On September 10th I harvested the first round of honey from my own backyard! I harvested one medium super. This was the medium super that had been filled with honey first and so was from mostly late spring/early summer honey. I extracted the honey with a cold uncapping knife and used a hand crank tangential extractor to spin out the honey from the frames. Nearly all the honey in this medium super was capped. Maybe one part of one frame was not capped, but the honey was cured. This means that the nectar did not drip out when turned upside down, so the risk of the honey fermenting is low. I do not yet have a refractometer to test the amount of water in my honey. Anything over 18% apparently can ferment and go bad. Generally the bees will cap the honey once it has reached below this magic number. Of course, I assume that if the cell isn't filled high enough, the cell won't be capped.
The setup.
A frame of capped honey. Isn't it beautiful?
Cutting off the cappings.
So sweet, so good. Lick it up!
Liquid gold from the honey gate.
Honey with the cappings wax.
Even the kids enjoyed the extracting process. This is my daughter with some of her friends.
I extracted my honey in the basement and used a fume board to scare the bees down out of the super. I used Natural Honey Harvester spray and it worked great. I had maybe 10 bees in the basement. In extracting, I had to uncap both sides of the frame and then put up to 4 frames in my extractor and then spun out the honey on one side. I then switched the frames to the other side and spun out the honey on the other side. I then opened the honey gate at the bottom of the extractor and had the honey run through a coarse filter into a bucket with a honey gate on it so that I could bottle the honey. I had a space heater set up in the basement to keep things warm so that the honey flowed well. While extracting I listened to the Cleveland Indians, who unfortunately lost to the White Sox during that game.
So in all, I extracted 33 pounds of honey from that one super. I filled 24 of that in these cool looking queenline glass jars. I've given a bunch of them away. Unfortunately, haven't sold any. But I think, perhaps if I use the excess of my honey as a source of giving and service, the hive will be blessed and will do better than were I to use the honey for selfish means. Who knows. Of course, I can't rely on that belief and neglect my hive. Faith without works, you know. . . dead. Anyway, my wife and I gave two of them (the 1 lb. glass jars) away to our neighbors. I found a scripture in the Bible that says, "How sweet are thy words unto my taste! Yea, sweeter than HONEY to my mouth!" -Psalms 119:103. I tried to use the giving out of the honey as an opportunity to share what has been sweet to us: the gospel. The card is a mormon.org pass-along card with my profile, some fresh baked bread, and a Book of Mormon. The sweetest things!
