A Postscript on the Bees

A few final notes following the pulling of fall honey from our hives.  We had mentioned a while back about small hive beetles and the damage that they can do in a hive.  If you have a strong colony, the bees will do a good job of fighting them off.  The guard bees run them out of the frames.  We help the bees out a little bit.  We learned a trick from our bee club that is doing the trick.

Swiffer sheets.  Yep, you heard me right.  Those sheets that you put on a dust mop to clean your kitchen floors have a dual purpose.  They will catch and kill small hive beetles.  We put a sheet on the top of the frames. The bees run the small hive beetles out of the hive and up to the top.  When they run across the Swiffer sheets, their little feet get caught in the microfibers and they are stuck together like velcro.  They end up dying.  Look at all the small hive beetle carcasses on the Swiffer sheets!: 

Tricia began rendering the beeswax from the cappings from our fall honey pull.  It only consisted of 21 frames, but we still save every bit we can.  Tricia puts all the cappings along with some water into a crock pot and lets it all liquefy.  This is then poured through a muslin cloth that acts as a filter.  We do this process twice to get a lot of impurities out of the beeswax.  It looks like a brick of gold.

We're saving all this beeswax for candle-making and making lip balm.  We are getting quite an inventory of beeswax and there are so many uses for it.

Once the beeswax has been filtered and removed from the crock pot, what remains is some honey that was trapped in the wax.  That honey, however, is mixed with water.  We tend to feed all this back to the bees.  In very early spring, we'll pull this out of the freeze and feed the bees.

So many uses of all the by products in honeycomb.  Not much goes to waste.

The Honey Harvest 2025 (Part 3)

Once we transferred the boxes to the honey house, the work of extracting the honey begins.  Our friend from the bee club has an air conditioned honey house and some expensive equipment.  We are a small operation and haven't invested in extraction equipment.  Fortunately, we have friends in our bee club that generously allow us to use their equipment until we get our feet on the ground.

So here is a medium frame of capped honey.  All of those cells have a layer of white wax that encapsulates the honey inside.  In order to extract the honey, you must uncap it.

There are several methods to do this:  Heated knives, fish-filleting knives, bread knives, and what we call "a scratcher." We used all three.  You stand the frame up sideways over a stainless steel table and begin cutting the wax cap off of both sides to expose the honey for extraction.

The uncapped frames are then placed in slots on the table.  The table has a screen at the bottom that catches all the wax cappings.  The honey that drips out of the frames or out of the cappings flows beneath the screen into a basin below.  There is a honey gate at the bottom that allows you to capture all the honey.

Here is a close-up of an un-capped frame of honey.  Sticky.  Sweet.  Delicious!  

The extractor holds 18 frames.  I think this one costs $1,800.  The frames are set, one by one in the extractor.  The folks at the uncapping table just keep on working and lining up the uncapped frames in the table.  The folks on the extractor spin the honey and continue pulling uncapped frames from the table.  Believe it or not, it doesn't take that long. 

Last year the extractor we used was a hand crank extractor.  We thought it was nice and it was.  This one is a Cadillac.  It has an electric motor and is gear driven and digital.  You can spin it at different speeds.  As you spin, the honey gate is opened on the bottom and the extracted honey flows through a screen into a food grade five gallon bucket.

The screen catches wax and any other impurities or bees that got into the honey.

We repeated that process until we had extracted all the honey from the boxes.  We're not done yet!  Stay tuned for Part 4.

By-products from the Hive: Beeswax and Honey Water

When we butcher a cow, we use most everything except the "moo."  We make bone broth with the bones and pressure can it.  We render the tallow for soapmaking and for cooking and so on and so forth.  Same thing with the bees.  The honey is the main attraction, but there are other uses for what's left behind.  Tonight I'll show you what we did.  

Here's a photo of the cappings.  When the honey in the comb reaches the correct moisture percentage (17%, I think), the bees cap it.  In order to pull honey, you must cut the cappings.  You try to cut as little as possible so the bees don't have to work so hard to make comb and can make honey quicker.  Here is a container that catches all the cappings.  There is honey in it, too.  The honey drips down into the lower container, where it is drained off through a honey gate.

But what about all that wax?

The wax will not be wasted.  We manually squeeze as much honey as possible out of the wax.

That leaves little palm-sized wax footballs.  We throw those in a bag.

We put some water in a crock pot and warm up.  The wax is put into a muslin cloth 'filter' and is melted.

The wax runs right through and the muslin cloth catches most of the solids.  A lot of that is propolis.  We squeeze everything we can out into the crock pot that is heated up.

We set the bag that contained the wax on the back patio and the honeybees discover it quickly.  Nothing goes to waste with them.  They collect it all and bring it back to the hive to reuse.

Then we let the wax in the crock pot come to room temperature.  The wax is on top and the water goes to the bottom.

We did this numerous times to process all the wax.  It hardens into disks and then we weighed it.

Here is all of it once we were done:

The cappings from our 13.5 pounds of honey made 2.25 pounds of beeswax.  Our friend that let us use his honey extracting equipment did not want his cappings, so he gave it to us.  The cappings from his 16 pounds or extracted honey made 2.75 pounds of beeswax.  In all we have 5 pounds of beeswax!  We plan on making candles, lip balm, furniture polish, and melt some to brush on to frames prior to putting foundation in the hives to give the bees a head start.

But wait, there's more!  The 'water' at the bottom of the crock pot when the wax goes to the top isn't just water, it's honey water.  We filled bowls of it, but didn't throw it out.

We put it in freezer jars and freezer bags and will freeze it and give it back to the bees.

In the winter, when there's not much for the bees to eat, we'll thaw out the honey water and pour into bowls for the bees to come eat.  Many people feed their bees sugar water, but we'll try a natural approach and feed them their own honey water.  It'll have them fat and happy to begin making honey for next spring.

Our First Honey Extraction

Saturday was a big day for us.  We planned to extract our honey for the first time as beekeepers.  We met in the morning, smoked the openings to the four hives and went through each box, only pulling out frames that were completed capped.  When the nectar has turned to honey, the bees cap the cells.  Pulling honey from only capped comb ensures that your honey has the correct percentage moisture.

We have queen excluders on top of the two deep brood boxes on each hive.  This keeps the queen from moving up and laying eggs in the medium frames.  Those medium frames are exclusively honey.  That's good.  We went through each and every frame.  When our inspection was complete, out of nine medium supers, five of them were 100% (or very close to it) capped honey.  We will leave the remaining four there.  By the fall we'll likely pull honey again.

The photo below shows the five mediums full of honey in the back of the truck.  Bees don't want you to take their honey.  In order to evacuate the boxes of bees, you use a fume board.  That's the board with the t-shirt stapled to it.  Once you have your boxes of honey, you spray the fume board with some "bee repellant" made with 100% natural ingredients as we don't want chemicals in our honey.  The bees leave the frames and you put a top on the boxes.  This means your frames are mostly empty of bees.

The boxes of honey is HEAVY!  I'm estimating around 50 pounds per box.  We stacked those up in the honey house.  We're using his equipment this first year rather than purchasing all that you need to extract honey.

I almost feel sorry for the ladies that made all this honey.  (Except they stung me, so my sympathy level is lacking a bit.)  They followed the boxes 5 miles and were trying to clean up some of the honey we spilled.  They did a lot of work to make that.

Here's a look down into the box.  You can see the 'bee space' between the frames.  The bees have drawn out all the comb and capped it.  

Here is an up close shot of a frame of capped honey.  That is all wax that covers each cell of honey.

Using a heated knife, we cut the cappings off, exposing the honey beneath it.  Once you do that, the frames can be placed in an extractor and be spun.

This photo zooms in on a frame of honey that has been uncapped.  It is now ready for the extractor.

The frames are loaded into the extractor.  This extractor holds 6 frames.

The extractor uses centrifugal force to remove the honey from the frames.  You hand-crank the extractor as you would in an old-fashioned ice cream maker.  As you spin, the honey flies out of the frames against the inside of the drum and then drains down the sides to the bottom.

This frame shows an empty frame once the honey has been spun out of it.  The comb remains.  We'll put that back out with the bees and they will clean that up.  In the fall, we hope to pull again when the flow of goldenrod ends.

While we work, we eat.  Fresh honey and honey comb.  So delicious!  We eat until our stomachs hurt.

We open the honey gate at the bottom of the extractor and honey (and wax/comb) flows out.  It is run through several screens to remove the wax.  It then flows into 5 gallon buckets where we collect it for bottling later.

Here is part of the honey harvest that we got from our first honey extraction!

Tomorrow we'll show you how much we got and look at some other by-products from our first honey pull.  It was a long day with a lot of work, but the benefits were, well... SWEET!

Testing the Aged Cheese

Back in this blog post from December: Making Basic Cheese, we made some basic cheese, sealed it and have been aging it in our wine cooler for quite a while.  You can go back and read that post along with four others in the series to see how we did it if you missed it.  This week we decided that it was high time to pull it out and give it a try.  Here is a two pound wheel of cheese that we made almost eight months ago.

Pulling an aged wheel out of the cooler

When Tricia sealed this wheel of cheese with wax, she sealed a piece of paper in it with the date on it, so that we could track the amount of time that we aged the cheese.

Dated 11/14/2013

The cheese has been waxed to keep it from drying out.  Have you ever purchased a package of Kraft cheese at the grocery store and left it opened but unsealed in the refrigerator?  If you've done that, you know that the outer edges of the opened cheese will dry out and get hard and inedible.  That's why during the aging process, we wax it to keep that from happening.

Peeling off the wax

We'll save the wax and melt it to reuse the next time we make cheese.  Peeling the wax off is very simple and it comes off easily.

Now because of this next picture I almost titled this post "Tricia cut the cheese," but almost 24 years of marriage has taught me that that would not have been a wise decision and I would pay dearly for that momentary lapse in judgment.  So I resisted that temptation.  Tricia did, however, carve a slice of cheese out of the aged wheel to taste.  It was good.  Not great, but very good.  We're going to keep trying this and learning about it and getting better at it.  That's what it's all about.

Taking a slice out to try

One thing that we've learned is that while this cheese might not be the best cheese in the world for snacking on, it is fantastic for cooking with.  It is great in omelets, pasta, tacos. casseroles and other such dishes and we use it quite frequently for those type situations.  In fact, we haven't purchased cheese in quite a while.  I consider that a big plus.

Slice of homemade basic cheese from Our Maker's Acres

So we unwrapped the entire wheel and we have already put a big dent in it.  I'll show you one of the ways we used it in another post either tomorrow or the next day.

Basic cheese

While we certainly can't claim to be experts in the craft of artisan cheese makers, we're learning new things and finding new, exciting uses for the products that we make right here on our little homestead farm.

Making Basic Cheese (Part 3 Sealing and Aging)

Welcome to Part 3 of Making Basic Cheese.  Have you ever opened a package of store bought cheese and then placed it back in the refrigerator without sealing it properly?  When you go back to use it, you see that the outer exposed edges of the cheese is darker, hard, dried out, and thus, inedible.  To eat it you must cut off the hard part.

The next step we do in order to age the cheese we've made is to place a coating of wax over it to protect it during the aging process so that the cheese doesn't dry out.  If you have ever eaten those little babybel snack cheeses that are wrapped in wax, you know what I'm talking about.  So we've purchased a block of cheese wax from a cheesemaking supply website and now we've got to melt it.  We do this by placing the whole block of wax into a double boiler.

Melting the cheese wax in a double boiler

The object of our process is to fully encase the beautiful wheel of cheese below in wax to protect it from drying out during the curing process which takes several months. Prior to waxing, you want to leave the cheese in the fridge for a few days wrapped loosely in a cotton rag to allow for any additional whey to come out.  You want to turn it to make sure it air dries and it makes a rind on the outside.  Put it on a rack to allow the air to circulate around it fully.

A hanker for a hunk of cheese...

Our block of wax is now fully melted in our double boiler.  We're using the liner to an old rice cooker that doesn't work anymore to hold the wax.  We don't throw too much away at our house.  Items that no longer work get recycled into a second purpose other than what it was originally intended for.  Gallon jugs of apple cider vinegar get cut to become feed scoops, etc. etc.  Back to our wax, though, we're ready to coat the cheese.  

Melted Cheese wax

There is nothing too technical about this next step.  Simply dip the cheese halfway into the wax, ensuring that wax has gotten into any nooks and crannies.  Dip it, wait 10 seconds and then dip a second time.

Dipping the cheese

Sit this on a sheet of wax paper on the counter and allow to fully dry.  It doesn't take too long.

Drying the wax

Now, grab the cheese holding it by the side that you've already waxed and dip the unwaxed section into the wax so that it is fully coated.

Fully sealed

We're done!  While the wax is still wet, make a little label with the date and variety of cheese and push it into the wet wax.  This is important as it will let you know the date you began the curing process, so you know when it is done.  If you're making different types of cheeses, it will let you know which variety it is as well. Here's the neat thing about the wax - when you cut it open, you save the wax, re-melt and re-use it.

Sealed and Labeled 2 Pound wheel of Our Maker's Acres Homemade Basic Cheese

Now, for the curing process, we place it in the wine cooler.  This is a nifty new purchase.  This appliance costs $500 new which is outside of our budget, but Tricia was able to find this on Craigslist for $75!!  It has 2 separate, dual digitally controlled sections so that you can cure/age different types of cheeses.  The wooden racks and glass front door are nice features as well.  You can see that we have two other wheels of cheese that we'll be waxing today.

Wine cooler cheese ager

Take a close look at the object in the picture below and see if you can guess what it is.  (Answer Below)

Beeswax

It's beeswax.  We have a friend that is a beekeeper and he gave us a couple of pounds of beeswax from his colonies of bees after we asked him for some of it.  We'll trade him some cheese for it.  Instead of purchasing wax for sealing our cheese, we'll barter for it.  That fits in nicely with what we're trying to do in being as self-sufficient as possible and then bartering for items that we don't have.  Our friend doesn't want to milk cows and we don't like being stung by bees!

There once was a woman named Tricia,

Who made a bunch of cheese,

But when she ran out of wax for sealing,

She used some made by bees.  (Oh please!)

So here we are melting the beeswax in a double boiler, using the same process.

Melting the beeswax in a double boiler

Since the beeswax came directly from the hive, there is going to be some impurities in it.  I blew it off real good with an air compressor, but there are still a few specks that I can't remove.

Beeswax is fully melted

As a result, we pour the beeswax through a strainer to catch the remaining impurities.

Straining out flecks of residue

Now we have a container of beautiful, strained beeswax that is ready to seal another wheel of cheese.

None of your beeswax

Here is the finished product.  A beautiful wheel of beeswax sealed cheese ready to be aged!

Ain't that a pretty sight

Tune in tomorrow for the final installment of our Cheesemaking exhibition.  I think it is the best part since it involves tasting it!