New Hobby: Bee Keeping

[massphatness]

A few photos from the honey extraction ...

Grace brought our frames to a local beekeeper who has a serious set-up. Here's one of our frames being readied. You can see the ladies did an excellent job fully capping the whole frame.




This is the same frame that's been uncapped. They use a heated knife to shear the wax away and it collects in a bin at the de-capping station. We get to keep the wax which can be used down the road for a variety of things from soap to candles to lip balm and more.




The frames are then loaded into an extractor which is basically a big stainless steel centrifuge that whirls them around to spin out the honey. The honey comb largely stays in tact during this process mostly because of the style frames I use. This is great for the bees -- less rebuilding of comb means more time can be spent making more honey.




The honey pours from the extractor and is strained into a food grade 5-gallon bucket through a couple layers of steel mesh to filter out the bits of wax, bee parts and other assorted detritus.




We ended up with just over 30 lbs of honey. (The bucket weighs about 2.5 lbs)




This was our honey filling station in the kitchen. You can see that 30 lbs is about half the bucket.




That 30 lbs was enough to gift everyone at my herf an 8 oz jar with plenty left over for family and friends. We'll see what the fall honey flow brings, and maybe I can make some available here.