Jan's Backyard Honey Bees 1st Harvest

This was my first year to harvest honey from my oldest hive. It was full of first timer novice mistakes, but the end result was good and I had a good friend to help me with it all.  I don't know how you do this without 4 hands. On a Tuesday I took off the top two hive boxes and placed the separator board under the top one.  The next day my good friend Pauline and I harvested it. In the mean time I decided to go for box two and put the bee separator board under it even though I wasn't sure about it since it looked like brood.  So our harvesting stretched over two days because of my inexperience. I learned several things the hard way, like wear thicker gloves (after several stings).
So here goes. This is actually my friend Pauline in the picture.

 Getting ready to take the top box off.  This box weighed in at 38.7 pounds! Honey is heavy! Lift that over your head and into a cart with angry bees all around. As the hive got shorter this got easier.

 This is what it looked like inside.  The comb is dark because it was once used for brood.

 Prepared to book it for the garage away from some very angry bees!

 After we blew the remaining bees out of the box (a shopvac with the hose reversed works really well for this) we prepared to cut the comb out.

 Bee comb in the draining bucket. This is what it looks like before we really mashed it up so it could drain faster.

 Honey draining from the top bucket with the wax comb into the bottom bucket with the sieve.

 Honey going through the sieve. This filtering helps get some of the pollen, bee parts etc out of the honey.

 The Bucket system. Honey drops out of the comb in the top bucket into the bottom bucket with the sieve and spout. Then you put it into bottles by opening the spout at the bottom

In the bottle!

I got 2.5 gallons.  I have since discovered that I could have probably harvested one more whole box without bothering the brood box.  When I returned the brood box I removed two other boxes to put the brood under them since they like their honey on top of the brood box. Oh well you live and learn. Hopefully the bees will forgive me. It is really an invasive process for the bees and understandable why they get so defensive.  That is a lot of work.

They are incredible though.  They cleaned up the box I harvested from and any comb I left out because it wasn't capped yet.  They let nothing go to waste. 

Next year I will be smarter....like thick gloves to begin with, look in all the boxes not just the top two and getting it done faster. My friend Pauline was so much help. I couldn't have done it without her. It is a sticky business.  I am impressed I got any pictures at all considering how many bees there were flying around us and how sticky you get instantly not to mention the gear we wear, kind of hard to snap a picture. But we got our system down and we will be brilliant next year. Stay tuned for using bees wax.