Today at "our" farm, I learned how to harvest honey. Here are the boxes where to bees live. The top two drawers have been taken off already and the bottom two are where the queen and all the worker bees will live during the winter. The honey in the bottom drawers is for them to eat. The honey in the top two are for us to eat.
To get the honey out of the honeycomb cells, you have to scrap the top beeswax off both sides of the frame. I think there are nine frames in each drawer.
Beekeeper Bob is showing me how to open up the honey cells with a fork brush.
If you brush it too hard, you break off too much of the cells and the bees have to work hard to repair it. Then the frames go in a spinner and the honey is spun out of the little honeycombs.
You can see the silver spinner in the back of the picture. You put two frames in the spinner at a time and spin them on both sides. The spinner went so fast it made my whole arm feel wobbly.
The empty frames are put back in the drawer and stacked on top of the other drawers. The bees will fill the cells up with honey again.
I like to eat honey but not the beeswax; it tastes weird.
