Bee Brothers Harvesting Honey

Kaleb and Jared's bees have been busy all summer storing honey.

This hive has done so much better this year. I have spent all summer planting flowering plants so that they have plenty to feed on....not that they don't have much around, with all the gardens and crops around, they have an abundance of pollen and nectar to find.

 It's amazing what you can learn on Youtube. They researched how to harvest honey the old fashioned way so that they didn't need to rent any machinery. Once they scraped the honey comb off they put the frames back outside next to the hive. The bees cleaned them up beautifully.

 It amazes me how bees can create this pattern of wax, make the honey, store it in the comb and cap it for later.

 They used a paint liner of cheesecloth to hold all that was scraped to drain into the food grade bucket. The ball of wax/honey was the size of a soccer ball. After hanging over night and squeezing it a couple times, the ball of wax was the size of a baseball.

They collected 1 1/2 gallons of honey!

And boy does it taste good. 

It tastes sweeter than the honey we have gotten from the grocery store. 

 These boys work really well together in everything they do.

They have done a good job taking care of their bees.

Have you ever seen such beautiful honey?!

I wanted to be Pooh Bear and just stick my paw into the middle of it, scooping the delicious honey out to lick my fingers! No matter how clean they were, we found sticky spots for a few days after.