Don't Get Jarred!

So the other night Bruce brought in all the equipment he needed to collect a frame's worth of honey. This is about 5 or 6 hanging frames in one level of his bee apartment building. Here is a photo of what the frame looks like filled with capped honeycomb.Of course the honeycomb is capped so the honey stays fresh. It amazed me that the frame sat in the den for several days without leaking honey on anything. When you examine the honeycomb in detail you can see that, in each frame, the comb is tilted slightly up as it is built. This prevents the honey from flowing out before the bees can cap it (duh!)

The next step is to break off the caps so the honey can come out (this is prior to placing it in the extractor.) The low-tech method here is just dragging a pointy multi-prong fork across the caps to break them up.

Bruce actually got around 30 lbs of honey from one frame. By breaking the caps and extracting he can place the frame (with the comb intact) back into the hive. This way the bees can refill it without expending the energy to make new comb.

And this completes our Christmas shopping! I hope everyone likes honey!