Our First Honey Harvest

Well...technically, it's not our first harvest, since we took a few frames out in high summer, pushed the honey and comb through a sieve, and got three glass jars full of pretty amber liquid. Yet, this is the first significant harvest, one that involved cutting open the wax caps and placing the frames in a spinner. Processing four supers took us just a little over two hours, not counting prep time. Here are some pictures:

Glenn removes the wax caps with a serrated knife.

Michael uses a pronged scraper to open the
capped cells before they go into the spinner.



Glenn checks the frames, turns them around.



Michael cranks the spinner, while Glenn holds it in place.
They took turns at this task. Savannah tried it, too, but her arm
wimped out after one frame. The centrifugal force pulls the
honey out of the uncapped cells and throws it onto the inside walls
of the spinner. It works much like the spin cycle in a washing machine.



The serrated capping knife, wax, and honey...
looking every bit like a scene from CSI.



Straining the wax and other detritus out of the honey
involves a finely meshed screen.

Glenn dispenses honey into glass pints and quarts.
(Savannah has also learned that hard plastic doesn't like the
dishwasher--even the friendlier top rack. It makes me
wonder what that heat is actually doing to my
softer plastic leftover containers. *gulp*)

Our honey is dark, much like molasses. It is darker
even than buckwheat honey we've purchased at market.
In fact, it is so dark that very little light penetrates the liquid.
We know for certain that our bees hit the field thistles and
clover especially hard. However, beyond that,
we're not sure what nectar might comprise this harvest.