Last Sunday was the day we set aside to harvest our honey. It was a beautiful warm day, and most of the bees were out, taking in the last pollen of the season from the late blooming wildflowers. Julie suited up and fired her smoker, and we headed to the hive at the top of the horse pasture. I have no problem being an onlooker!

With her hive tool in hand (a flat pry bar similar to a small crowbar), she pried off the top off the hive. A couple of days before she had put a queen excluder in between the two shallow supers (the open-ended boxes that the hive frames rest in where the bees build honey combs) and the deep supers below. This device allows the bees to move down in the hive but not up. The theory is that in time most of the bees will move to the deep supers that are never removed leaving the shallow supers to be harvested free of bees.

As Julie worked, she periodically smoked the bees to calm them, which seemed to work. It also helped that Julie is able to stay gentle even as there are swarms of irate bees around her. She also talks to her bees. I have to believe that they respond positively to her quiet, calm manner.

I had driven our ATV with a small trailer attached up to the hives, and as she removed the supers, she wrapped them in old pillow cases and put them in the trailer to prevent the bees from following me back to the garage where we were set up to extract the honey.

Hive buttoned back up and supers in the garage with the doors closed to discourage any bees from expressing their displeasure at our theft of their hard earned honey, we started the process of extracting the honey from the frames inside the supers. One by one, we removed the frames and placed them on a specially constructed box that was built to catch and strain any honey comb that fell into it. We then took an electric comb knife and ran it along the top of the combs to uncap them and make the frame ready for the extractor. Looking at the multitude of identical six-sided cells is a wonderful experience. I could not help but marvel at the beautiful industry of our bees. Each cell was perfectly constructed of wax made by the bees and then filled with golden honey and then capped off, the result of uncountable trips to flowers sometimes quite far from the hive.

With the tops of the cells cut off on both sides of the frame, I then put it into the extractor. When another frame had been similarly processed, I closed up the top of the extractor and cranked the handle to set the wire mesh tub inside spinning. Centrifugal force pulls the honey out of the cells where it runs down the insides of the extractor to collect in the bottom. The frames are flipped over to extract the honey from the other side of the frame. This process is repeated until all the frames have been processed. It is sticky business, but the licking of one's hands periodically is an added bonus for the work required. With all the frames processed, we opened the tap at the bottom of the extractor and let the golden harvest flow into a strainer on top of a five-gallon bucket also with a tap at its bottom.

Once strained, we then took the honey into the house to be put into jars. This year's crop amounted to 40 pounds of the sweet delight. It is now all in jars and sitting in cases on the kitchen counter. It was good year. It is not always so. Sometimes the bees get a disease and the whole hive dies. Sometimes the bees swarm and fly off to parts unknown, and sometimes the weather just does not cooperate and there is not sufficient nectar for the production of excess honey. I say excess honey as a bee keeper never takes all the honey that is produced each year. Honey sufficient for the hive to survive the winter is always left in the deep supers at the bottom of the hive. So we are done for this year. The kitchen is fragrant with the smell of this year's crop, and I love just staring at the golden liquid which is summer in a jar. milajuno@aol.com