Spring Blossom Honey

To extract honey several sticky steps are needed. One first must get the honey frames off the hives.  Sometimes the bees don't seem to mind.  At other times they are very determined to keep the beekeeper (honey-taker?) out of the hive.  Spring time is usually an easy time.  The bees are happily flying from blooming flower to blooming flower and returning pollen and nectar to the hive.  Most of the 30-60,000 bees in a hive are out working.  Usually only a few guard bees are present plus a hivefull of new baby bees.

After the honey frames are taken into the house it is time for extracting.  This spring, as soon as the frames were off the hives, we started uncapping the honey frames.  When bees have completed the amazing process of turning nectar into honey they seal the hexagonal storage unit with wax.  (A process that my mom copied when canning jelly and jams with paraffin wax.) So before we can put the frames into the extractor the seal must be removed.  We use an uncapping knife.  It's basically a stainless steel knife that is electrically heated to smoothly and easily melt through the wax, cutting off the seal and revealing the sticky, warm and amazingly wonderful smelling honey.

The honey oozes out of the cells.  This year's spring honey was a light to medium color with a slightly fruity, light and delicious flavor.

The wax is discarded into the uncapping tank to drip and collect the honey that was in the wax. But the now glossy honey frame is ready for the spinning of the extractor. Yum.

The honey supers are then returned to the hives. Usually the bees are quite happy to get their wet sticky honey frames back.  They quickly clean them, repair the wax that was damaged, and begin to refill the frames. 

This weekend we hope to get our second harvest from the hives.  The clover has been blooming well.  The wonderful smell of honey is drifting from the hives as we drive by.  It will be good to get a midsummer harvest of honey. 

Today's Journey Joy - warm honey

Let the shelling begin

This past weekend was a busy one. Tucking the gardens in, burning brush piles, moving soil, grading landscape in preparation for fencing.... and shelling popcorn. My son's friend came over and lent us a helping hand.

They took the dried cobs and twisted them in the manual popcorn de-sheller. Basically just a lot of muscling, twisting wrists, and flying popcorn.... After about 45 minutes (the boys gave up after 5), I had almost ten pounds. It still needs to be sifted of the debris but it it almost ready for packaging. But of course we had to try it to ensure its organaleptic properties. Does it look good? Smell good? Texture? Does it pop well? And most important, does it taste good? "Yes" to all of the above. Wonderful white kernels.... yum.

My daughter decided that she would be the ultimate taste tester. Did the popcorn pass? Definitely. There was not even a kernel left. I guess that's a hit!

Today's Journey Joy - Popped white and delicious corn

Honey Harvest (Part 2)

"Pleasant words are as honeycomb, sweet to the soul." (Proverbs 16:24)

Earlier I wrote about our adventures with the 2008 honey harvest... it was basically uneventful... no stings, no angry bees, an easy time essentially getting the supers from the hives. And if you recall we found that our honey harvest was less than we had hoped (I also wrote about some speculations about the reason that happened). After we got the frames into the honey house (i.e., our basement!) we discovered that not all the honey was capped and in fact some of it still had too much water content. If honey is extracted with too much moisture it easily ferments... not a problem if you're trying to make mead, but if your aim to sell honey... well, one's customers might frown. So my husband cleverly came up with a dehydration-station. A make-shift room made out of a shower, a dehumidifier and a bunch of shower curtains / plastic. After a week the honey was well within the specs to harvest. So last weekend we extracted the honey from the frames. Above you can see my husband using an electric uncapping knife to remove the caps of wax over the honey. The cappings fall into the uncapping tank (which is a bi-layered "tank" that allows the honey attached to cappings to fall below - some say that the capping honey is the sweetest - I tend to agree). After the frames have been uncapped, I placed them in the extractor. We have been blessed with a large 20 frame motorized radial extractor. It makes the work of extracting super easy. I remember when I first saw our friends extract honey. They have a nice manually operated tangential extractor. They would turn the crank as fast as they could for (what seemed to me) to be a long time. Then they would turn the frames around and do the whole process again.... a great work out.... but I'm too old for that kind of work (at least that's the excuse I'm giving today!)

So anyway, I put the frames in the extractor and tried to balance their weight so the whole machine doesn't walk the floor like a washing machine out of balance. We close the lid, turned the motor and watch the honey "spray" out of the frames. A few minutes later we slowed the motor down and then spun them the other way. The whole extracting process probably took only 5-10 minutes (with no sweating or achy joints involved!).

The honey was strained using a double stainless steel strainer. The strainer gets most of the wax, bees debris and stuff that was on the frames out of the honey. Then the honey is stored in big 5-6 gallon honey containers and left to settle for a few days. The extracting process allows some air into the honey and if one were to bottle this new extracted honey there would be a bunch of air bubbles in the containers.


So since today is a very rainy day and I can't pick beans, squash, or raspberries and it is certainly way to muddy to be weeding the strawberries, I thought today would be a good day to bottle the honey. It's not difficult but it sure is sticky and sweet (of course I have to sample the "drips"). I simply grab one of our bears and open the honey gate and fill the bear. The process just repeats until the honey in the container is drained. Sometimes the children help me but today I did it myself.

We bottle Papa (16 oz.), Mama (12 oz.), Brother (8 oz.) and Baby (6 oz.) Bears. I placed the fall honey next to the spring honey to show the differences in color. The spring honey (we call "apple blossom honey") is much lighter than the fall honey (we call "autumn gold honey"). The last picture is one of the whole "family." We hope to sell some of it this year. Usually all I have to say is something like "Local honey makes a great and unique stocking stuffer." Sometimes I remind potential customers that this honey is from our hives which have no chemicals or harsh treatments (like many commercial honeys) and that since it is local they would be supporting their local economy. If they suffer from allergies I also remind them that research shows that local honey may help their symptoms.


Selling honey is not the only reason why we have become beekeepers. It just seems like the right thing to do. The berries need pollination and the bees make many products (honey, comb, pollen, propolis and wax). They have an amazing structure to their colonies. Perhaps one day I'll write about the many life lessons I have learned from watching their behavior.

God made an amazing insect with amazing abilities. And throughout history honey has been a valued and sought after commodity. Remember the Israelites? God promised them a land flowing with milk and honey... sounds like a good recipe for ice cream to me!

Today's journey joy - Autumn Gold Honey

Honey Harvest (Part 1)

"They (God's Word) are more precious than gold, than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the honeycomb. " (Psalm 19:10)

Labor Day weekend is our "Honey harvest weekend." All summer the bees have been growing, multiplying, collecting pollen and nectar. And it is this weekend when we interrupt them and remove the supers (a rectangular box with ten frames that the bees make honeycomb on). The bees are usually not too pleased to have someone take their honey. But this year we did the honey harvest at around 3:00 pm and most of the worker bees were out and about so the supers were relatively easy to get off. The weather was gloriously hot and sunny, and thankfully there was a slight breeze.

It all starts with getting dressed and getting the smoker lit for a couple hours of anticipated work. My husband grabbed some coals from the outside wood furnace and added some wood chips. It makes great fuel and super smoke.


The photo below is of a hive that was started this spring from a 3 pound package of Buckfast bees. They started a little slow but we were hopeful that they would make some surplus honey. So with anticipation I approach the hive with my smoker, fume board and a little Bee Quick (a smell that encourages the bees to leave the super).

But alas, no surplus honey on this hive. That is not unexpected. First year hives that have to draw out their own comb often do not have enough numbers and time to make extra honey for the bee keeper. But there's always next year!

So instead of getting honey I checked the brood boxes (the larger rectangular boxes below the super) and see if they have enough stores of honey to make it through the winter. The frame I have lifted is full of capped honey on the top, brood in the middle and some pollen near the bottom. The bees are healthy and happy. That makes a happy bee keeper.

After about an hour we have gone through all the seven hives (five of them new packages this year) and have about four supers with honey in them. A scant harvest of honey. But we are excited... the aroma of the honey is irresistable and I am eager to extract. My husband gets our massive 20 frame radial extractor ready below. But then as we are about to uncap the honey and put them in we discover that some of the frames of honey have too much moisture and we need to dehydrate them a bit. So my wonderful and resourceful "honey" rigs up a shower dehydrator and they are presently getting thicker. The rest of the honey harvest will have to wait until the honey is at 17% moisture content.

For now I will be satisfied with the anticipation of yummy, sweet and delightfully sticky honey.

Today's journey joy: Golden sweet honey