~~HONEY HARVEST 2010~~

Well this marks the second year of being beekeepers! We are still learning about beekeeping ALL the time, it's much harder than we thought it would be but we absolutely enjoy fresh raw honey that we harvested.

 Here's a picture of Dusty uncapping the frames to prepare them to go into the honey extractor. Beekeeping supplies are very expensive so here you'll see the poor mans version. Most beekeepers own an electric uncapping knife (usually around $100 a pop) here you'll see us using a knife that we've dipped in boiling water. We alternated between 2-3 hot knifes.

 The caps contain honey so here's a picture of the caps falling into a strainer. The caps stay in the strainer and the honey falls into the bucket. Commercial beekeepers own a machine that does all this for them, (costing around $3,000) but not us, again, the poor mans version.

 This is funny. Yes, that is a PetZoom. I picked that up on clearance at Fred Meyer for $4.90 that is the poor mans version of a capping scratcher. That scratcher opens up the capped honey that the knife couldn't get. You can find those capping scratcher for pretty cheap, about $10 or so. This PetZoom was just a cheaper version plus I didn't have to pay shipping.

 We are in the process of converting our old clothes washer into a honey extractor. In the meantime we borrowed this from a local farm. Usually farms don't loan out this type of equipment, that machine is a 20 frame extractor, probably valued at $1500-$3000 or more. The farm loaned it to us for free. Thank you Lord!

 This is a picture looking from the top of the extractor down into the machine. We've loaded 1 frame so far. 1 down 19 to go. :)

 Here's Dusty loading more frames.

 All loaded...now ready for a 10 min spin.

 Spinning...

 I had been watching the honey fly off the frames. I'm also trying to stabilize the machine a bit.

After the honey is extracted it still has to be strained. Lots of wax would be in the honey otherwise.

For the health benefits we've choose to preserve our honey in the raw form. The wood burning stove was still a little warm from the night before so we are using it as a straining station.

 We didn't have filters or cheesecloth so we are using our jelly bags to strain the honey. It worked well!

TA-DA!! It's done.

(2 days later and LOTS of messes to clean up) We got approx 3 gallons of honey.

We expect more next year. We bottled up the honey in jars of all sizes. We learned last year that it's better to have a few small jars around for bartering purposes and gifts.