Wednesday evening, Kelley decided he would get the honey out of the hives.   He had chased all the bees down into the lower part of the boxes...that was quite the job right there. then brought the boxes with the frames full of honey over to the house.  He set them in the back room for a few days to warm them up a bit.

 To get started they brought in the big propane tank and warmed up the garage real nice. Then Kelley would get out each frame and shave off the wax coating the bees had made over the honey. each little honeycomb is so perfectly shaped...how do they do that? Can I just say again how amazing bees are!  Truly one of God's greatest creations.

It was a super sticky messy job!  Tommy had given Kelley a neat electric knife that heated up so it could slice right through the wax, but there was really no easy way to get this part done.  Then KC took the frames and put them in this neat extractor machine.  It spun the frames around and pulled the honey out of them (and when I say it spun, I meant we cranked the handle to make it spin), then it would collect in the bottom of the machine.  Pretty cool.

Chris came over and helped for a while too.  Kelley had the machine just sitting on the floor at first, but it was jiggling all over the place so he got a pallet and screwed the thing right to it.  That worked much better, but it helped if someone stood on the pallet and held the machine down while someone else turned the handle.

It got to be pretty funny cause we were all so sticky.  We started out pretty good and tried to keep at least one hand clean to turn the handle on the extractor, but pretty soon we just let it happen.  Kelley was in it up to his elbows ( and all over the rest of him)  It was on the garage floor ( which soon was tracked into the kitchen floor, and I guess from our clothes and hands onto the kitchen counters...everywhere you would touch, there was stickiness) Kelley was cleaning off some things at the kitchen sink and when he tried to walk away, the rug went with him...totally stuck to him!

 

 When the bottom of the tank got  full, he just opened up the valve and out came the honey.  He had a couple fancy strainers to put the honey through, but we learned through trial and error that we needed to start with a bigger strainer and warm honey.  Where there was still so much wax in the honey, it just clogged the strainers right up. So we used some of my kitchen strainers first and got all the wax out, then heated it up a little and sent it through his finer strainers again.  It came out just beautiful this time.  

Kelley has watched a hundred you tube videos about doing this, but I think you just have to experience it to figure out how to make it work for you.

Kelleyand I have been trying to come up with a name for the honey company...Candice was helping him bottle some up and rightfully named it.

 I don't know if it was the work, ( ...Kelley has put in a whole summer of work into these bees...he doesn't look at it that way though..he throroughly enjoys them) love, or just memories of the experience that went into it, but that was the best tasting honey I've ever had.