Harvesting Honey

Went for my run this morning and look who was out? It’s hard to see them, but there were two antelopes enjoying the same field I was running in. .

It was a beautiful morning with clear skies and 44′. A nice day for a run and harvest some honey.

Out of the two hives we have, the big hive has been fun to watch. I don’t know why. Maybe because there are thousands of bees in this hive and only a few hundred in the smaller hive?

Anyway, the end of the year is here and time to harvest our honey. Our honey is in the top box, so we need to remove the top box and shake all the bees out and into the other two boxes.

Lighting the smoker to encourage the bees to move from the top box to the bottom boxes.

This is what a 4 year old does to keep busy 🙂

We have a lot of good frames of delicious dark honey.

Still entertaining himself 🙂

The hive has been reduced back down to a two box hive. The bottom box still has brood and the top box is full of honey for the bees to eat throughout the summer.

A few of the frames.

Look at all that honey!

We cut out the comb from a few of the frames.

Put them into bags. Taped them onto the computer monitor arm 🙂 . Cut a tiny hole out of the bottom of the bag and let them drip.

We let the honey drip into a double sieve. The bottom sieve is finer than the top sieve to catch the wax that escaped from the bags.

The honey drips from the sieve into the bucket that has a spout that will make it easier to drain into jars.

No two hives are the same. Every hive varies in color and had has different tasting honey. This hive has been producing dark, thick, delicious tasting honey. I can’t wait to bottle it up!

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