Lo and behold, the time for the great honey harvest in our Cottage Home bee hives had arrived. Decked in all the appropriate safety garb(so very on trend) Eric Nordgulen and David Hostetter set forth to reap the gold liquid. They had the good luck of finding about 9 of the frames full and laden with beautiful honey.
(The bees bring in nectar which is ingested and then placed in the cells which have been readied by the bees. Next they place a cap of wax over the cell and fan it with their wings until it has dried. The honey is then ready for us to harvest.)
Lots of golden honey
David and Eric prepare to remove the honey
The process of clearing the frames and garnering the honey is wonderful yet pretty difficult and labor intensive. No mind. Cut the wax with a special heated knife, take those frames 3 at a time and spin the living daylights out of them until they are emptied. Any goodies left on the frames were given back to the bees. They devoured them! Then the filtering process. Twice filtered for what we hope yields the finest inner city honey around(note the tooting of our horn!). a glorious 4 gallons were harvested! Thanks bees! You are most magnificent creatures! What hard work.
