It's honey harvest time!

Beekeeping is wonderful and fun and I encourage as many people as possible to keep honeybees. Not only because they are imperative to the health of our planet, but because they are fascinating and educational. If you live in the city, think of the many perennials around you that would benefit from healthy pollination. Don't just look down, look up. Trees are perennial and create pollen as much as (if not more than) the flowers in your garden. Honey bees pollinate an estimated 50-80% of the world's food supply. They are very important and beneficial insects.
The University of Minnesota has a great class on beekeeping. http://www.extension.umn.edu/honeybees And anyone interested in keeping bees next summer should start right now ordering equipment and learning.
Keeping bees is fun and I always learn something new. But today I have a little photo series on "how do you get the honey out?"
The first step is to suit up well. As you can see, we are covered head to toe in protective gear. The smaller boxes on

After we get the frames home, we keep them warm (not hot) until we are ready to extract. The bees put a thin coat of wax over the top of the honey and we use a hot knife to cut through this layer. After the honey is exposed we insert them into an extractor. This works as a centrifuge where the honey is splattered against the walls as they are spun around, flipped, and spun again. This is a slow and stick process!
We then filter the honey through cheesecloth into plastic food grade jugs. Again these jugs need to be kept warm until we are ready to bottle. There's also another process of saving all the wax, but I didn't have any shots of that (my fingers were too sticky for the camera!)
Honey has natural antibiotics and is the only food that can be sold to consumers in quantity without a food license. However, all honey should be sold in new, clean, sanitized jars!
Then the fun begins -- eating. www.honey.com has some great recipes and is a wonderful site for education on