Notes From the Honey Harvesting Side Kick

Pick-Up Truck Bed Full of Honey Harvesting Supplies

If it had been just me, the side kick, there wouldn't have been any honey harvested this year.

Ed did most of the strategizing and organizing on how we were going to gather and process the honey from our layens hives - and he did an excellent job! I watched a couple of YouTube videos and thought I was more than ready to be Ed's side kick in this endeavor.

Technically, the layens hives are "my" hives while our traditional U.S. Langstroth hive is "Ed's". That said, Ed has really done all of the hard work when it comes to raising our bees; that's now true when it comes to harvesting the honey as well.

The reason I say that we wouldn't have any honey if it were dependent on just me is that when we set out to harvest the honey frames from the hives, we were greeted with a never ending swarm of very angry and very loud bees. Even though we were in our respective bee suits and even though we used plenty of smoke (which is supposed to calm bees down), the bees were wild with angry activity. It's because of this that I would have put the lid back on and walked away.

But Ed was a trooper. He methodically executed his plan (the plan we agreed upon) and harvested the said number of frames from each hive (being sure to leave ample honey for the bees to overwinter) - despite the angry bees.

Side note: it's our theory that the bees were so angry because they had completely filled all available frames with honey and had run out of room to make more honey. We did help them in this regard as we left some empty frames for them to continue working and fill.

Ed will tell his story which will be the better story from a "technical" standpoint; however, suffice it to say that extracting the honey was a lot messier and a lot stickier than either one of us imagined it would be (even though Ed had laid out our work area perfectly).

We plan to bottle next weekend. It looks like we'll have 6 (just maybe 6.5) gallons of honey all told along with a nice amount of bees wax from which I plan to make candles (silicone candle molds and wicks have been ordered). Again, Ed will lay out the process for me to follow and he will supervise my work :)