Honey extraction day!

Last fall (September 29, 2012), Mark (mentioned in the April, 2012 post) was harvesting some honey from his hives.  He was willing to suffer the presence of me and the four kids, so up to his place we travelled.  He had the extracting set-up all ready to go.

Above shows Mark's garage, modified to do the honey extraction.

Before we started the process, we took a look at the hives.  They were busy with active bees.  Below, first, is a picture.  Below that, a short video.

He had already removed the frames from the hive.  They were in a sealed container in his garage.  They were sealed so that the bees would be less likely to find the frames and reclaim their honey!  Below is a picture of a frame of capped honey.

In the stainless steel bowl to the left (in the photo above), there is a spatula-like tool with a cord coming out of the handle.  It is a heated tool that removes the capping of the honey, by melting/scraping them off.  That opens up the hexagonal compartments that the bees created and put honey into.  The frames (the woodenware rectangle in the pan on the right in the photo above) go into an extractor.  An even number of frames goes into the center of the metal cylinder (below).  Then, they are spun.  This uses the spinning action to fling the honey out of the hexagonal compartments in the frame and against the side of the extractor.  You can see the extractor in the top photo of this post.  A close-up of the extractor and its honey port is below.

You can see above that the honey is flowing out into a filter.  The filter is removing bits of wax and bees.  The honey then continues through and collects in the bucket below.  The bucket also has a honey port that you can use to bottle the honey.  Below is a video of the honey flow in action.

In the end, we left with a nicely-packaged bottle of honey.  It would be considered "local wildflower," raw, Grade A honey (at least that's my current understanding).  Below is a picture of it.

It is now April, 2013 as I write this post.  Most of the honey has been eaten!