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I got together with some neighbors and fellow Metro Atlanta Beekeepers on Saturday to assist with the honey extraction of their bee hives. As I am a beekeeping novice, this the first time I actually got to make a big harvest. Many thanks to Vance and Patricia for being wonderful hosts (and for taking some great pictures).

Here we are, putting on the “fumigation board” and coaxing the bees to the lower levels of the hive supers.

After the bees moved down a level, we pulled off the supers, one level at a time and then hauled the “beeless” supers into the garage where the extracting was done. By “beeless”, I mean the bees were mostly gone. Each box always had a few bees left behind and we endured a few stings once the equipment came off. The force was with me this time as I escaped without a single sting (although I had a couple get lost in my hair). They seemed to prefer Dave!

Here I am by the unloaded supers in the garage.

Here, Patricia is using a hot extraction knife to melt/scrape off the honey caps. We got our first taste of the honey, and the wide variety of flavors, by chewing on the honey caps like gum - Delicious!

Once the individual frames of honey were “de-capped”, they were put inside the extractor. The extractor works like a centrifuge. Here the honey is coming out of the extractor and is being filtered. Richard Kiefer is looking on and sharing his calm wisdom.

I had to leave right after Patricia’s delicious El Salvadorian-style lunch so I didn’t get to see the final haul. Let us know when you have honey bottled and ready to sell, Vance!

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 7:55 pm and is filed under Beekeeping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.