Our bees have rewarded us with extra honey this summer; so far we have harvested 3000 pounds of honey. Right now we are taking a break from Honey harvesting and are putting our efforts towards getting our hives and winter nucs ready for the upcoming winter. We will begin our second harvest the second full of week of August. It looks like we will harvest an additional 1,000 pounds of honey for a total of 4,000 pounds for 2014!
From the third week of June to the last week of July, Mary and her intern, Casey, have been going from yard to yard and doing all the hard work of collecting the honey. We do not use any chemicals or blowers to get the honeybees off of their beeswax capped honey frames-we brush the bees off by hand, one frame at a time. When the truck is loaded with a couple of hundred pounds or more of honey we head back to our Honey House with our precious load.
At the honey house Ed takes over. He removes the surface beeswax on each frame using our Dakota Gunness uncapper and then spins the frames to extract their stored honey using our Dadant 36-frame extractor. The spun honey then goes through strainers-we do not filter our honey. Then all the surface beeswax capping’s are collected and added to our solar wax melters. After a day in the sun we save our melted-down beeswax in 2-3 pound bread pans for future beeswax candles. The honey is stored in 60-pound buckets for Honey favors for our future Brides-to-Bees and Mommies-to-Bees!
