Honey Extracting

I was going to name this post “Honey Making”, but I was corrected by my loving wife.  I’m reminded that the bees make the honey.  We simply rob a little of the extra and extract some for ourselves.  Either way, it makes for some delicious diversions; not the least of which is smoking the hive and taking 5 frames of a super out.  (Bees aren’t too happy about that!)  Once the frames are pulled out, one has to get the bees off the frames.  I use a manual technique (slightly banging the frames on the ground to dislodge the majority of the bees, then swinging them gently around in a circle to fling the remaining bees away).

I take the frames in the house, scratch the combs to open them up and run them through the basket extractor.  The frames sit inside a spinning basket and centripetal forces work to sling the honey to the outside wall of the extractor where it runs to the bottom and flows into a filter bucket.  Once the honey settles through the filter, it can be bottled immediately.  From 5 frames (not quite full), we got a little more than 10 pounds of honey.  Enough for the year for us, so we’re happy.

Now we just have to figure out how to process the wax.  That will be our next project (added to the bottom of the queue).