Sometimes I wonder why I bother having a camera at all. I always forget it when we are doing something interesting. We joined in the honey harvest on Saturday and were the first ones there so we did our eight frames of honey first and got about 25 pounds and several pounds of beeswax.
The setup was great. There was a wax melter with a big hot knife that was used to slice down the frame to uncap the honey. Then we put the frames in the extractor a centrifugal drum with a handle for turning. There are electric extractors but this one was manual so we took turns revolving the drum to spin out the honey. The honey is spun out on one side, then the frames are turned and the second side is extracted. The honey then passes out a spigot into a bucket that has a double strainer. When the honey fills the bucket enough it's moved over to a counter where we filled the jars by opening a tap at the bottom of the bucket. It was really fun.
We stayed another hour after extracting our honey and just visited with the other beekeepers. We're talking about starting a bee club here in Woodstock and I'm looking forward to it! There is so much to learn from the experienced beekeepers and even those who've only been doing it for a few years.
Here's a video that describes what's involved in the harvesting process. It was a great experience and we just took the box with the frames and put it back on the hive for the bees to clean up. They will too!
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