Honey Harvest 2014

Whew!  We finally finished our honey harvest for 2014.  We started on Saturday and just finished today (Monday).  It was a good honey year.  We got close to 400 pounds of excellent and  tasty honey.  This year the honey is somewhat lighter in color than last year, and maybe a little sweeter.   We had some help on Saturday with the extraction, and for the last couple days we have had visitors come to watch how things went.   Here are some photos of this year's process:
     We started out by taking a selfie of ourselves dressed up in our bee suits.

The Ballard Beekeepers

The 2014 bee yard at our place.  We had one other small bee yard at another farm, of swarmed hives.

The 2014 Honey Kitchen!

We start off by cutting off the wax cappings on each frame.

The frames are placed into the extractor to spin out. 

A couple of our helpers turning the crank on the extractor, Bill Cloose and Steve Amberg

The fresh honey runs out of the spigot and into a strainer over a honey bucket.

We end up with a tub full of wax cappings and honey.  This will be strained later on, and the wax purified for selling or for making candles or soap.  The honey is just fine and will be bottled up. 

More of our helping crew!

Later in the day, Joe Miller came to help.  We replaced the crank handle with a drill to use as a motor for the extractor.  (Much easier on the arm muscles!)   These guys are just having too much fun!  Using a drill as the power source is truly a "guy thing"!

A better picture of our drill crank.

A pint of this year's honey!  It takes a bee an entire lifetime of 3 weeks to make one teaspoon of honey.   A pint has many teaspoons!  For 400 pounds of honey, how many bees were working???

Sometimes bees do strange things!  If proper bee space is not maintained in the hive, the bees try to fill in the spaces with burr comb.   This is a good example of the burr comb and the bees' engineering skills!

We should end up with about 275 jars of honey to sell from the 400 pounds.  This year's honey has a lot of sweet clover in it, and also basswood blossoms, white and red clover, birdsfoot trefoil, purple aster, various kinds of thistle flowers, wild plum blossoms, goldenrod, daisies, alfalfa, as well as garden plant flowers and decorative flowers.   There are probably other natural plantings, too, that I haven't listed.   The bees know what's best for the honey.   The Lord has designed the bees to produce honey and they do it well!  We have been truly blessed this year with a wonderful crop of honey - thanks be to God!