Sweeter than honey?

There are a lot of benefits to keeping bees around.  Of course there is the honey, which is always dynamite.  I harvested plenty of honey from one of my hives this year, it has real flavor (which you just won't find in the grocery store varieties) and expresses a range of color depending on when and where it is harvested from.

This year I was able to capture four swarms for myself, which I have hived in three large Top Bar Hives up on the farm.  On top of that, I had opportunity to capture several other swarms which we placed with some aspiring new beekeepers - nice to get some other folks into the work of caring for bees!  My hope is that the hives will all be strong enough to weather the winter and will start next spring strong.  I will be able to split those colonies next year and continue to expand the apiary.

The wax not only looks great, but it smells simply amazing.

One of the side products that is readily taken from the Top Bar Hives is beeswax.  The bees build fresh comb which they use for raising young and for storing honey.  The honey storage comb is sometimes emptied out as the bees make use of the food during periods of colony growth or low forage availability.  That empty storage comb is good stuff for processing into pure beeswax.  Evie and I built a solar wax melter this summer and have been putting it to use to render out some beeswax for a special project she's interested in.  Pure beeswax has a lot of uses, but she has her eyes set on lip balm.  So we'll combine this wax with some other natural products and start turning out Evie's first line of lip balm soon.  It's sure to be the hot item this winter for all those chapped lips out there, so keep your eyes open for our young entrepreneur's announcement about available product.

A Taste of Honey

After some weeks away on various adventures, it was time to check on the bees and see about harvesting a couple of bars of honey!  The weather has been hot, hot, hot in Yakima, and I had some concern that the hive would be full of collapsed comb and angry bees.  But the girls seem to be getting along well and it looks to me that the colony is quite healthy as we move into late summer.

I've been getting a bit more practiced at hive inspections, and this time I was able to put my new inspection stand to use, something I cobbled together from scraps in the garage.  It allows me to put a bar up for inspection and photos, which is handy when working alone.  My new smoker works like a champ, though I try to not overuse it since the girls seem not to like it much.

The colony has expanded mightily since their installation in May.  They have more than tripled in size, and now occupy 16-18 bars and have a very solid brood chamber clustered near the entrance.  I harvested one bar several weeks ago, when I took some junior high students from the church on a hive tour.  I had one student fully outfitted in a suit working in the hive right alongside me, which was fun for me and for him.  The honey is really, really good, and I am glad that top bars allow for the option of cutting out comb as well as the crush-and-strain harvest method.

They had been busy over the last several weeks, constructing several new bars of honey storage, which they are slowly filling up. After checking out their work, I decided to harvest two bars from near the entrance which had been capped for some time.  This is probably the last harvest I will make this year, focusing instead on arranging the colony to survive this winter so that they will have a strong start in the spring.

I brought the honey home to crush and strain, but Tavish was into it before I could even get the buckets set down.  He "yikes it, reewy reewy yikes it."  After straining it overnight, I took the bucket of wax back up to the hive so that the girls can clean out any excess honey.


Meanwhile, Evie and I have started gathering materials for a solar wax melter.  Our plan is to melt the wax, and then use the pure beeswax as a primary ingredient in a line of lip balms that Evie is jazzed about creating.  We went to the Habitat for Humanity Re-store today and picked up a glass window, some metal flashing and some hinges.  A solar melter is basically a box that uses the heat of the sun to bring the wax gently to melting temperature and then sifting it out from any debris it may contain.  The finished result is pure beeswax.....pics of that will follow, should we succeed!