Mmmm, fresh honey!

We have had some amazingly nice weather lately and I had wandered down to check out the beehive. There was no activity so I cracked it open, sadly it looks as if my bees left sometime this fall. There were a handful of dead bees in the hive, no pollen stores, no brood of any sort  but quite a bit of honey, some of it left uncapped and it had crystallized. I did get roughly 45 pounds of honey out of it as well as a good bit of wax. Wish the bees had stayed, though. Oh, well, that seems to be life with bees.

I only got one picture after opening the hive as I got very sticky very quickly. As you can see in the one photo I did get, though, they were cross combing at this end of the hive. Not sure why, most of it was full of straight comb. Some obscure bee reason, I'm sure.

Cross comb upon opening the hive.

My honey gathering set up is rather primitive, but it works. It's two 5 gal buckets. The top one has holes drilled in the bottom and is lined with a bag I made from an old sheer curtain. The honeycomb goes in there and gets crushed up. It then drains into the bottom bucket which has a honey gate on it.

 

 Honeycomb in the strainer bucket, crushed up and ready to drain.

Here's a bit of the honey that has drained through into the bottom bucket.

And, finally, bottling the honey.

 Sorry for the dirty jars, little kids with wet, dirty hands. :)