NO BEES WERE HARMED IN THE TAKING OF THIS HONEY

Nothing says delicious like fresh, unprocessed honey straight from the hive.

My grandmother and aunt started beekeeping quite a few years ago and it has since grown into a small business for them. This past weekend they invited the whole family to come over and help harvest the honey from the hives. Personally, bees make me a little leery but I learned throughout the day that if you're working with 50,000+ bees you can't really be afraid because the odds of a sting are pretty high.




Inside of a movable frame bee hive



The night before the harvest the hives were emptied of bees and moved to the garage. You can't harvest the honey out in the open because the bees will swarm back to the honey. While I'm open to being around bees, I wasn't too thrilled thinking about a swarm flying after me; picture cartoon characters with the giant black cloud chasing them except I didn't have a pond of water to jump into and hide.

Each frame from the hive is removable for easy access. The frame has a honeycomb made from beeswax which protects the honey inside each comb.

To start the processing of extracting the honey from the comb, you get a hot knife (we used an electric one) and slowly melt off the wax covering each comb. This leaves the honey combs open for delicious business. During the process my aunt provided us with crunchy pretzels to dip in the honey while we worked.

Yum! Eating fresh honey straight from the comb!!

You can see the honey just waiting to come out!

As you sawed off the wax, you had to be careful not to hit any of the bees who hadn't hatched yet. I'm sure they got severe whiplash from being in the centrifuge though.

The lighter brown combs are unhatched bees.

As each frame had the wax cut off it was loaded into the "extractor" which is more or less a centrifuge. Here the honey was spun by a strong, strong man, my cousin John (good thing he was invited). During the spinning the honey gets thrown out of the combs and pools in the bottom of the extractor.

The strong, strong man himself.

Before the honey gets too high in the extractor and hits the frames we decide to empty it! Stop looking so worried, of course it goes into a sanitary bucket!! The extractor has a valve at the bottom and my aunt positions the bucket underneath along with a sieve to take out some of the bits of beeswax still in it.

While the extractor emptied I figured it was a great time for eating beeswax covered in honey. I highly recommend trying this if you ever have the chance. The honey is so much sweeter and stronger than something you find in a honey bear. However, be forewarned... I did sort of cough from all the sweetness because the comb had waaaay more than I expected. :)

I also decided it was a great time to complete something on my bucket list, so... I licked a honeycomb.

Okay, okay. I don't really have a bucket list but I really just wanted to lick it! How can you not!?

Harvesting honey wasn't something I grew up thinking I would have the opportunity to do. But my family is so eclectic and does the best outdoorsy and "real" types of things. I'm pretty lucky I can have the experience without all the bees at my house.

To be continued in...

Part Two: Babies, Bees and Bug Shells