Sugar....Oh, Honey, Honey.

Special thanks to Bill Emenhiser (my father-in-law).  Without him there is NO way I could have made this.

While this may look like just your everyday, average trashcan, it's anything but. That's my honey extractor, and you know what that means!  HONEY!  Bill and I just finished making it last week, and none too soon, because today I got to go and try it out.

Now it's kind of difficult to see here, but on the top is (of course) the lid.  Inside, that mesh and steel bit you're looking at is a basket that holds the frames.  By attaching a drill to the shaft that comes out the top, you spin that basket around, and it flings the honey out of the combs and basket against the sidewalls of the can, and it drains down through a spigot into a 5 gallon bucket.  Or, at least that's what is supposed to happen...

Now, most of you will recognize that this drill looks a little short on the front end, and that's because after spinning the frames for a few minutes, the screw that holds the chuck on broke, and now my drill is in two pieces.  Unfortunately, my other drill doesn't have a large enough chuck to fit the shaft of the extractor, so now my extractor is out of commission.  This means there will be no more spinning honey out of the frames today.  But that doesn't mean I'm not getting that honey.  Just need to improvise, adapt and overcome.  And that's exactly what I did.

Again, it's a bit difficult to see here, but those frames have been stripped of their wax and honey.  Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of actually doing it, on account of my hands were covered in honey and there was no way I was going to touch the camera.  All I did, however, was take that yellow prybar on the left side of the box and scrape all of it off into several containers.  This made for one heck of a mess, with the wax and honey all mixed together.  Fortunately, there's a cure for that.

This five gallon bucket has a plastic strainer in the top, that filters out anything larger than 600 microns.  Into this the wax/honey mess was piled.  Since it was a bit chilly this morning, the honey was pretty thick and didn't want to run through the strainer very well, so I set it in the living room in the sun.  It warmed right up and drained through pretty well, leaving the wax and the occasional bee leg in the top.  Everything underneath that strainer is pure, beautiful and delicious honey.

This container holds 1 gallon, and you can see it's about 3/4 full.  That's all the "good" honey I got.  There's pretty close to the same amount of uncapped honey left that we probably won't be able to keep and eat.  The reason is that the bees don't cap (cover over the cells) the honey until it reaches a certain amount of moisture (usually less than 22%.), and honey with a higher moisture content is likely to ferment.  That's a long way of saying this higher moisture content honey (or "bad" honey) will probably get fed back to the bees in the next few days, so they can add it to their winter stores.

And there it is!  The first bear I've ever bottled, and hopefully, it's the first of many, many bears to come.  The honor of having the first bottle goes to Bill and Julee, because without Bill's help, I'd have had a heck of a time getting the hives built, and they wouldn't have turned out nearly as well.  He also gave me (okay, so it was actually a loan) a Beekeeping book 3 years ago, and that also helped to get me started.  And if not for Julee, I wouldn't have half the time I do to get these things done, because she watches Logan, a lot.  So a big thanks to the both of them, and I hope you guys enjoy the honey.  Unfortunately, there isn't a ton of honey to go around, so most people can't expect to get any from me this year.  Next year should hopefully go much better, and we should have a very large surplus to go around.  I'll leave you (as usual) with one final picture.  A couple of my girls wandered inside the house this afternoon to see what all the good smells were about, and here they are just hanging out on the back of my couch.