On Labor Day, our labors churned out sweet success. The bees produced some bee-autiful wildflower honey.

The bees store the honey in cells on frames. To get the honey, Jaime uses a hot knife to remove the wax caps on the cells, while Robyn (left) and Nikie offer a hand.

Any cells that are still intact after the hot knife get scratched by Deidre, wielding the funky yellow fork.

Then the frames go into the extractor, a stainless steel drum that is cranked by hand. Centrifugal force pulls the honey out of the open cells. It collects at the bottom of the extractor.

Cranking the extractor provides a great upper body workout!

Honey (with bits of wax) pour out the bottom of the extractor into a filtering bucket.

Once the honey has had a chance to settle through two filters, it’s time to bottle!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 10:59 am and is filed under Bees. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.