Sweeter Also than Honey and the Honeycomb

9 The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.  

10 More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.        Psalm 19:9-10 KJV

Saturday afternoon and the phone rings.  It's a friend who's about to go work some of his hives.  He tells me that he'll be pulling frames of honey and extracting it.  He's offering Tricia and I to go out with him and learn, saying we'll be far ahead of the rest of the class.  I was interested, but our bee suit hasn't come in yet.  He responded, "You don't need all that.  Wear a long sleeved shirt, your gloves and your veil and ya'll will be just fine."

We show up and he has the colony pretty doggone mad.  I get out of the car and bees are buzzing around my head, annoyed.  I don't want to get stung, so I quickly grab my veil and gloves.

We check the hive for brood, for pollen, and for honey.  We search for the queen, but she's hiding.  We remove frames of capped honey.  Here's one:

The bees have capped it with wax.  The frames are heavy!  I picked up a box of frames full of honey and struggled to get it back to the truck.

To get the honey out, we'll have to remove the cap.  It is made of wax.  A heated knife is used to melt the wax cap, exposing the sweet honey underneath.

The wax and some honey falls into a screened container and the honey drips down to the bottom.  It was very enticing.  I kept reaching down in the container to pull out pieces of honeycomb.  I would chew on it, relishing the sweet, sweet honey - Miele (in French) until all that was left in my mouth was wax.

We then put the frames of honey that has the caps removed by the knife and a type of "comb" that perforates where the knife couldn't reach into an extractor.  The extractor has a hand crank and uses centrifugal force to push the honey out of the frame and against the walls of the extractor, where the honey drips down the sides into a tank below.

We then open the valve and run the extracted honey through some screens to filter out wax and other things.

We ate lots of honeycomb and honey!  It sure was sweet.  We didn't get stung one time and feel like we learned quite a bit - a "sweet" experience, for sure!