Nothing Goes to Waste with the Bees

Beekeeping is a hobby in which nothing goes to waste.  After pulling honey, there is a use for everything.  Let's look at the cappings, for instance.  The cappings are the wax cap that seals off the honeycomb.  In order to spin the honey in the extractor, you must use a knife to cut the top cap off in order to expose the honey.

Once the honey drains off of the wax, you are left with this.  We'll warm this in a crock pot with a little water, the wax will liquify and rise to the top.  We'll skim that off to make candles and chap stick.  The honey will be cooked out of the wax, leaving a honey/water mixture that we will feed back to the bees in the winter.

The frames that we've extracted the honey from still have some honey on them.  Unfortunately, you cannot get every drop.  That's okay.  We set the boxes and frames out on a bench about 15 yards from the hives, and the bees come back to reclaim what's rightly theirs.  Hundreds and hundreds of bees fly around the boxes, robbing the honey to take it back to the hives.  

After cleaning the honey off of the extractor with a water hose, the honey/water is put in a bucket and the bees come drink the sweet water to take back to the hive.  We put a float for them in the water so that when they step on the raft to drink, they don't drown.

Here's a photo of a couple of the frames that we extracted the honey out of and the bees have had a couple of days to clean them up, removing all the remaining honey from the frames.

They do such a great job on removing every useable bit of pollen, nectar, and honey from the frames. All of those products are carried back to the boxes and put back into "inventory."  We will put these cleaned up frames in the freezer for a few days to kill any hive beetle eggs that may be on the frame.  Then we'll store in a tote and these frames with drawn comb will be put back on the hive in the spring.  The bees will spend most of their energy making honey versus making honeycomb since most of the honeycomb is already constructed.

We poured some honey from the bottom of a bowl into a jar lid.  The bees quickly found it and have made it their ambition to rob this honey back and return it to its rightful owners.

The uncapping tub and filter still was quite sticky with honey and comb.  Rather than wasting time and energy scrubbing and cleaning, well...  We'll let the bees clean up the sticky mess.  You can see them scouring the screens, and uncapping tub.  It will be spotless before you know it.

Here is that jar lid that used to be full of honey.  The bees in a mater of just a few hours, have cleaned it all up!

Bees are really unique creatures.  They leave nothing, cleaning up after themselves and also will work for you as well.  Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.  They do it all.

Walk-around Wednesday

We had Worship Service this afternoon at one of the nursing homes in town.  It was a nice time.  Our little church always enjoys visiting there, singing old hymns, praying, and opening the Word of God.  It was a 'sweet' time.  The Bible compares the Word of God to being priceless and sweet:

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

Speaking of honeycomb, one of our milk customers dropped by to pick up his milk and had a sweet treat for us.  He had just returned from Mittie, Louisiana, where he got some honeycomb just dripping with honey.  We are eating this by the spoonful, and it's not gonna last too long.

The second thing I saw today is that the two rows of cowpeas I planted are popping up nicely.  I have one row of purple hull peas and one row of black-eyed peas that we planted in the garden in the side yard where we had just harvested Irish Potatoes.  They seem to thrive in the heat and humidity.  The only thing that affects them are aphids, but I've got some neem oil ready to go when I see them on the plants.  I've bordered the pea patch with sunflowers.

Just to the north of the peas, I planted Cinderella pumpkins, Peanut Pumpkins and New England Sugar Pie Pumpkins along with some assorted gourds.  They aren't up yet.  This planting is an experiment because the seeds are old (2017) and were saved from some pumpkins my parents brought back from a trip to South Dakota.  I planted a lot of seeds on each hill, assuming that since they're old, the germination might not be too good.  We'll watch and see what happens.

Finally, I wanted to show you a basket of peppers we picked.  It is my new favorite variety.  They're called Shishito Peppers.  I'll show you next week a delicious recipe that we found for them.  

We'll talk again tomorrow night.

Cleaning Up After the Bees

We’ve had a colony of bees living in the hollow column of our side entrance for years now.  Due to the location of the hive, we’ve been unable to get any of the honey, but we’ve enjoyed them living there due to the fact that they pollinate our plants.  In a post from early May, we showed you the bees bearding up outside the entrance to their hive.  They either do this when it is too hot or when a new queen is leaving in a swarm.

During the last week of June, we noticed diminished activity in the hive, with only a few bees flying in and out.  Then, one afternoon we opened the door and smelled a foul odor.  It was a sickly sweet fermented odor, with a slight alcohol scent.  We looked down at the base of the column and noticed honey running out of the bottom.

Fermented honey (meade) running out of the bottom of the column

It really stunk and it was attracting bugs.  I knew that something had to be done to clean out the honeycomb filled with souring honey out of the column.  I got our jack and a 4 x 4 and jacked up the roof of the side porch enough so that I could pull the column out.

The fiberglass column, even though it is hollow, was very heavy and as I pulled it out, maggots began falling from the cap of the column that contained some honeycomb.  it was just a nasty exercise. Benjamin helped me pull the thing out of the way so that we could start working on it.

Pulling the column out

As we pulled out the column, a bunch of honeycomb with rotten honey and maggots poured out.  

Quick inspection showed that there was a lot of honeycomb still in the column, lining the interior and going about 4 feet down.

Using a T-post I started scraping the interior and pulling out honey-saturated honeycomb.

Here is a closer look:

The Honeycomb hideout

It was pretty nasty stuff:

I wish we could have gotten to this while it was still good

We sprayed as much of the honey and honeycomb out of the column as we possibly could and sprayed a bleach and water solution on the inside out outside of the column to try to knock down some of the awful smell.

We had a big pile of honeycomb and sticky rotten honey by the back door that fell out when we moved the column and another pile that we scraped out in the yard.  We shoveled all of the honeycomb that we removed into a 5 gallon bucket and we threw it in the pasture.  We learned a couple of things in the process:

1.       Chickens like to eat honey-drenched honeycomb, and

2.       Black socks and flip flops aren’t going to get me on the cover of GQ magazine.

Oh, one other thing we learned: I’m going to talk to some beekeeper friends of mine.  I already miss the bees.  I want to see if they’ll bring a new swarm of bees to our house.  This time in a beebox and we'll put it in the backyard.  We'll be able to get the honey off of this one.

Getting Wild Honey from the Honeycomb

A beekeeper friend of ours gave us some honeycomb from some wild bees that he found in the woods.  We cut pieces off of it and used it to sweeten our coffee, but the wax made a real mess in the coffee cups which was hard to clean.  So we decided to go ahead and extract the remaining honey from the comb.  Bees cap the cells of the comb with beeswax.  To extract the honey, you have to uncap it.  Professional beekeepers use a hot knife to uncap it and then they have an extractor that uses centrifugal force to spin the honey out.  Of course we don't have any of that.

We just used a knife to cut through the beeswax-sealed honeycomb, exposing the honey.  You can see the sealed cells at the very bottom of the photo below and the cut open cells on top.

Capped and Uncapped honeycomb

On the left hand side of the picture below, you can see a cell that is bright yellow in color.  That's pollen!  Bees go out and collect pollen from male flowers.  They collect the pollen in pollen baskets on their back legs.  Maybe you've seen bees with large yellow "bags" on their back legs?  Anyway, they carry it back to the hive.  It will be used as food for the baby bees.  Pollen is high in protein. Bees will store this pollen in an empty cell that is used as a pantry for storing their food.

A cell filled with pollen

Since I don't have fancy beekeeping equipment, I tried to remove the honey the best way I could.  I just cut up the honeycomb to uncap it, put it in a colander that sat over a pot that sat over a skillet of hot water.  I used a potato masher to coax the honey out.

Mashed up honeycomb

You can see lots of pollen once the honeycomb is mashed. 

I lifted up the colander to see if we were getting any honey and... we were!  I left it overnight to drip.

American Honey

The next morning I used a rubber spatula to scrape all the honey off of the pot and into a half pint jar.

Now we didn't get much honey, but we only had a few pieces of the honeycomb.  It was still neat to actually see what getting the honey out of the honeycomb was all about.

A little bit of honey

And even though it was just a little bit of honey, we will use it to sweeten our coffee... without the mess that we experienced earlier when we put the whole chunk of honeycomb in the coffee cup.

Honey and Honeycomb

Psalm 19:9-10  King James Version (KJV)

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.

Word pictures.  I like them.  I am a visual person.  If you really want to get me to remember something, draw a picture using words.  That's what the Psalmist did. When talking about the Law of the Lord, he said the commandments are everlasting and just and represent absolute Truth.  He didn't stop there.  He went on and compared the Word of God to gold and honey.  What is more desired than gold - especially in hard and uncertain times?  The Gold Standard.  Gold is a store of value. What can be sweeter than Honey?  Sugar, you say?  Nope.  Honey is twice as sweet as sugar.  If you are substituting honey for sugar in recipes, you use half the amount of honey.

A friend of ours came by the other day and had just robbed some honey from a wild hive in the woods and he shared with us 3 big pieces of honeycomb.  Our friend is a beekeeper and told us stories about bees.  Did you realize that bees are the only insect that makes a product that is edible? The honeycomb was heavy, sticky, and aromatic.  It was dry on the outside, but the bees cap off the cells with beeswax. When you cut into the cells, the honey oozes out.  I cut a chunk off of it to get a closer look:

Honeycomb

You can pop the whole thing in your mouth and chew it up.  It is waxy, because of the beeswax, but it is edible, but you can do other things with it as well.  For instance, we put each a chunk of honeycomb in our coffee cups on Sunday afternoon to sweeten our coffee.

A little cream and sugar HONEY!

Upon pouring the hot coffee in the cups, the honey immediately dissolves.  What remained on top of the coffee was a swirling mass of stuff that didn't look appetizing.  It wouldn't hurt you to consume it, as it was merely beeswax, but it was just weird to have something floating in your coffee so I skimmed it out.

Beeswax

The coffee, of course, sweetened by honey, was delicious and satisfying.  We don't use much refined sugar at all and substitute honey, so we didn't notice much difference in the taste of our coffee, but...

Waxy cups - a mess to clean

When we were finished with our coffee and the cups cooled, there was a coating of wax all over the inside of the cup that proved to be quite difficult to clean.  Tricia scrubbed and scrubbed and used very hot water to finally remove all the beeswax from the cup.  Since honeycomb used to sweeten coffee resulted in too much work, we won't do this again.  Instead, in the next few days, we'll show you what we did with the rest of it.