8/10/2013 Lughnasa State Fair Moon
Honey extraction coming up on August 20/21. We’re going to get ready on that Tuesday, 
which means cardboard on the kitchen floor and plastic all over, too. It also means bolting our extractor stand to a piece of plywood with 2×4 lengths nailed to it for the stand’s braces, getting the uncapping tank set up and all the filters and bottling equipment cleaned out and ready for action.
On Wednesday I’ll begin by using honey robber to move the bees out of the honey super, one super at a time. This involves putting a bit of a chemical on a felt backing contained in a super-sized wooden box and putting that box over the super. This drives the bees down and allows me to get a bee free super off and onto a pallet I’ll have waiting on my truck dolly. I’ll repeat this six times, covering the stack of supers each time I add a super to keep the bees away.
Once all six supers are off, I’ll wheel them into the garage and carry them, still covered, into the kitchen. Kate will have the uncapping knife warmed up and will start uncapping. When we have six frames uncapped, they’ll go in the extractor where they will spin as centrifugal force pulls the honey out of the comb. This process continues until all frames, as many as 54, certainly 40, have the honey drained from them. That’s when filtering and bottling begins. A big process, lots of steps, but easier each time we’ve done it. Practice makes lots of bottled honey.
After all this, of course, there’s selling it. This is going to be a crop well beyond our needs so getting some cash out of it to defray the considerable money we’ve already sunk into bee-keeping makes sense.
