🐝 Honey Harvest - Stealing Liquid Gold from a Mob of Armed Ladies (12 Pics & 4 GIFs)
Time to Open the Hive(s)
We've got cravings for some sweet & sticky stuff!
Give them a good whiff of smoke to send them into forest-fire-mode.
The bees were having a hard time this year. The weather wasn't too kind, they were swarming heavily, plus me and my apiculturist friend have been neglecting them a bit.
This will be the first and only honey-harvest this year.
The girls are healthy, though. No mites, plenty of brood and heavy frames with a decent amount of honey.
Everything looks fine, so let's pick out some frames without brood, but with a decent amount of this delicious gooeyness.
Leave the Bees at Home
We'll take those frames away, but the bees can stay!
a little bump will do
To get all those bees that are still working on their comb back into their hive, it's easiest to just hold that frame above the hive and give it a nice little bump. Most bees will simply fall off into the hive below, but they will also notice something is quite wrong. ;)
Up to now things usually stay calm, but as the girls have been shaken up a bit, tension starts picking up! Even after several years of doing this, it's still a good adrenaline rush to stand in between those stirred up, angry, armed ladies!
So let's brush off the last overly-attached bees and get out of here.
This is Where it Gets Sticky
Back at the apiarist workshop, we'll start extracting the honey.
yummmmm
To get at the good stuff, we'll have to uncap the honeycomb. This is an oddly satisfying thing to do. It feels a bit like slicing butter with a hot knife.
The uncapped frames are then rigged into the honey-extractor. That thing is basically just a huge tumbler spinning the frames so quickly that all the gooey sticky fresh delicious golden honey gets forced out of the comb by centrifugal forces.
Time for the Moneyshot!
We're almost done, now let it flow
We made 12kg of greatness today
There are some small chunks of wax left in there, so it will have to be screened through some progressively finer meshes before it's ready to get jarred.
Now Look at This:
Yummy!
Time for toast with butter and honey!
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Nice post what are you using to make the gifs? Up voted and followed. Fellow beek.
thanks for the follow :D I don't post too much bee stuff though... I hope you'll still find it entertaining when I contribute somethingo your feed. hehe.
The GIFs were made from still photos, I combine them on the site ezgif.com.
This post was sweet! :-) I really like your use of the gifs to show some of your work without inserting a video link, too! Honeybees are on our list to get within the next few years. Many of our neighbors have them and we enjoy hearing and seeing their hives and work. We also love finding bees on our wild flower growths on the property, too. Thanks for the informative and entertaining post!
I'd also like to invite you to our SteemitHomesteaders slack community. We're new, with about 45 members, but are growing every day. We aim to be a community of homesteaders, gardeners, preppers, farmers, DIYers, and other like-minded Steemit users that help each other learn and grow on Steemit. If you're interested, you can read more about it and join from the link below.
https://steemit.com/steemithomesteaders/@greenacrehome/announcement-steemithomesteaders-slack-community
thanks! I love gifs!
You should really get yourself some bees... if your neighbours are keeping already, I am sure they'll be willing to let you have a swarm next spring?
The homesteaders community sounds great, maybe I'll pop by, but I am not really a slack user tbh.
Oh yum yummm... I am very familiar with stealing honey from the bees too ;)
Our honey machine looks a bit different but it is very, very old one. I think it fits only 3 frames inside in one go and you have to flip them to take the honey from the other side. But the mechanism is about the same.
How many beehives do you have?
There is nothing better than fresh, warm honey :)
My favourite is the first one from rapeseed... very white (after it crystallize) and so smooth like butter. Yummy!
We have 4 hives now... one is from a swarm we caught this spring.
Yeah, I know what you mean... spring-honey is the best. I love it when it gets a bit of a citrus-y sourishness to it!
I wish I could find natural honey here in Japan. 😫These look so good!
incredibly good!
I'm sure there must be beekeepers in Japan, too... Keep your eyes open... I'd image Japanese cherry blossom honey or something... must be the "bees-knees"... heh
This was awesome. Totally following you now!
thank you! I hope you'll like what I have to post!
Pure Liquid Gold right there - awesome post!
a whole bucket full of it... just like at the end of the rainbow!
Wow this is really very cool. Great pictures through the whole process. And man that end result looks fantastic.
thanks!
I always liked to buy my honey still in the comb but I haven't come across any FOR YEARS!!! following as I have a passion for bees and honey!
a woman of good taste ;)
thanks for the follow, I hope I won't disappoint!
Thank you for sharing the process. It is fun to see how things are done and made. Mmm, now I want to make that honey cake my brother requested. I love honey and bees, but I would be so scared to do what you do.
it's a bit scary... but you have to realise, they actually have to commit suicide to sting you... so it's nothing they really want to do.
As long as one remains calm... it's all fine. I rarely ever get stung... and if it happens, that's usually because I've been too hectic or careless myself.
Also, bee-stings are supposed to be healthy :P
great shots and gifs man! Thanks for showing us hte entire process!
my pleasure... thanks for taking the time to look ;)