Gettin' My Buzz On

Healthberry Farms hired me the other day to gut organic chickens. It was a very heart-warming experience....warm hearts....and warm everything....while I meant to take some raunchy pics, I bet an ounce or five (5) of fresh sangre would have been getting into the battery chamber, and perhaps, if I were lucky, the lens.



Yesterday (Thursday) I went back to Healthberry to help with some honey extracting. We used a very "old-school" hand-crank extractor that would only allow two frames, like the waxy nine (9) in the picture below, to be extracted from at a time. A bit tedious but very rewarding, mesmerizing, and refreshing (a great fan with a slight honey mist!)....and all without electricity. Ben would uncap the supers and I'd crank the extractor and return the empties to be refilled again later.



We started out in the outside garage and were soon found out by a few bees who had followed the honey-thieves to their lair. He danced a dance to his cohorts and soon we were being swamped with buzzing and honey-eating. We moved into the greenhouse and luckily it was cool that day so we did not bake alive. A few bees made it in, most swarmed around the door. They seem to be so intuitive and I don't know if they have any sense of smell but they sure honed in on the honey that we had snatched. After about fourteen (14) minutes in the greenhouse we noticed that we were no longer surrounded by buzzing any longer. They must have given on and moved onto plain old pollen again.

Supers loaded with honey and ready to be uncapped, extracted and replaced.

Ben uncaps and saves all of the wax for later use in salves, candles and to bottle honey. The extractor was old but worked great....funny to think that older things worked better than most of our "new" things....odd, eh?

Uncap on...

The extractor in motion....it sends the honey to the barrel walls and gravity does the rest.

Once in a while I have to pour out what the extractor extracts...honey, wax, propolis and bees all slowly slide out to soon be bottled and lovingly consumed.

Alas, many a desperate working (lady) bee gets swallowed alive by their own food and desire. We rescued most, but some were beyond saving...R.I.P. Lost Bees.

The doble extractor in action....one-handed isn't so bad.

Oh yeah baby! The fruits of monotonous labor are sweeter than any paper rectangles gotten for any reason. You can (somewhat) see what really raw honey consists of.

Leaf Peeping is coming into the limelight. Get some!