Harvest Time!

It’s harvest time! It’s harvest time! Yippee! God, I love this time of year. We finally get to taste the fruits of our labors (well, their labors, really, but oh, still so sweet!)

One of the things I love about the honey harvest is the different colors of the honeys in different frames. The girls build out from center (inner frames first, then outer, bottom middle to upper outer), so as different flowers come into bloom, the honey they’re collecting at the time will have a different hue. It’s really beautiful to compare the different colors. I remember some years ago I got a single frame that was like a rainbow, these gorgeous amber striations showing the passage of season in sweet.

It was hard work getting the bees out of the honey supers. I had to take out each frame by hand and shake it in front of the hive, which got most of them off, then do a second pass. With two boxes of ten frames each for each hive, that’s 80 shakes. Whoo-boy, was I sore. I tried using a bee brush to get them off, but that just seemed to piss them off. I figured if a few ended up hanging out, it wasn’t such a big deal.

I left it over night and then wrapped it in plastic, so robbers wouldn’t get in…you know, yellowjackets and the like, not guys in striped shirts with masks, I didn’t figure them for trying to steal my golden treasure. Now, it’s up to Julie to haul the hives up to Duval for extraction…then we eat!