Yesterday was THE day!! We harvested our honey! My brother came from California with equipment and to help. We weren't sure what to expect---would we have enough honey? Would the bees be agitated? So many ifs------but everything went great! My brother had done a lot of research and decided the best method was to pull the frames out of the hive(while smoking the bees) and load them into tubs to bring home to process. The bees build the honeycomb on these hives and then fill them with honey and cap them with wax. That step went smoothly until a bee got irritated with my brother and stung him 3 times. Then all the tubs were transported to our garage where we took a hot knife and uncapped the frames and put the frames in a centrifugal spinner to extract the honey. Smooth process and with 3 people working, it went great. We let the honey settle and today we will bottle and pack up the wax. Nothing will go to waste. Candles and lip balm from the wax---honey in the bottles-----and frames back in the hive for the bees. And yes, we were kind to our bees. We left them an entire box of honey to feed them through the winter. Next year we are adding hives!
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