Mid-summer brings big vegetable harvests, but it also brings another harvest around here - honey! This is our second year of trying our hand at beekeeping, and we're pleased to report that for a second year we've had a good summer honey harvest. We did have a swarm in one of our hives earlier in the summer that we weren't able to catch (they swarmed at the top of a high pine tree, so unless we called in a crane we there was no way to access them), and one of our hives is a bit 'weak', but we extracted honey from one of the hives two weeks ago. The other hives will become stronger with frequent checking and maintenance, and we may have small harvests from them in the Fall, but for now, we have one very strong hive that has been consistent and allowed us to harvest this summer. We are very fortunate that our uncle Derrick is a wealth of knowledge about bees and has been guiding us through the beekeeping basics and supplied us with the equipment we need.
Unfortunately we didn't capture a ton of photos of the extraction process but here's a good one to get an idea of how it works. The first step is to gently remove the wax caps from the frames so that they honey will flow freely. In this photo I am using a tool that looks like a garden spade, with a triangular end. It is plugged in and heats up, which warms the wax enough for it to be scraped off easily. After the caps are off, we place two frames in the extractor - the stainless steel drum to my left in the photo - where they spin with the push of a button. We spin them for about a minute, and all the honey splashes onto the sides and bottom of the drum. At the bottom of the drum is a spigot, where the honey pours out through a filter and into a bucket. Next, we take this honey and pour it over a finer mesh filter into another bucket, before portioning it into jars. In cooler months we have to heat the honey slightly in order to make it pourable (this is different than pasteurization - we do not pasteurize the honey, which involves heating it to a much higher temperature), but it was so hot and humid while we were extracting it that we cut this step out. This is a bit of a simplification, but generally it is not a very complicated process.
We didn't have a huge harvest since we only took honey from two boxes, but we were very pleased with the quality and flavour. It's interesting that the flavour and colour can vary so much with the seasons and flowers that are in bloom. In the boxes we harvested from, some frames had very light, almost white wax and honey, while some had deep brown wax and honey. I'm not expert but my guess was that the bulk of the lighter honey was primarily the product of bees gathering pollen from clover, while the darker honey was from buckwheat pollen, since we had a huge patch of buckwheat cover crop close to the hives. We still have a lot to learn about keeping bees, but one thing is for sure, the extraction process is extremely satisfying!
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