Honey Harvesting~

The day arrived to check the supers

and see how many frames we could pull off

for honey extraction.

Couldn't of been a more beautiful day~
And, bonus points, there was NO wind!

Doug, teacher of our beekeeping class, is amazing!
He's a walking encyclopedia and so full of
information~

Along with checking the top super to see how
much excess honey there was, we ended up
doing a hive inspection to check the state of
the hive...

This frame shows brood, capped cells, and capped
honey cells on the outer edge.  This is their
typical pattern on the frame~

We were only able to harvest 3 frames off of one

hive.  The other hive didn't have enough to 'spare'

at this time and we wanted to leave enough for 

winter stores.

But,

come spring,

we'll hopefully be able to harvest more :)

Here we are lightly scraping the frames
to remove the caps before we spin
them in the honey extractor.

And, away we go.  Turning, turning, turning
the extractor to spin the honey.

Once all the honey is extracted and we've
turned (and sometimes scraped) the frames again,
it's ready to pour out into the sieve and bottom
white bucket.
As soon as it strained through then we opened the valve
to fill the jars~
YUM!
We got 3 quarts of honey with a little tad more :)
The flavor is amazing~
all wildflowers!