Saturday, December 13, 2014

A river of gold

After keeping bees for two seasons, we finally extracted honey today.  Those of you who know about beekeeping, know that it's really late for us to be extracting honey. Don't worry, we removed the honey super from the hive in September, but it's been sitting in our basement waiting for a good extraction day.  We have a friend visiting, we lit the wood stove in the basement, and let the river of gold flow.  

And now, a photo montage -- it's my favorite way of showing stuff. :)

This is the honey extractor.  Anna's dad used to keep bees when Anna was a kid, and this is the extractor he used then. He stopped keeping bees, lent the extractor to a friend for many years, and now that guy has stopped keeping bees so we have it. I love all our classic handed down manual farm equipment (like our cider press).

We decided to clean out the extractor before putting the honey in it since it sat in our garage collecting dust and pine needles for a while. The farm manager supervises all activities with gusto.

Farm apprentice was not taking advantage of this learning opportunity rather he was distracted by a treat sent to him by a friend. Also, he decided the sawdust was a really cozy bed.

The inside of the extractor.  Originally, it had 4 chambers for frames, but now it's down to two. We're hoping we can find 2 more. It basically works like a centrifuge. You put the frames in, turn the crank, honey goes flying. Amazing.

We only had one honey super to do this year -- 10 frames per super.  Here, Anna removes a frame from the super.

Anna's pretty stoked about all the honey in this frame.  All the part that is capped and pale white is full of honey. :)

The remaining 9 frames in the super.  We're pretty excited.

Lisa examines the honey filled frame. 
Before extracting the honey, we have to remove the caps on all the cells.  

Like a hot knife through buttah.  OK, seriously, the knife is warm, and you just skim the wax off the top of the cells exposing the honey -- sometimes it drips onto your finger. Tragic.

"My favorite part was when Anna cut the wax off and the honey just oozed out. I just wanted to stick my face in it." -Lisa, first time honey extractor.

Here we go...Lisa makes it look so easy!

If only you could smell the goodness. You can kind of see the honey on the sides of the drum.

If the frames were uneven weights, the stand was a little wobbly. This necessitates a team effort.  For the future, we're going to build a solid stand and this thing will live in our yet-to-be-built sugar shack.

The golden goodness.  The chunks on the top are bits of wax from the comb, but it will be filtered out.
  
Look at the river of golden goodness. Sometimes your finger gets in the way.

The bucket has a strainer to catch all the wax bits. The bucket isn't really as full as it looks here.  Next year...

Anna scraped the sides to get all the goodness into the bucket....

...also so she could do this.
And there you have it. Our first honey extraction was a success. I cannot wait until we have more supers to do next year! 

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