~~THE DAVIS BEEKEEPERS~~2010

Once upon a time YouTube and I sat down together and YouTube taught me how to harvest honey.

All good stories start with once upon a time and YouTube right?!

Here is the "super" (beekeeper lingo) and some extra frames from another hive on top. We had one full hive and I partially full hive.

This one shown above is the partially filled one...

Honey extracting can be done different ways. The most common is with a large, fancy, expensive honey extractor which we don't have. Soooo, we did the al cheapo method called "crush and strain". The title pretty much explains it.

I was able to pull supplies from around the house and create my own way to strain and bottle the honey. Costing me $0 dollars to extract the honey. Minus the spatula that I broke during the process. :)  So, here's a picture of my new Steam Juicer that I got for Christmas this last year.

The cone on top is a hand-me-down from a friend from a few years back, the filters came with the cone so that seemed to work well to strain the honey. I put the Juicer in the oven on the lowest setting to allow the honey to melt a bit so it could be strained. Most people just stick the honey and the strainer in the sun but it's still a little to cold here for that...so the oven worked nicely.

Then I bottled it up. I still have MUCH more to do. It's a pretty sticky, time consuming project so I'm just doing a little at a time when I can. We are pretty excited to have our own honey. Thus another step in our journey to being less reliant and more sustainable. Oh and this honey tastes AMAZING! It's like no other...I have to keep reminding myself to keep my fingers out of the honey pot!