First Honey Harvest!

The first honey harvest is officially in the books!

We have eight hives and pulled honey from six of them—twenty medium frames altogether. Not every frame was fully capped, so we came away with a little less honey than twenty completely full frames would have given us. Still, for our first harvest, it felt like quite a haul.

I saved my arch-nemesis hive for last.

The girls in that hive are a little more aggressive than the others. In fact, every sting I’ve received so far has come from that particular group. Naturally, it also turned out to be our best-performing hive. We pulled ten frames from it alone, and it still had more to give.

By then, however, the girls were getting wound up, and I decided we had tested the limits of our relationship quite enough for one day. I’ll go back for the remaining frames once everyone—including me—is ready.

Today, we assembled the eight-frame honey extractor and the storage and bottling tank we bought from HillCo (hillco.buzz). The bottom-drive electric extractor worked amazingly well, and I have never been so grateful that we did not choose the hand-crank version.

As with most first attempts, we also began a running list titled Things We Will Do Differently Next Year. At the top: find an elevated surface for the extractor so the bottling tank can sit beneath the gate with both the medium and fine-mesh strainers in place. Why the pieces don’t fit properly with our current setup remains a mystery. But I digress.

We removed the wax caps with an uncapping roller, loaded eight frames into the extractor, and let it spin. At 360 RPM, the honey was flung from the comb and against the walls of the tank.

And then we opened the gate.

After all the preparation, all the learning, all the opening and closing of hives—and, yes, all the stings—there it was: our own liquid gold flowing into the tank.

That was a sight to behold.

Everything is now cleaned and put away, ready for the next harvest. And somewhere nearby, my arch-nemesis hive number three is already making more honey…and possibly plotting against me.