the pollinators: Honey!

Wassup everybody?

It's been two months since my last post, but as I've learned in this beekeeping game, sometimes you gotta just sit back and wait. When I last posted, I had just added the honey supers and queen excluders. After a few weeks, I checked on them and was disappointed with the lack of activity in the honey supers. I did some research and learned that experienced beekeepers often refer to the queen excluders as "honey excluders" - due to the fact that most bees aren't comfortable passing through the thin metal grate, so I removed them. That coincided with a warm September and a great Golden Rod bloom that left much of the countryside awash in bright yellow.

Fast-forward three more weeks - and it was time to harvest the honey. After a myriad of email exchanges with Dick Johnson, the plan was taking shape. He told me to be at his house no later than 10 am on Saturday to pick up the honey extractor, as well as some other extracting tools. When I arrived, he had everything waiting for me in his driveway. Before sending me off he walked me through the process and told me what to expect. He said, "I'll stay close to my phone." Before the day was over I would call him 4 times.

The first step in the process was to simply open the hives and see if we did indeed have capped honey. After recruiting Ben as a partner we headed up to check the hives. Beeatrice's hive had thousands of bees congregating near the entrance, while Queen Latifa's hive had next to no action. It looked very strange. We actually thought they might have flown the coop! So, with Ben manning the smoker we opened Beeatrice's hive first and immediately saw capped honey. Lots of it! That was kind of the point where this whole experiment became real. Now we we're going to have to take the honey from the bees... very carefully. We applied a very smelly, all natural product called Bee-Quik to a felt lined lid to help clear out most of the bees. They hate the smell and it drives them deep into the hive. Once most of the bees were gone it was relatively easy to remove the frames, brush off any remaining bees and place the frames in an empty honey super that was placed nearby. Erin's parents were visiting this weekend and her mom somehow got the job of manning the super that we were putting the frames into. She kept a towel over it to keep bees out. We removed six full frames from Beeatrice's hive leaving the remaining three frames for the bees to keep for winter. Next, we headed over to see what Queen Latifah had to offer. I opened the hive half expecting to see no action at all, but to my surprise when I opened it there were not only more bees in there, they had also produced more honey and were more aggressive. Who would've guessed? While we thought they had headed for the hills, they were actually inside their hives quietly working as hard as they could to produce honey. Like a bunch of nerdy kids who just stay quiet and do their work. As I said earlier, these bees were way more aggressive, so Ben had to work extra hard with the smoker to keep us from getting stung. We ended up taking seven full frames from that hive and made our way into the house for the extraction - with not a single sting!

Extracting honey for the first time is quite a learning experience, albeit a very fun one. How do we get the wax cappings off of the cells? What do we do with the wax and all of the honey attached to them? How do we use this crazy honey extractor anyway? Exactly how many pots, pans, bowls, knives, spoons and spatulas we went through that day we'll probably never know, but here's how it went down: I would scrape the cappings off the cells, then deposit them into a strainer over a bowl to catch the honey caught in the caps. Once a frame was decapped on both sides, it went into the extractor. When two frames were in there, the lid was closed and Ben (and occasionally Erin's dad Mr. Callahan) would start spinning. We spun the first two frames for about 2 minutes and nothing came out, prompting me to call Dick Johnson to ask advice. He said spin each set for ten minutes. Ugh. He also said that once the frames were drained to put them back in in the super on top of the hive for the bees to clean out. That step would later prove to be a daunting task. So, we went back to spinning and after about ten minutes, there was a healthy amount of honey pooling up in the extractor. Midway into the second round of frames, Ben was having difficulty cranking the handle, so we opened the lid to find that about three inches of honey had accumulated at the bottom, preventing the mechanism from spinning properly, so we decided to drain it. We opened the spout at the bottom of the contraption, and honey with bits of wax in it started pouring out into a sieve (to catch the wax bits) that was over a big soup pot. That pot was quickly filled, and we continued on. Over the course of the next 4 hours or so, as Ben and I plowed away, the Callahan's rocked out quite a jam session that proved to be the perfect soundtrack for a honey extracting party as Miss Lucy kept a watchful eye (and tongue) on the all the action. We spun the remaining frames, strained out the wax chunks, and soon had about five gallons of honey running through a fine mesh bag to get out any remaining impurities.

After the cleanup, Ben and I (now covered in honey) had to go back up to the hives to put the frames back in the honey supers for the bees to lick clean. Beeatrice's hive went very smoothly, but when we got over to Queen Latifa's hive those quiet nerds we're now angry and aggressive. As I replaced the frames, Ben fought the bees back with the smoker as best he could, but in the end I was stung twice on the left forearm and once on the left ankle. It was kinda brutal, but we did it.

And then there was honey.

Check out some pics below: