it was an amazing day. exhausting for all, but very rewarding. i did not get to extract with the "bunch" because i felt like my supers were not quite capped off enough and i did not want to risk having that liquid gold go to waste and ferment on me! my bees needed about another week to 10 days to be ready for robbing.
*****
laney had his garage set up as a temporary "honey house". everyone brought over their full supers that morning or the night before and tried to "cleverly" hide them from laney's bees under a tarp on the driveway, but we were only fooling ourselves! those bees could smell that honey and were determined not to let anyone with less than 6 legs get at it before they did!
*****
inside the garage were several de-capping stations. these were basically portable utility sinks. each one had been retrofitted with a rack across the top to hold de-capped frames waiting for extraction.
*****
a note about "cappings"... the bees store nectar in the comb, and fan it with their wings to help evaporate the moisture. they know when the nectar reaches that magical conversion point...a moisture content of less than 18%. that's when nectar is no longer nectar, but honey! the next step for the bees is to "cap off" the cells with wax to store the honey for future use, kind of like we can green beans in the summer.
so, "de-capping" is the process of opening the cells by slicing off the wax caps so that the honey can then be extracted.
the cappings drop down into the utility sink and drain through a filter into a bucket waiting underneath the sink.
*****
the cappings are saved and used in a variety of ways... they can be rendered (that's a story for another day) and used to build up foundation on frames for use in the spring, made into soaps and lotions, they can even be melted and eaten on toast (Gary's favorite)!
lots of uses for beeswax, but i chose to borrow an idea from laney and gary... selling unfiltered honey w/ the cappings in the jar. lots of people ask for comb, and just as many are looking for local honey to help with allergies, so i borrowed their idea and combined my unfiltered honey (full of pollen and whatever else the bees brought into the hive) with the cappings and offered it for sale. great response. it's also a good way for me to easily distinguish between the spring flow honey and the summer flow.
they really had this whole day down to a system. everyone worked together, but on only one beekeeper's supers at a time. so after de-capping, the frames were loaded into one of two extractors. one was a three-frame extractor, manually operated, and secured to the stairway banister.
the other was a nine frame motorized rig mounted on a sturdy table and somehow chained to the floor. andy and cliff were both enamored with the motorized contraption...
each extractor worked by spinning the frames and slinging the honey out of the comb, which then drained out the bottom through a screen and into a 3 or 5 gallon bucket.
then came clean up! had to gather and store all the cappings in separate buckets, wash everything down, stack the supers and buckets, make room for the next beekeepers' bounty, and start all over again!
i think the final count was around 100 gallons at the end of the day. like i said, exhausting, but rewarding.
