Honey Harvest 2012

Today, we completed our first honey harvest and over-all it was quite successful! Yesterday, we set everything up so we were ready to begin extracting first thing in the morning. We rented an extractor this harvest from our local bee farm Walk About Acres. We would HIGHLY recommend anyone who is needing any equipment or just advice to check out their website or give them a call. Below, is a pictorial summary of our day. Though we only had one super to harvest from one hive, we still gleamed ~15 lbs of honey!  Not bad for our first season (with a drought none-the-less).

The "work shop." We set up shop in the corner of my dad's repair shop. You can see all the equipment we used in the above pic.

 Capped honey frames

Uncapping the honey. The knife you use is thermostatically heated thus the wax cappings simply melt off into the uncapping tub below.

After the frames are free of all cappings, you place them in an "extractor." By cranking a handle the frames spin around and centrifugal force causes the honey to spin out onto the sides of the extractor. Thus sliding down to a valve we open and drain into a mess screen where we drain the honey from any remaining wax pieces.

 The extractor. We hope to own one of our own before our next harvest (hopefully this spring!)

 Little Robert wanted in on the action too!

The wax cappings. These cappings are what we cut from the frames above. They melted into this uncapping tub where they fell onto a screen and any honey that clung to the cappings drained into the tub below.

The honey!  We chose honey bears as our bottles this year. We bottled a total of 13 1/2 12 oz bears

BEE SPITTLE!!!

Next weekend!

After another inspection earlier this morning, we have decided to go ahead and schedule our first, honey harvest for next Saturday (Sept 22). We have an extractor on hold to rent and all our materials ready--at least we are hoping so!  Will probably spend the week looking through materials on harvesting honey, watching informative DVDs/YouTube videos and just familiarizing ourselves with the entire process.

We sampled a little of the honey from some sections of comb today and it was DELICIOUS! Wish us luck and we promise to provide update with photos of the entire process as soon as we can.