So, Michelle and I finished scraping the honey off of the frames.  I’m not sure if it was the “right” way to do it, but it was the free way to do it.  By next spring, we will have the proper tooling to extract the honey by spinning the frames in a centrifugal honey extractor.  This year, however, funds are tight and we are making due with what we have available.  We used a rubber spatula to scrape the comb and honey off of the frame (we used a plastic foundation in the honey supers so we didn’t have to worry about accidentally scraping out the foundation) onto cheese cloth which was propped up on a wire grate. I was going to show you the video I took when we were scraping the frames, but evidently WordPress decided I need to upgrade to a “premium” plan in order to use a specific HTML tag for my media (what a load of crap!). This allowed the honey to flow through our filter and into a bowl.  We let that drip filter until it appeared that no more honey was coming out. We did that for each of the five frames that we collected from the bees.  We then took our filtered honey and put it into jars. We also heated up the comb with the honey that wouldn’t flow out and separated them in a bowl so we could use the beeswax and the other honey.

The heated concoction was filtered through a pair of nylon pantyhose to remove any of the debris.  From what I understand, heating up the honey destroys some of the beneficial elements that are found in raw honey, so we decided not to jar any of the honey we heated up.  The heated liquid then separates, on its own, according to the density of the liquid (i.e. the beeswax floats to the top).  Once it cooled, we removed the cake of beeswax and were left with the previously heated honey.  Unfortunately, we severely overheated the honey in the crock pot set on low.  Apparently, it gets a lot hotter than I thought it would.  We lost about two pounds of honey due to that SNAFU and we can’t even feed it to the bees because bees can get sick off of caramelized sugars. I’m sure we can find a use for it, likely baking, but whatever enzymes and pollen was in it which is very good for us is long since gone.

We were left with several pounds of honey, though, so we hit up Wal-Mart to grab some jars and lids.  Pro Tip: we checked Cash-And-Carry too, but the jars were more expensive.  I’m not sure what determines how “good” a simple glass jar is, but I’m fairly certain that the ones we bought were sufficient for our purposes.  I also happen to like the shape better than the ones we found at Cash-and-Carry, but that’s just personal preference. Here is a picture of the finished product.  I put my son, Elijah’s, phone under it to give an indication of the clarity and color of this raw honey.

As you can see, it is a beautifully dark color.  As we don’t own a ton of land, we can’t guarantee what pollen’s and nectar’s went into the hive, so I am just calling it “Wildflower Honey”.  At any rate, the end result is a richly dark honey with a very complex flavor and a slight tang at the end.  I enjoy it quite a lot as the flavor is vastly different than what I have found in the single plant (usually clover) honeys sold in most stores.  Luckily, we were able to harvest enough for us and a few of our family and friends.

As we plan to have several more hives next year and we have learned quite a bit about beekeeping this year, I wanted to throw out a few bits of information that I have learned through trial and error this year. Hopefully, someone will find it useful:

1. When you receive your new hive, nuc, or bee box you should be prepared to immediately put on another brood box (ours had to be put on the day after we got it) or you could have your bees decide to leave because they don’t have enough room. We used the ten frame 9 5/8 boxes for our brood boxes. The first box was what GloryBee gave to us when we purchased our hive, so we just continued with that size.  We have a total of two 9 5/8, ten frame, brood boxes on our hive.  This is where the queen usually lays her eggs, but it will also have honey and pollen in it.
2. When you put the frames in your box (brood or honey super) DO NOT evenly space them apart. The frames have tabs on them that keep them spaced at exactly the correct spacing that the bees like.  If you evenly space them, like I did in the second brood box, you end up with the bees trying to bridge the gap between the frames and those are much harder to inspect and move around.  On the subsequent boxes (the honey supers), I pushed all of the frames together and centered them between the sides of the box.  This seemed to work pretty well as there is almost enough room left over to put an eleventh frame in the box.  I may buy some extra frames next year and shave off the tabs a little so it will fit in there.
3. Once our second brood box was almost full (took about 12 days in May to get to 8/10 frames full), we put two honey supers on at the same time.  This IS NOT the recommended practice.  Most of the beekeepers I have talked to recommend putting one box on at a time.  This prevents the bees from doing what they naturally want to do (which is to build up, not out) and make them fill most of the frames before moving on into the top most box.
4. It can take quite a while for the bees to draw out an empty frame with no comb on it, especially when you don’t get them started on it until June.  I expect that our first hive will produce a lot of honey next year, since the brood boxes won’t need to be filled up again and they can concentrate on building up the honey and honeycomb.  It can take even longer for the bees to decide to build their honeycomb onto plastic foundation.  They don’t seem to like it very much.  You can entice them to go up onto the frames by spraying it down with sugar syrup (1:1 mix).
5. The temperament of your bees can vary widely from hive to hive.  I am used to tending my bees, which are apparently very docile.  I don’t usually feel the need to smoke them when I am working in the hive and they will flutter off after I get about ten feet away.  I went to my dad’s house to check out his hive and once I got the top off, the little suckers started to dive bomb me.  They we super pissed and they weren’t afraid to show it.  They followed me all the way back to my rig, which was parked about 100 feet away.  Needless to say, my eyes were opened to the differing attitudes hives can take.
6. When you put your honey supers on you DO NOT have to have a queen excluder.  I bought one, thinking I didn’t want eggs in my honey supers.  When I put the supers on, though, the bees seemed to not want to venture through the excluder, so I took it off.  I didn’t end up with any brood in my honey supers.  I have theorized that this is because the queen had so much room for brood rearing (because I used the 9 5/8 boxes), that she never needed to move very far away from the main hive.  I don’t plan to ever use it again unless I run into issues with the queen laying in the honey supers.  If she does, I’ll scrape the brood out and put the excluder on.  It’s much easier to get the bees to venture through it once there is comb on the frames.  Once they start filling it with honey, the queen won’t try to lay eggs in it anymore…I think.
7. Mite treatment is a must.  One of the biggest issues that has to be addressed when you have hives, is the “varroa” mite.  They infest the brood and can completely kill a hive if not handled.  The recommendation from most experts is that you treat in August and in January/February, in Oregon.  You are supposed to remove the honey supers from the hive before you treat.  Here is where there was a breakdown in communication between me and the people who told us when to treat for mites.  They told me that the bees need about 80 pounds of honey to make it through the winter without needing fed.  Any amount of pounds short of that will need to be made up for by supplying them with “bee candy”, which is a special kind of fondant (a doughy sugar substance), pound for pound (i.e. if you are short one pound of honey, you will need to feed them one pound of bee candy). What I didn’t know, is that most of this honey is down in the brood boxes and I am supposed to take the honey supers off before treating for mites (with the Thymol – a thyme essential oil – method I am using).  I am pretty sure my first treatment with not be very effective since I left the honey supers on and put the treatment on top of the top most honey super.  I was supposed to put it directly on the top brood box.  Even if the honey supers will not be harvested, you will be taking off the supers for the winter so the hive can conserve heat (the bees form a cluster down low in the hive to keep each other warm in the winter and will not go up into any honey supers you have on there).  Since I left the honey supers on, the honey in them will not be toxic but it will taste weird (eww! Thyme flavored honey?!) so we can’t use it and the bees won’t be able to use it.  It will probably just end up thrown away, unfortunately.
8. The ancillary equipment you will have to have to start beekeeping is a bee brush, a hive tool, a bee jacket and gloves (no need for the full suit if you wear jeans), and a smoker.  If you want to spend a little more you can get the full bee suit and a frame grabbing tool, which can be handy when those suckers are full of comb, heavy, and stuck.

Obviously, there are quite a few more things I learned about keeping bees, but these are some of the ones that caused me the most frustration when I finally figured out the answer.  If you are thinking about beekeeping as a hobby, go for it!  It’s a blast to watch those girls work their butts off and see them building.  As for us, we will be selling our raw honey and beeswax next year when we have more hives and more honey available.  I want to eventually have around twenty’ish hives, but I’m going to slowly increment that according to how much honey we can feasibly sell and how much extra work I can handle on top of my normal job.  We will be announcing our official company launch and logo soon.  Stay tuned for updates!