Sweetness

I have grown up with honey as far back as I can remember. Honey in tea, coffee, bread and other baked goods. Honey on biscuits, cornbread, and spoons. I would always get a week, sometime late in the summer, to visit my grandparents. This would give my parents a little less work at home and send chaos over to Oroville. Many times it coincided with the honey harvest and I would do a little work for their business "Steg's Aprairy".

This is where the real learning began. It is where I would find combs of honey, tastily trimmed cappings, semi soft finger burning blocks of wax and barrels, buckets, jars, and large tanks full of golden honey. As I would work I would chew the hot knife trimmings dripping with honey. I would chew it as if it was a stick of honey flavored gum. To me it was! Once all the sweetness subsided it was time for more. I still remember the end of those days where my throat was almost closing on itself from the sweet and the world had a glossy sheen about it from the pure quantity of sugar running through my veins.

Needless to say our family consumes plenty of honey over the course of a year. The hard part is that it has gotten expensive. In our office we can go through quite a lot of honey in just a few months. Our last purchased bucket was $37.00 for 12lbs. Over $3.00 a pound! We had to do something.

Our solution was to get some bees. Two nukes a piece. (Nukes are typically four frame nucleus of bees along with a queen). At 85$ a nuke the buy in was not cheap. There were 5 partners: myself, my two brothers, my parents, and a co-worker that had no idea what he was getting into. 10 nukes, were purchased and picked up sometime in March. Dad had all the experience and tools so he did most of the basic care. Though I would help him here and there as the bee boxes began to get heavier and heavier to lift.

Towards the first part of September I started helping dad get the temporary extracting setup cleaned and prepared for extracting. Dad guessed we would get 500lbs of honey based on how well the bees were doing earlier in the summer. We were about to find out.

Dad and I started by taking the honey boxes off the hives. A little smoke and the bees will take a drink of honey. This will send the bees deeper into the hive as well as provide a calming effect. We start at the top of the hive and pull each box off blow the bees down the slide towards their entrance. Then we quickly make off with their hard earned gold.

This is what we ended up with after the raiding. We take all the shallow boxes of honey off the top and leave them with a minimum of two full depths with which to survive the winter with.


Here are the four stacks of shallows. There were more than a few empty boxes but there were plenty of heavy ones as well. The process for getting the honey is as follows. We take a box. Take a frame from the box. Take a hot knife and cut the cappings off (a covering of wax over the cell of honey). We then scratch open any cells that were not opened by the hot knife.

We then load up the extractor. The extractor is essentially a big drum that hold all the frames.

To get the honey out of the frames it spins throwing the honey onto the extractor's walls. The honey/wax/pollen etc fly out of the frames, down to the bottom and drain out into some holding container.
In our case we used a big bowl to catch the honey as it flowed out of the extractor.

We up end the bowl over a screen that catches most of the wax and other odds and ends that make it out of the extractor.
The honey eventually flows through this screen down into our 1000 pound holding tank.


Once all the honey drips into the tank we let it settle so that the impurities float to the top. This includes a foam of bubbles, pollen, and tidbits of wax that made it through the screen. Once settled we pour our loot into containers and are set for months!
In the end we had a grand total of 458lbs of honey off of our 10 nukes. A pretty amazing year for unestablished hives. Also pretty close to dad's original 500lbs estimate when you consider we didn't include the wax weight to the 458lbs. Now the hope is to get them all through the winter so that we might again enjoy the fruit of our tiny little friends' labor.