Third Day: The Sweet Life

Today was our third day at beekeeping camp. Since we were becoming beekeeping experts quickly it was now time to steal from the bees...oh I mean harvest the honey:). We traveled by car to Tulo Valley in Spanish Point where Quincy's largest apiary is located. After taking a walk around the property to see which trees the bees in that area were collecting pollen from (Fiddlewood) we suited up and got ready to go into the hive.

As soon as we opened the hive and smoked the bees we saw golden honey comb dripping with honey. As we harvested the honey we took the foll frames of honey and replaced the hive with our freshly painted supers filled with empy frames for the bees to draw out new honey comb. As we drove home a man on a motorcycle flagged the Burgess mobile down to let us know that there were bees in the car:). We didn't have the heart to tell the man that there was also 50lb of honey in the back of the car as well.

When we returned to the Honey House we learned the art of taking the wax cappings of of the honey. This process is called uncapping. In order for the honey to come out of the comb during the extraction process the beekeeper must uncap the wax. We remembered not to throw away the wax since it is more expensive than honey. We placed our wax into the strainer to be melted down with other wax in the near future. Darius was stung twice but there was no reaction noted while at camp. We hope that he is having a good night's rest:).

Almost everyone went home with a cup full of honey and honey comb. We hope that you have all had a sweet day!