Harvesting Honey


We tried bees last year and they swarmed and the queen bee, although we tried to rescue her, managed to either be kicked out by her troops or she died or she ran off. Who knows, but we lost them and got about one decent pint of honey.



Our bee friend Cassia came over to look in the hive with us. We still are not perfectly sure what we are doing. Right away, Cassia found several heavy sheets. She handed them to me and said I could take the honey. Harvesting honey. All new to me. I know there are special machines that spin the honey out of the comb, but we don't have one. We didn't even know we had honey in the hives yet!

So off to the kitchen with sheets dripping with honey. The only instructions I had were to scrape the combs off and that it is okay to crush the combs to get the honey out, but save the most beautiful ones.

The children followed in hot pursuit ready to harvest honey. We set to work with strainers, potato mashers, spoons, more strainers, more bowls, and more having no clue about what we were doing. We managed to get a system going with strainer and bowl and potato masher. The honey poured out of the comb into the bowl. William kept saying, "It's sweet!" I think he was doing a lot of tasting and not a lot of mashing!

 I hope that harvesting honey becomes something so regular in our lives that we do have a spinner and we can offer it to people in our community. I do hope that we are able to be a part of the bee rebuilding process that must happen, but until then, every step is new and intriguing and a little nerve wracking.

Ironically, I was the only one that got stung all day and it was at the pool, no where close to the hives!



 

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