Summer Honey and Bee Clean Up

Hello!  It seems to be taking me more and more time these days to keep up with getting postings up on this blog.  I'm sorry!  Things here have been slowing down a bit farm-wise, only to be replaced with getting everything ready for basically the imminent arrival of Baby 3!  Yeah...I'm kind of just waiting.  Even though I have two other little children and I basically know what to expect, I still feel like I'm just not ready.  Oh well!!  We're very excited and Willow and Ronan are anxious for the new arrival.  Tick tock...
Summer honey is in!  Well, it's been in for a few weeks now but like I said, I've been a bit behind.  Sorry!  It's a really nice batch this year.  Very bright yellow with a crisp, almost sharp taste to it.  I don't mean that in a bad way either.  This time around we started to extract the honey right as the sun was going down.  We don't have an enclosed honey house and if we tried to extract during the daylight hours we would be surrounded by a giant swarm of bees.  They catch scent of the wonderful honey, go back to the hive and signal that they've found a nice food supply, and before too long they're bringing all their friends from home to help suck it up and take it back to the hive!  Now, needless to say this is not very condusive to a smooth extracting session.  Once the sun goes down the bees have gone home to their hives for the night and we can extract without having them surround us!  Here is the most recent honey flowing out of the honey extractor into one of the 5 gallon buckets.  Yum...

And on another note, we had someone ask us what we do with the boxes of frames once the honey has been extracted from them.  Well, one option is to simply put them right back on the hives.  Let the bees start working on putting more honey in them right away.  When we pull the boxes off of our hives we replace them with empty frames right at that moment so the hives are never without a honey super (the box the honey frames are in).  Sooo, when we extract we place the empties boxes close to the hives for the bees to clean.  Again, they catch the scent of that yummy honey and before long the boxes are swarming with bees cleaning out every drop of leftover honey to take home.  This works out for us because we eventually get to get that honey back the next time we extract.  It simply goes back to the hive.  I actually got a short video of the bees cleaning out the boxes the last time we extracted a few weeks ago.  This was the next morning.  It's quite a sight to see.  Oh, and yes.....you do hear my sheep in the background!