our first hive honey harvest

This past week Carl and Gabriel did another bee removal job.  This one was really big and they brought home lots of honeycomb. 

When I got home from The Nutcracker costume fittings they had begun to process the comb to extract the honey.  For wild honey, this is pretty time consuming.  There's all kinds of mashing and straining that goes on.  

Gabriel checked on one of the hives that has had a lot of activity lately.  He found some pretty full frames in the super box.  We really didn't think we would harvest any of our own honey this year.  But since this is extra for the bees we went ahead and harvested it. 

 

Most of these cells have honey in them.  The ones that are capped with wax are completely full. We removed the capped wax and put the frames into our honey extractor.  And turned the handle to spin the frames.

 

When all the frames were done.  We made a homemade stainer using my canning  funnel with a mesh tea strainer inside and a wire strainer on top.  Sometimes you just gotta use what you have.

We got 3 quarts and 1 pint from our first honey harvest from our bees.  What an amazing treat.

 The honey was so light and golden.  Gabriel had some comb that the bees were building in the "wrong" place on a frame and he cut it off to add to some of the jars of honey.

Phoebe and Esther made us a snack of watermelon while we worked on the honey.  I say we but Gabriel, Carl, Benjamin and and older couple from church really did the work.  I just socialized and took pictures.  oh, and turned the handle a couple of times.

Now, I'm off to finish cleaning the kitchen, since my sock just stuck to the floor I think mopping is in order this morning...

Have a great week and don't forget about Handmade Christmas 2012 all the links will remain open until the end of November so feel free to go link up all kinds of gift giving goodness.

This post is shared at:  Backyard Farming Connection