Honey Spinning

Today we spun last fall's honey out of the honey comb.  We had two of these boxes, called supers, each with full trays of honey comb.

 You can see all the residual wax along the edges of the trays.

 Here Steve scrapes the wax covering off of the combs, opening them up so the honey can be extracted.

 We have a centrifugal honey extractor.  Two full trays can be inserted at one time, and then the handle is turned by hand, spinning the trays around and extracting the honey.

 Once one side of the trays are extracted, they are turned around and extracted more from the other side.

 Spout on the bottom of the spinner allows the honey to be drained into 5 gallon buckets.

 This comb tool helps open up the honey cells that the knife missed.  All the scrapings are saved and we put them out for the bees to gather the last bits of honey before we save the wax.  It can be melted and filtered to get all the unsavory bits out of it, and then the wax used however we see fit.  We use it in lip balms and hand creams, and I have also used it to make encaustic wax for my art work.  My house smells wonderful now, redolent of honey and bees wax.  Because most of the wax remains in the trays, we don't harvest much of it.  The bees will reuse the trays, hopefully filling them up again over the summer.  We got about 8 and 1/2 gallons of honey from these two supers today.
If you would like to see the post I created years ago where we captured a wild swarm of bees, you can see it here:  Going Buggy.
Other news from the home front, the hummingbirds have returned!  Too bad we can't feed them the honey but evidently it isn't good for them.  Seems odd but I'm not going to test it.  They get pure cane sugar syrup with no added coloring.
Till next time, be well.