Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Busy Busy Bees

Our bees have been super busy!
Just before Halloween, Tim and Carol busted open the hives, pulled out the frames and extracted the honey.  I missed the part where they actually pulled out the frames (cuz you know there would have been photos!)

Once the  frames were out, Tim had to slice off the "caps" (whatever that means) with a hot knife.
The un-capped frames were then dropped into the spinning do-kicky machine
 which was heated by 85,000 watts of flame throwing heat and spun by Alan until the warmed honey was flung right off of their frames .
 Once the honey was spun clean off the frames, it was drained from the kettle and through a filter (in order to get all the dead bee body parts out).
 In the end we got nearly four gallons of honey.  What a beautiful sight!

2 comments:

SHIRLEE said...

wow this is really quite a process. would have loved to witness it....Maybe next year you can hold an open house for all to see.....

Gwen said...

Wow ! I'm surprised you got 4 gallons - that's awesome :)