Collecting the Honey!!

Yesterday I went up to Sam and Earl's to collect some bees.  Last time I got maybe 15-20 in the jar, but this time I only wanted around 5-7.  I don't like keeping them in the jar for an entire week--I'd rather just get a few since I can walk up to their house anytime I need to.  Also, I have a suspicion that the longer the bees are in the jar, the more toxins build up in their bodies since they can't fly around and exercise, and then the venom isn't necessarily more potent, but I have a bigger reaction to it.  I have seen some other blog and forum posts from beekeepers and apitheripists that seem to support this hypothesis, so I'm going with it for now.

Here's a photo of my uber-technical bee set-up.

There's honey comb and honey in the bottom covered by some tissue so that the bees can feed but not become stuck in the honey.  The toilet paper tube gives them something to sit on since the glass is too slick.

Then came the fun part--helping Earl extract the honey from the combs!!!!!  These short boxes and frames are called Honey Supers.  They sit on top of the deeper boxes, and a thing called a Queen Excluder goes between the deep boxes and the honey supers.  This keeps the queen from going up there and laying eggs, so only honey gets placed into the combs.

The bees fill the cells with honey and then cap them with wax.  In order to extract the honey, you have to remove the capping.  Earl has this device that's like a knife that heats up, and then he removes the capping layer to reveal the honey underneath.

Then the frames get placed into this beast:

Which gets spun around by the yellow handle that you see, and the centrifugal force spins the honey out of the cells and into the barrel.

Once the honey is extracted, it gets filtered (because there can be tiny flecks of the comb still in it) through a double layered seive, and then it's ready to be packaged!