Well, today was an exciting day here on the farm. This picture is of my son enjoying some fresh honey from our hives. We don't get honey from our bees every year, mostly due to my lackadaisical bee management style, but this year was a good one for us. We got two supers full of honey. The white box in the left of the photo is a super. The super holds nine frames and the bees build their honeycomb inside each frame and then fill them up. Sometimes. Some years there isn't enough rain or there is too much rain, or the bees swarm (their natural method of propagating the species) and for whatever reason they can only produce enough honey for the hive to survive the winter and none for the beekeeper. Usually you will get about two and a half gallons of honey from a super and true to form we got five gallons from our two. That sounds like a bunch of honey but when you have a family of six and you use it to cook with, on pancakes, and for the topping of choice for the cathead biscuits, it is about a years worth. And you only "take off" the honey once a year so this is it until next summer.
There was a time when you would take off honey twice a year, once in the spring and again in the fall, but the fall honey was almost exclusively from cotton and there hasn't been much cotton grown around here in a while.
The man in the background is not me, it is my Daddy. He is wielding an electrically heated knife that cuts the wax capping off of each frame of honey so it can be extracted. After the cappings are removed, each frame is placed inside the extractor which spins around and the honey drains out the bottom where it is double filtered to remove big wax particles.
My Daddy is the one that got me into beekeeping. He's the kind of guy that thinks if he's doing something everybody should be doing it so when he started keeping bees, he thought we all should. And I enjoy beekeeping, but I just don't have the time to devote to it like I should, so my bees are "free range" bees you might say. They pretty much make it on their own, or not.
So it was a great day spending most of the day with my son and my Daddy in his "honey house" doing alot of "quality control" and replenishing the honey stores for the coming year. I also got to see my Mamma for a few minutes who sent me home with cases of canned goods! Double bonus!!! I should write a whole blog entry about her kitchen sometime! I think I'll remember today for a long time.
