Honey Harvest 2008!

Two weekends ago I drove up to Gualala to spend the weekend with Dave and his parents. Dave had kept the dogs that week since I had to do some field work and would be gone for 20 hours straight (they are good dogs, but no one can hold their pee for that long!).

The real purpose of my going up there was to help with honey harvest. Last year my brother-in-law, Michael, came up and brought his friend Lesley to help out, too. We bottled 220 quarts last summer. Because of the fires this year, we knew there would be a lot less honey than that so we didn’t worry about recruiting a bunch of people to help. We did have two other helpers, though—Wally and Vance—who came over just because they were interested in the process.

Since it is so late in the season they not only pulled the supers (where the honey is stored) but they also inserted Apistan stripes to ward off any varroa mites:

After sorting the honey into “dark” and “normal” they cut the caps off the comb with a heated knife:

Then the frames are loaded into the honey extractor (basically a huge centrifuge) to let all the honey spin out:

The first 10 frames worth took forever to empty so we turned on a little heater underneath the extractor, which did seem to help. Dave also closed all the windows to keep the heat inside so the honey would thin out and flow better. After a while the garage was like a sauna and we were sweating like pigs.

Dave was in charge of filtering the extracted honey through two sieves, into a clean bucket fitted with a handy little valve:

Then I bottled the honey into clean quart jars:

After only a few hours of sweaty work we were done, having bottled 98 quarts. The next morning Dave bottled the honey filtered out of the wax cappings for a total of 107 quarts. Not too shabby.

We made sure to feed the bees some sugar syrup since we robbed their hives:

Man-o-man, did I eat a lot of honey that day! Whenever I had a spare chance, Dave and I would grab wads of the wax cappings that we cut off the frames and suck all the honey out. You just pop the whole mess into your mouth, and chew and suck until there’s no more honey left. Then you just spit out the wax—it is like old fashioned gum!