*Honey, we got honey!

All of us around Erilyn are whooping and hollering! We couldn't be more excited about beekeeping than we were this afternoon upon returning to the house with two frames of delicious honey!  Eric and I have been planning to check our top supra for possible capped honey. Boy, what a delight it was to open the top board and find fully capped honey cells, our gift was finished.

This week we will replace the top supra with new frames for the busy bees. We were really hopeful that the frames would be ready for harvesting, but somewhat doubtful based on the things we have read about young colonies.  Our hive has grown so much since we got it back in the spring.  When we added the second supra, I felt like we had a good chance on honey in our first season.  By the weekend we will likely have 50lbs of dark amber colored honey.

Eric has become the smoke master.  He has not protective gear on because he is not working directly with the bees.  He is usually close by, but not directly involved so he feels safe enough just wearing a long sleeve shirt.  He is also my eyes and my careful guide when I need it.  I have got the moving slow part down really well.  In fact, when I put get all suited up, I switch into a different gear - SLOW. 

Mr. & Mrs. Beekeepers

Just look at that full frame!!!! Maneuvering this heavy frame with the gloves is not as easy as it might look.  I work carefully, and very meticulously all the while the gloves really make the job harder- perhaps safer, but harder. I am trying to work my BRAVE up enough so I can go to the hive under regular maintenance glove less.  If you look in the background you will see a container with pebbles in it as well as water. This container serves as our bees water source, a safe place for them to get water and not drown in the process.  Before we put this out for the bees we were finding numerous honey bees floating in our pool daily.

Momma was there with a clean plastic garbage bag for us to slip the frame into until we were ready to leave the area.  I had to give the frame several hard shakes to get the bees off. Many flew off, but some were more difficult remove.  I had to lightly flick them off the frame in order to rob them of their precious honey. We ended up with two live bees in the bag, which we set free when we got up to the house when we took the frames out of the bag.

Here we are putting the top board back for now. We still need to harvest the other 8 frames in this supra.  I am so glad we only took two the first time around. It was a lot of work. Exciting. Interesting. Joyful too!  We are an awesome team!   NO stings to day at all!

Let me encourage you - if you don't already keep bees, look into starting a colony next spring!  We have no idea what we are doing and we are harvesting our first supra of honey just 4 months after getting our hive started.  Mind you, we are NOT taking the surplus food supply that our sweet bees will need to weather the fall and winter months, but the other supra. The bees are keeping busy these days most likely with the blooms on the many, many Crepe Myrtles all around our neighbors property as well as a few on our property.

When we opened the top board on the hive we found 15 to 20 (visible to us) Hive Beetles.  We saw these little beetles skittering around and had no idea what they were or why they were there. Upon a bit of research, we found that these critters can be little to great harm based on the strength of the hive. Either way I will be paying Mr. Bundrick a visit tomorrow to get something to take care of the beetles that are known to be deadly to Florida bee hives. We don't want to take any chances.

We did harvest the honey in our spacious kitchen, um.... I think every surface in that kitchen was covered with sweet honey and wax.  With this having been our first time in claiming and harvesting honey, we were totally inexperienced in every step even though we had read everything "bee" that we could get our hands on. 

Here momma is helping scrap the honey off of the frame into a pot with as strainer in place. 

We ended up with about 10lbs of honey from two frames!  If the rest of the frames go this well, we will end up with about 50 lbs of honey this year!  This will help balance out the cost of investment made earlier this spring to get us started in keeping bees.

Stay tuned for more updates on our "Erilyn Honey Harvest Summer 2011".  (all photo credits go to my nephew Skyler, he did a great job didn't he!?)