This is one of my favorite times of the year – you might be saying “you’re nuts!” The temperature has recently fell below 100 degrees here in North Texas – yeah… 99 degrees, a cold front I know. It’s humid to boot. So what am I so giddy about?! Well, it’s time to harvest honey… lovely honey!
Extracting honey is a sticky job, but one I am glad to do. Every year around the first part of July we extract our honey – and it’s a family event. We all LOVE honey. In fact, my 14 year old son gets a kick out of just dipping right into the comb still on the frame covered with bees – just dips his fingers in it and takes a finger-full (he actually uses two fingers now) of raw bee honey and it is delicious! This year he got stung twice by honey bees trying to rob the hive – but serves that honey bear right I suppose.
This year we ran across a bee keeper going out of the business – he was only keeping a few hives so we were able to procure an extractor of our very own – and considering we’re an hour from the nearest club member with an extractor we can rent time on it seemed like a good idea – and we got a sweet deal on it – YEAH!
After a good scrub and sterilizing it was ready to go and it worked out so well! Just a few minutes in this slick honey extraction equipment and viola! Sweet local honey is dripping into the bucket! Oh mercy!
Thanks to the lovely ladies – the honey bees – we get to enjoy more of that delicious nectar. Although, we’ve found we use so much more honey in our cooking than we harvest each year we all agree that we’ve got to increase the number of hives we have.
Maybe we’ll double next year – that would be really nice!