Harvesting Sourwood Honey in the Mountains

On Thursday and Friday, my four year old granddaughter and I went to the mountains to harvest whatever sourwood honey might be on the hives we have at Robin and Mary's farm in Rabun County.   When we arrived, the first thing I saw was this dead European hornet on the landing board of the hive.  The bees must have balled it and killed it - go bees - the European hornet takes live bees to feed their young - GRRR.
                                                                                 

Rain was threatening so I went quickly to work to take the capped frames of honey off of the hives.  This is Rabun County so I left them lots of honey so that they might make it through the winter and only harvested one super from the largest hive.  The smaller hive appeared to have swarmed and requeened and didn't have surplus honey for me.

The capped honey was just beautiful and I gave Robin a cut-comb square along with some liquid honey as a thank you for letting us have hives on his farm.

I put the harvest into a nuc box, covered it with a towel and when the box was full, transported it to the car where I had an empty super waiting.

Robin, who kept bees early in his life, put on a veil to watch and help.  

The way the hives look below is how we left them.  There is a goldenrod flow as August begins to wane so I may add a box to each to accommodate the fall flow, but now we have harvested from the blue hive and consolidated the yellow hive so that both may do well for the remaining days of summer.

Robin and Mary have a beautiful garden in which these hives reside:

Mary and Lark are standing in front of her zinnias and cosmos.

Lark and I went to my mountain house to crush and strain the honey before dinner.  Lark was quite the honey harvester and was seriously good at doing this.

She is using the little pestle in these photos, but it wasn't long before she switched to the big crusher that Bear made for me and was crushing in high style!

The next morning we bottled the honey right after breakfast.  Lark was good at this too and we had quite the assembly line going. 

And the honey was DELICIOUS - yummy sourwood probably mixed with tulip poplar - a different taste than we get in Atlanta.

Crushing with Bear's Amazing Honey Crusher

This weekend Jeff, my son-in-law, and I harvested honey.  I've been not as active with my beekeeping because I am wearing an air-cast on my right leg.  I tore a ligament at Christmas and it hasn't gotten better so I have to do this for at least a month to allow the ligament to heal.  So I was grateful for his help.

First we went to the Morningside garden hives.  These were the latest installations we made this year and they do not have any honey to harvest, but to get to the hives I have to climb straight up a hill and I knew I would need Jeff's help to do anything with these hives.  I haven't looked at them in a month.  They are on a hill covered with kudzu.  Kudzu can grow one whole foot overnight.  It's known as the vine that ate the south and our beehives are no exception.

The entrances to both hives were covered with kudzu.  The bees were flying in and out just fine, but seemed grateful that we unearthed their entrances.  We tugged and cut the kudzu.  We also left a jar of water on each hive in a Boardman feeder.  Both hives were doing well but only had enough honey for themselves so we patted them on the top cover, frowned at the kudzu to encourage it to stay away, and left the hives for another day.

At my house we only harvested from Sebastian's hive.  We have at least two other hives with lots of honey to harvest, but we stuck to just this one.  We took two full boxes of honey off of this hive.  We crushed and strained the honey with Bear's wonderful present.  It is so mammoth that it is the Paul Bunyan of crushers.

Jeff wielded it first.  You can see in the photo that it crushes much more real estate than any other pestle we have.  What a wonderful gift!  Thank you so much, Bear.

Then I took a turn - great fun to crush with this southern pecan crusher.

We will harvest the rest soon, but it was fun to get a start on the season.

Amazing Gift for My Crush and Strain Honey

My friend, Bear Kelley, president of the Georgia Beekeepers Association, made me a gift.    I was talking to him about the difficulty of getting an effective pestle for crush and strain honey.  I have been using the same two since I began and they are small with the then requirement of lots of crushing.

I told him that when I was at the Chimneyville Crafts Fair in Jackson, Mississippi in December, I had asked a Mississippi craftsman to make one for me.  That one had a larger surface area but the handle had a pointed tip and over time, really hurt my hand.

Bear came to the rescue and made me a gorgeous honey crusher.  He hand-turned it out of southern pecan - more fitting than he knew because the southern pecan has had quite a role in my life.  My parents lived on land with giant southern pecan trees.  I remember feeling frightened as I watched the tall trees bend and parts of them break off in the hurricanes that came up the river from New Orleans to my hometown of Natchez.

Then when I was a senior, I asked my father if I could buy a class ring.  He said a class ring was a complete waste of money and if I wanted one, I'd have to earn the $50 that it cost by myself.  So I picked up pecans under those trees on our land and sold them to a pecan packing plant.  I quickly learned that I could make more money if I sold them shelled, so I became an expert at getting the shells and the bitter interior lining off of the meat of the pecan.  I earned my $50 and got my class ring - and as my father predicted - never wore it.

So southern pecan is a part of my history and actually represents hard work to me, so it is fitting that Bear's honey crusher is made of pecan and I will be using it to work to get the honey out of the honey comb.

Before he gave it to me, he entered it in a honey contest where he won a blue ribbon for his efforts.
After the contest, he branded it with his name Bear in the top of the handle.

Thanks, Bear - I'm SO EXCITED to have this lovely piece and to get to use it.

Harvesting the Stonehurst Honey

I had a great time harvesting the Stonehurst Place honey.  Caroline, the innkeeper, took some photos at the beginning (so I am in the photo for a change!) and then I took some pictures of the frames and the rest of the process.  We got about 80 pounds of honey from the two hives (from the two harvest visits) which is remarkable since the hives just got started this year at Stonehurst.

Click on the slideshow to see it full screen and with captions.

What Not To Do .... When Harvesting Honey

I think it's funny that there's a current TV show called "What Not to Wear." This is a post about What Not to Do.....

I harvested today and my honey was various colors, so I decided to keep the light honey separate from the dark. Then I found some frames that seemed like maybe medium honey - neither dark nor light. I have two set up harvesting buckets. I also have a bucket that my brother gave me.

I ran to the sunporch, screwed in the honey gate which was lying in the bottom of the bucket and set the filters on the bucket. Then I put what looked like medium honey crushed into that container. I carried all three outside to let the Hotlanta heat hasten the filter process.

A few minutes into it, I went outside to put out the dripping cardboard for the bees to clean up. I looked over and there were way too many bees flying in the vicinity of my filtering buckets.



Horrors! The honey gate on Barry's bucket was open and leaking. I picked up the bucket, tilted it so the honey would not be pressing at the gate and redid the closure on the bucket. Meanwhile all of this honey was on the ground and the bees were all over the place, sucking it up.



My clean up after harvest included bringing two sheets of cardboard out to the carport for the bees to clean up and putting out the silicone mats I used for crushing for the bees as well.



I also put the dripping frames into an empty super and put them over the inner cover in Lenox Pointe for the bees to clean up.

And I hung the towel on the porch railing that I had draped over the nucs for transporting honey into the house.  The towel had drippings on it from cappings that got damaged in the transfer and the bees had a field day.

Big Bee Day - Part One Rabun County

I drove up to Rabun County in the pouring rain yesterday, planning to visit the bees and inspect the hive. Last time I was there on August 8, they were angry and had a field day with me (no smoker, only a jacket).

Although it poured all day yesterday, today the sun broke out and I broke out my Golden Bee suit - no stings for me (it's almost impossible to get stung in the Golden Bee suit). Fully prepared with smoker, Golden Bee suit, and curiosity, I opened the hive at the community garden this morning.

The hive is full of bees. Box one is mostly brood. Box two is mostly honey. Box three is comb and little else. There were no hive beetles, the bees looked healthy (no DWV, no sign of varroa mites), and there are still a few drones in the hive.



At EAS Billy Davis really advocated using hive drapes, so I brought flour sack towels that I buy from Walmart to cover the boxes. These towels are all cotton, light, and lint free. Using them I'm not likely to leave any reminder of the towel behind in the hive and the bees won't get caught in the material as they might in terry cloth. This accomplishes two things: it disturbs the bees less because the box is not suddenly exposed to the bright light of the sun and it keeps the hive from advertising its honey stores to any potential marauding bees from other hives.



I am dying to see what their honey tastes like since I've only gotten honey from my backyard bees in Atlanta. These bees can get nectar from sourwood and from kudzu neither of which is available to my Atlanta bees. So I took two frames of honey from box two and replaced them with drawn wax from a box in Atlanta.

This hive had great stores of pollen as you can see in the picture below.



Also the queen has been hard at work as you can see in the brood below. I think the picture below is upside down, but the brood is still visible to your in the cells either way! The larvae look healthy as do the bees in this hive where I have never seen the queen.



The two frames I took were frames of drawn wax from last year that I had put in the hive. I brought it home to crush and strain. This is the first time I have tried crushing wax that isn't brand new. It wasn't easy. Actually there were two problems. I couldn't find my pestles and remembered that someone had suggested on this blog that I use a potato masher.

The two problems were that the comb was old and the potato masher really didn't work well. The comb got all smashed into the holes in the potato masher and it was completely gunky in minutes. I ended up smashing the comb with the insert for my Cuisinart! It was the shape of the pestle and solid on the bottom which was the problem with the potato masher (it wasn't).

One of the frames I brought back had popsicle sticks as starter strips rather than wax.  The cut popsicle stick showed up in the crushed wax and at first I had no idea why wood was in the honey.  Then I realized what it was!

I let the crushed honey drain all afternoon and the wax at the end of the day looked like this:

Because it was old wax, the crushed wax looks dark and stiff, unlike new wax that I usually see.

Then I tasted the honey - WOW - it tastes a little like grape which means that there is definitely some kudzu in the honey.  It's only a small bit - maybe six pounds if I'm lucky - but I am thrilled to get it.

Harvesting Honey with My brother Barry

I traveled to my hometown of Natchez, MS this weekend to help my brother Barry harvest his very first honey.  He was so excited.  He had asked me what he needed to do crush and strain and had bought everything I said down to the flexible cutting boards and a pestle!

Here he is harvesting his first honey crop (click on the slideshow to view it full screen):

A Bee Movie with Gina and Linda

Every year the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association holds a short course in January. We are always trying to improve the course. This year we are adding a movie on how to harvest honey two ways - extracting (Gina) and crush and strain (me). We are so lucky that we have in our club a beekeeper named Allen Facemire who is an Emmy-nominated film-maker and director. He offered to make a movie for us about extracting.

Here is Gina getting all miked-up before the filming begins.


Allen comes with amazing equipment - microphones, cameras, and lots and lots of expertise!



The first part of the movie is to film taking honey off of the hive without using any chemicals like Bee Quik or Bee Go. As followers of this blog know, I don't advocate the use of any poisons, so I just shake the bees off and carry the frames away from the hive.



Allen is filming me putting the harvested frames into a nuc box to carry inside. The nuc is at my feet covered with a towel to keep interested bees from exploring the honey I am harvesting.



We took two frames in from Gina's hives.  I had brought three frames of my honey from home.  Here is one of the frames before a hard shake to get the bees off.

This is our last snapshot.  We then got deeply involved in the bee movie.  Gina showed how to use an extractor and then I did crush and strain.  We bottled a couple of bottles of honey.  I thought my honey was awfully thin.

I took my honey bucket home to bottle the rest.  I kept thinking the honey was really thin.  I decided to put a drop on the refractometer.  This was fully capped honey and I have not been feeding my bees sugar syrup this entire season.  To my horror, the moisture level was 20.2.  Honey is too moist above 18.6 so this was honey with way too much moisture.

I've always relied on taking fully capped honey, believing that the bees don't cap honey that is so moist that it will ferment.  Well, not so this time.  I called Cindy Bee who told me to put the bucket with a dehumidifier and maybe it could be de-moisturized enough.  I posted on Beemaster to find out what people thought was behind this.  One theory was that we are in a heavily humid area and maybe the bees just quit before they evaporated the moisture because it has been humid and rainy.  Who knows?

Maybe I should make mead.......that way the inevitable fermenting is invited!

Many Hands Make Light Work

I got a call from two beekeepers who had been on one of the Blue Heron inspections. I had offered to let them come over to help me harvest honey so they could see for themselves how easy crush and strain is as a harvest method and how it isn't messy at all. I invited them to come on Saturday.

We all put on aprons and Donna and Dick, my new beekeeping friends noted at the end that they didn't even get honey on their aprons!

I had my camera on the macro setting for taking pictures of bees in the hives and didn't get good pictures of the day, but the one below, while fuzzy, does show Donna and Dick hard at work. Don't get me wrong, I remember Tom Sawyer - the key is to get the other person to think that work is FUN!



Dick devised his own special two handed pestle method which made the crushing go quite fast.



After we had crushed all the honey and put it in the bucket to strain, we put the bucket outside in the Hotlanta heat to begin the filtering process. We sat down for iced tea, watched the beehives on my deck, and waited. We talked bees and honey a little while - I showed them my harvest so far this year, my 18th pour wax block from last year, and the various ways you can harvest honey - chunk, cut comb, and liquid.

After a short while, we brought the bucket in and I showed them how easy it is to fill a honey jar from the honey gate on the bucket. I do think that we all had fun.

They went home with a bottle of honey that they could claim as the result of their own hard work (thanks, Tom Sawyer!).

I'll bet I could have convinced them to paint a picket fence if I had had one handy!

Reminder: Blog Radio Talk show Wednesday, the 22nd 5:30 PM EDT: here's the address with the information.

The Value of a Silicone Mat in Honey Harvesting

I love using the silicone mat when I do crush and strain honey. It's merely a silicone cutting board that I bought at the DeKalb Farmer's Market in Atlanta. It perfectly fits the pan I use for crushing the honeycomb.

Here is the mat in the pan - it doesn't quite go end to end in the pan, but that makes it easier to pick it up to transfer the honey and comb to the straining bucket.


Here it is with one frame's worth of crushed honey on it, ready to be transferred to the straining bucket.

Now, this is why I love the mat. It has flexibility so that it can curve around and guide the honey and comb into the strainers. It can be easily lifted out of the pan and moved, honey and all to the bucket. It has an easy surface for using a rubber spatula to get the remaining honey off of the mat and into the bucket.

Here's what a full bucket looks like. I actually split this super into two buckets since a couple of the frames had very light honey in them and I wanted to keep them apart from the much darker honey in the other frames.


In general the comb I am harvesting this year is much less full than the last three years. I think this demonstrates how much the bees lost in making and capping honey when we had weeks of constant rain during the honey flow.

First Honey Harvest of 2009

Here is my daughter Valerie with the first jar of honey harvested in 2009!

Today I harvested for the first time in 2009. I had two excellent honey helpers, my daughter Valerie and my grandson Dylan. We first cut the capped honey off of the frame and let the pieces drop into the prepared pan.


Then Valerie and Dylan crushed the honey comb with their pestles.

My job was to take the honey-laden silicon mat and scrape as much honey as I could off of it and into the filter bucket.

Dylan helped with that as well. We then put the filter buckets out in the Hotlanta weather to encourage the honey to filter through. They each took home a jar of their honey harvest.


To see a more detailed view of crush and strain, visit my video on crush and strain honey harvest.