Honey Harvest - Video

I finally got around to editing some footage from our honey harvest back in September. It was a beautiful morning, but we (meaning my wife and our friend Josh) had to work quickly to remove and clean the frames and make it to our extraction appointment on time. It's much easier to bring the frames to a place that already has all the equipment and knows what they are doing. Plus, they do all the cleanup. We brought them the frames and they cut off the capped combs and spun out the honey for us. We ended up with about 65 pounds of honey which we took home and bottled ourselves. The honey tasted a little different this year, kind of like apricot and pumpkin. Who knows were those bees had been!

Hope you enjoy this short video!

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/61500839 w=600&h=337]

Honey Harvest from Jeff Baumgart on Vimeo.

Make Us Some Honey!

Here is one of our bees hard at work in the garden. When you sit and watch them for a while, you really understand the term "busy bee". And busy they have been this year! We are on track to harvest a minimum of 80 pounds of honey come this fall, maybe even closer to 100. Not bad for 1 hive! I will keep you posted, maybe even a honey harvest video.

A Morning With the Bees

Sunday morning was a beautiful day for a  hive inspection. The queen was located thanks to the orange dot on her back. Sometimes she's difficult to find among 50,000 other bees! The hive is looking active and healthy. There was plenty of fresh larvae and capped brood. That sounds gross, but it is a good thing. This was also the time to add on the second deep. I don't really know bee stuff, actually I have no clue. I'm just repeating what I hear from the "real" beekeepers. All I contribute is the photos and video. Anyways, it's a very interesting hobby for all of us involved.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3MlSh4wAeM?rel=0&showinfo=0&hd=1&w=600&h=378]

The Great Honey Harvest of 2011

As first year bee keepers, we were pretty excited to harvest our first batch of honey. We were not counting on getting much, if any in the first year. Our busy bees on the other hand had higher hopes. They surprised us with almost 20 pounds of liquid gold! Our hive consists of basically 3 boxes stacked on top of each other. All of them contain 9 frames that the bees make wax comb into and fill with honey, and/or brood or larvae. The bottom 2 boxes we leave alone so the colony will grow and they will have some honey to eat through the winter. The top shallow box, or "honey super", contains just comb and honey, and is all for us.

First we had to spray a "fume board" with a smelly liquid that the bees hate. This drives the bees out of the honey super so we could take it off and collect the honey. 6 of the 9 frames were filled with honey. Not bad for the first year. We loaded the honey filled frames in the car and drove to New England Beekeeping Supplies in Tyngsboro, MA. They were super helpful and have all the equipment for extracting the honey from the combs available for rent.

Using a hot knife, the wax caps were sliced off. We saved all the cappings to make some beeswax products later. The frames were then places in the extractor, a large stainless steel cylinder with a motor and a spout at the bottom. As the frames spin faster and faster inside the extractor, the centrifugal force pulls all the honey out of the combs and eventually comes out of the spout below. The fresh honey was strained and filled our bottling bucket.

After we got home and made some whisky drinks with mint and fresh honey, we started bottling. We ended up with 32, 6 oz. jars. The taste is delicious! Much better than anything store bought. It was so exciting to see the whole process from start to finish and be able to enjoy something fresh and natural.

More photos

More photos