Actually we were hoping we would find gold when the time was right, back when we first set up the Genesis Colony of honey-bees at Pure Water Hollow in March. We jumped into the honey-bee business without much prior knowledge or experience, but I think things have gone very well. All the credit really needs to go to Lisa. She seems to have a natural sense as to what needs to be done with them, as well as taken some time to study up on honey-bees.
We have donned our veils and gloves a couple other times checking on the hive and adding additional supers, but this is the first time Erica got a picture of us.
Here we are ready to break into the lid of our hive and "rob" them. I have the smoker which should calm the bees down, but at this point, we really did not know what to expect from them. I guess I was picturing a wild and fierce attack on the part of the bees when we would open the hive, but they stayed calm. On some of these pictures you can note the time. We began as dusk was settling in at 8:16 pm
The heat index for this day was supposedly over 100 degrees again. The outfits made it even hotter, but the heat did not bother us too much. Here was the Genesis Colony on this warm evening as we approached:
When we took the lid off, there were bees and honey comb right up at the top. It appeared as though the top super was filled up completely with honey!
We smoked many of the bees on down into the hive and lifted the top super off the hive. I could not believe how heavy such a small box was. When we weighed it later, it came to 43 pounds, which is a lot to lift slowly, straight up, trying not to stir up the many bees that were still in this part of their hive!
It looked like each frame was full of honey and honey bees! This picture came out a bit blurry, but you can get an idea.
We put an empty super, with all the frames ready to be filled, on top of the hive and then put the honey-filled super back on top of that. The idea was that the bees left in our honey-filled super would go on down into the new, spacious super we had just given to them. With some encouragement from the smoker, many more of the bees deserted the super we were wanting to take by crawling on down into the new super.
We then took the super full of honey off again and began to take out each frame. Here we are looking at the frames:
There were still plenty of bees that were staying with the honey so Lisa gently brushed all the remaining bees off of each frame in turn, into the new super. A few of them were crawling around on us during this time, but not too bad. Erica got a picture of some of the bees on Lisa’s veil and arm.
Here are some of the frames, all the bees brushed off, and ready to go back into the super:
After we replaced each frame back into the box, we were ready to transport the super full of honey down to the house. There were still a few bees that accompanied us along the trail, but by the time we got to the house, we could find only two bees.
Now that we were in the house, we could examine the frames in better light.
Some of the cells had come open, and golden, delicious honey was oozing out! We immediately knew that it was delicious as we licked our fingers that had gotten covered with honey. Of course everyone had washed hands!
We are now still letting the honey drain from the frames. This is taking a very, very long time. We do not have any fancy extractor or anything, so as of now we are just cutting the beeswax open and letting the honey drip out. At first there is much honey that pours out, but then it takes a long time for each drip to come out.
We are very thankful that no one got stung and that it looks like we have a good harvest of honey for our first attempt. I am looking forward to seeing how many quart jars of honey we can fill from this one super. We would also like trying to make some beeswax candles some day. That would be a fun project on some cold winter day when we are all snowed in!
Thank you, Lord, for allowing us to learn about honey bees and providing us with such a delicious, natural food source!
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