week. On Sunday, we loaded up bottles for the neighbors. They see the bees all the time, it's only fitting we share some of the bounty. Here's the cute little bottles we gave out.
It was a first time harvest and full of excitement. We have already had Peanut butter and Honey sandwiches, Tea with Honey, Honey flavored BBQ, and Katy's Favorite, Honey on a spoon. It was a very rewarding experience and I hope to do even more of it next fall.
