MyGardenPal Blog

Remember that talk your parents gave you when you just hit puberty?  No?

Me, neither.  It either didn’t happen, or I buried it deep down in my sub-conscious.  So, we’re going to have that talk now.  Except without the birds.  Be warned, his tale does involve swollen body parts, and a sticky ending.  Of course, I’m talking about extracting honey from my bee hives.

This being my first time I called on my friend Matt to come help as he has done this before.  Matt seems to be there the first time I do lots of things, I’m not sure what to make of that.  Anyway, honey extraction… This is the process:

Smokin'

1.  Make sure you are fully covered and wearing two layers of clothing because the bees can stink you through one layer…. yep, found that out about four times, including one on the neck.

2.  Wear gloves and make sure they are sealed at the top… lots of lessons for me today.

I am not an elephant, I am a human being!

3.  When bees do get into gloves, do not run away screaming like a little girl trying to rip gloves off… whoops

I have a bee book here with photo’s of beekeepers just wearing shorts and a shirt, with only a veil to protect their face, while they pull frames out of the hive.  I now no longer believe these photos, they must have been  photoshopped!

Phat Hand

I was also told wearing white stops the bees stinging, but they will attack dark clothing (something to do with bears being dark).

Well, here I am dressed whiter than a bride, and being stung. Eight times!  Something tells me the bees don’t like having their house broken into and their food stolen.

Anyway, lets move on as this hand is still swollen and itchy as hell, so I don’t know how much more I can type.

The first hive we opened was so full that the bees had started to build honeycomb onto the underside of the lid.  Once we get the frames out of the hives, the honeycomb needs to be decapped in order to extract the honey.  The normal method is to use a heated knife which will make removing the wax caps easier.  But we found that the wax was quite soft and just needed to be scraped off.  Another advantage of living in the sub-tropics.

Hive lid with honeycomb

The wax that is scraped off is dropped into a bucket of water, this is so the honey stuck to it will dissolve, and we can then salvage the wax to use later.  My girls are looking forward to making candles so we’ll see how that goes in another post.

Once the frames are decapped, they are put into the honey extractor.  This is a large stainless steel drum with wire frames inside fixed to a rotating shaft.  This is used to hold the hive frames, which are then spun to extract the honey using centripetal force.

Decapping with a knife

This is done with a hand crank, and you can see the frames spin and the honey being thrown out and oozing down the side of the tank.  The frames are double sided so once one side is done the frames are flipped over and the honey on the other side is also spun out.

Honey extractor

All of this is more manually intensive than it sounds, so, being the good dad than I am, I let the kids experience cranking the extractor handle for while.

Once the honey settles on the bottom of the extractor it needs to be drained off, or else it gets too high and impedes the spinning frames.  A plastic bin is placed under the extractor with a wire mesh to filter out any wax.  We used fly screen wire for this, which is probably a bit course because some fine pieces of wax did sneak through, but not enough that would ruin your honey on toast in the morning.  I am told pantyhose is probably a better option but I didn’t want to part with any, I mean, Cheryl didn’t want to part with any.

Honey being filtered

As the frames were emptied we put them back into the hives for the bees to start filling them again.  Getting them back was nowhere near as traumatic as pulling them out.  The bees were still mightily pissed off, but we had wizened up and taped up the top of the gloves so the little buggers couldn’t get in.

At the end of the day we ended up with a 25 litre bin full of honey.  Along with two swollen hands (Matt also was stung – reminds me of a Pink Floyd song… my hands felt like two balloons…), a swollen neck, lots of itchiness, and a mess to clean up.   I’m sure we will do much better next time.  Well, I say we, but the chances of getting anyone to help after this little episode is probably quite slim.  In fact, I shouldn’t really be posting all the bad bits on here should I?  Now I’ll never talk any of you into helping me.

Free honey anyone?

Namaste

Namaste!

Yes, it hurts!