Extracting Honey

Jacob has been working some serious hours since the spring began.  He’s been busy with his other ladies…the bees.  He has driven them to 3 honey flows; orange, gallberry, and sourwood and has spent countless hours extracting honey after each flow.  Thankfully the end is here for this year, and he gets to slow down and gear up for next year.  Hopefully then he can start cutting back some on his “day job”.

One afternoon, while he was extracting gallberry honey, the boys, Mom, Bill and I paid Jacob a visit.  We hadn’t been involved in the process because he’d mostly been doing it from late at night to the wee hours of the morning, so the boys were sleeping and somebody had to watch them, so I was off the hook.

The first 3 years, Jacob extracted honey in our barn, using a scraper as an uncapper and a hand crank, then a 12 frame extractor the next year.  Last year he moved up to a real uncapper and two extractors that hold 33 frames each, which was Deda’s.  This year he’s moved up in the world and got to use Deda’s equipment in a nice extracting room owned by Lee, a local beekeeper and mentor.Here, is Lee’s really nice equipment.  It takes up nearly half the room and is all automated, producing about 18 drums of honey a day.

Then there’s Jacob’s equipment, which fits nicely in the corner and produces about 6 drums a day, though we are very happy about that.  Here, he is using the uncapper.  The extractor can be seen to his right (there is another behind the boxes on the left), and the holding tank is raised up behind his head in the corner.

Looking into the holding tank.  This is where the newly extracted honey sits for a little while to allow the small pieces of wax to separate out.

His brand:He has some of Deda’s old boxes, too.  Jacob tells me this isn’t a good picture because the brand isn’t in great shape, but I love it anyway.

I’m trying to come up with an idea for a piece of furniture we can make that will use these frames and boxes with both brands.

Jacob says this is NOT what you want to see: brood with honey.  Below is what you DO want to see: all honey.

Test tasting!  They approved!

The final product.  Not all of these are his.  He produced 29 drums, plus some spare 5 gallon buckets.

Another reason the boys and I had stayed away was to limit their bee stings, which are inevitable to some extent.  We decided to risk it, but poor Josiah got the unlucky end of that stick.  He slipped on a wet spot on the floor and fell on top of a bee, which stung his hand.  Poor guy!  It was his second sting ever.  The first one he got at Gram’s house trying to save a lizard from a bee :)  Oddly enough, the week after this second sting, he got stung by a wasp at Grandma’s, then again the next week!  He must be special!

This doesn’t have to do with extracting, but I got a couple pictures of some bees swarming out of one of his hives at home.  For different reasons, they will all congregate on a branch or something near the hive, then all leave at the same time to make another home elsewhere.  This is them congregating and too high in the tree to retrieve.  If noticed and in a good location, they can be placed in a new box and saved.  It has been a bad year for swarms.