Honey Harvesting

Have you ever seen a Honey Harvesting?  The answer was 'No' for everyone in our house.  A benefit of living in a somewhat rural area is that from time to time opportunities arise that you can't get from paying $$ to entertain your children with games, bouncy things or movies and Honey Harvesting is one of them. 

One of my fellow Waxhaw MOPS moms lent some of their land to an old neighbor for his bee hives.  In return, Dennis from Berry's Bees Honey was nice enough to invite her family (& friends) to watch a live Honey Harvesting.  With over 12 kids and moms present, he decided the actual removal of the frames (covered with bees) should be videotaped and shown to us inside (good call).  Here are some pictures that I took of the TV showing us the video of the extraction.

Bee keeper Dennis was very patient and took on ALL of Garrett's questions.  This is a flat honey comb that you can put in there for the bees to fill with honey or you can let them make their own combs.

First you scrape off the beeswax and then place in the extractor.

The extractor spins the combs around and then the honey slowly ooozes out. 

Check out the 5 gallon bucket already filled up on the right 

The whole process took about 2 hours and now we have fresh local honey - YUMMY!!!!

I asked Garrett what he learned.  His response #1 Boy bees don't sting and #2 when the Queen is not laying enough eggs they kick her out and feed Royal Jelly to a new baby bee and she becomes the Queen.