Honey Party

We went to our first honey party two nights ago at our neighbor Dan's house. Here is his honey extractor. It's a giant centrifuge that holds 10 frames of honey at a time. The black wires wrapped around the tank warm the metal to make the honey more thin. There is a switch that controls two belts which move the frames around inside. This extractor was actually given to him for free!


The first step is to remove the caps from the frames. We used a hot knife that is specifically for this purpose.


For the capped honey that is below the surface of the side bars, this afro pick worked better.


The wax was all collected in this bin. The bottom of the bin had a small screen that allowed the honey to flow through it. He leaves the wax in the bin for about a week and by then lots more honey drains out into the bottom. The bottom has a valve so you can drain the honey out easily. I'm hoping to get some of this wax for batik. This picture was taken early in the night, but the end the bin was overflowing with wax and honey.


Once the frames have the caps removed they go into the centrifuge. When it is full the lid goes on and the machine is turned on.



Then a beautiful thing happens...You open the valve and honey pours out. More honey than you have ever seen in your entire life. We double filtered with sieves to take out the wax and bee parts, but the honey was too cold and this turned out to be our limiting factor. This was taking forever! Finally at 3:30 am Dan announced that we should all go in the house, find the biggest jars we could and fill them with unfiltered honey to take home.


So we scored all of this! 2 gallons to use and share.


It's gorgeous!


Thanks ladies! Can you believe one bee makes only 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her entire life? We harvested over 400 pounds!


So after the extraction, the frames are still very sticky and covered in honey. Some of the frames still had lots of honey left in them. How do you get the frames clean to store them for the winter? Let the bees do it!


I stopped by today to see the masses come. Apparently this was way down from earlier when the sun was shining on the boxes. You can see why we do this harvest at night...


We came home very, very sticky at 4:30 am. I was so tired I was going to forgo the shower. Then I found honey in my ear. And remembered someone had set an empty sticky box on my head earlier, and found some in my hair. Next year I think I'll wear rubber boots. 3 of us got stings on our feet from all of the bees crawling around. Tuesday was definitely rough, I was so tired at work I couldn't even function but I made it, went home for dinner and went straight to a CPR class that went until 9. I'm so glad we didn't have plans tonight! I made a nice garden dinner and we went for a hike. Tomorrow night, Bard in the Quad!