Honey Making & Bee Keeping
A few friends and I have recently received a crash course on beekeeping and honey making with the opportunity of an occasional job!
It started out as a one time thing to help an older gentleman with his local honey business for a few hours one weekend, but turned into something more regular. It was such a cool experience extracting honey, cutting honeycombs, vacuuming bees and bottling/labeling/sealing honey!
Sam, Heidi, Daniel and I were the lucky students who volunteered for the job. As it turned out only Sam (and possibly Heidi) got stung, which I thought was amazing considering the number of bees and us taking apart their nests!!
As the extractor ran, the honey was filtered and pumped into a storage tank, which we emptied out into these big orange 50 gallon drums. I think we filled up 4 or 5 drums of honey!
The honey was then stored for curing/further filtering.
We also filtered, packaged, labelled and sealed honey to go out into the local grocery stores.
It started out as a one time thing to help an older gentleman with his local honey business for a few hours one weekend, but turned into something more regular. It was such a cool experience extracting honey, cutting honeycombs, vacuuming bees and bottling/labeling/sealing honey!
Sam, Heidi, Daniel and I were the lucky students who volunteered for the job. As it turned out only Sam (and possibly Heidi) got stung, which I thought was amazing considering the number of bees and us taking apart their nests!!
This is the honey extractor. It scrapes off the excess honeycomb, then spins the honey out of the leftover combs.
Some of the hives got brought inside where they were cut and packaged by Heidi and I.
As the extractor ran, the honey was filtered and pumped into a storage tank, which we emptied out into these big orange 50 gallon drums. I think we filled up 4 or 5 drums of honey!
The honey was then stored for curing/further filtering.
We also filtered, packaged, labelled and sealed honey to go out into the local grocery stores.
I could go into so much more detail about the whole process, but I'll keep things short.
All n all, it was a fantastically sticky time! :)
Glad no one was seriously stung, after my Saturday experience. Hard to believe you could collect that much honey in one day! Did you get to eat the honeycomb honey? I have and it was really, really good! You guys must have been a huge help to this biz owner!
ReplyDelete