Honey and popcorn

To keep in the spirit of the name of this blog, I decided that I need to include a little "farming" stuff. Today I extracted some of my bees honey. It is my first time doing all of it on my own and I learned a few things. First - the kitchen is not the ideal place to remove honey from honeycomb. Second - always wash your hands before you grab a door knob or at least wipe the knob off before you decide to use it again. Third - don't touch an electric knife (who would have thought they would be hot?).

A quick lesson on how to extract honey. What I am holding here is a frame full of capped honey. Ideally all the frames in each box are supposed to look like this, but my bees don't seem to really listen to me so I only had about 60% that looked this nice. The rest of the frames were either uncapped (which means the honey is not "ripened" or dehydrated enough) or had brood in them.



The next two show how the cap is removed from the honey. As I eluded to earlier - the easiest way is to use an electric knife which gets hot and cuts off the cap. The cap falls into a bin where it is allowed to drain to get the rest of the honey off. This cap wax can then be melted and used to make whatever beeswax thing you want to make. I would like to think that at some point I will use it, would be fun to try to make a candle or some thing like that Burt Bees guy makes.





The stainless steel contraption you see in the next photo is the extractor which uses the centrifugal force (spinning) for those of you who slept through physics to remove the honey more quickly from the comb. The yellow handle you see next to the pail opens and the honey flows out into a bucket where the honey can then be strained. The bucket also has a valve to fill up whatever you want to store the honey in. This is the potentially extreme mess part of the operation - if one isn't paying attention you can suddenly have a whole lot of honey on you and everything within 5 feet of it.


The last picture is a nice closeup of a something that my little bees shouldn't be doing. The build a cross comb between the frames which the queen laid some eggs in. The little white things you see are bee larvae that haven't matured yet.


This is my "new" corn harvester. This machine is 40+ years old and is in great working order. It's really hard to describe how this machine works in a few sentences, but essentially it gobbles up the cornstalks and rips off the husks and then all the ears of whole corn go up the little ramp in the back and empty into a wagon. It is probably one of the most dangerous peices of equipment ever made. There are so many spinning gears, chains, rollers and places that a shirt or finger could get caught in a ripped off. These things are a big reason why old farmers are missing body parts. That being said, it should be fun to give this a go in October!


It wouldn't be a good blog without some sunset pictures. I took these after a rainstorm had passed and there were actually clouds coming out the opposite direction the storm was moving and they were just creepy looking. The second picture is sort of creepy and I wish I understood how to put full size pictures on this blog, because the smaller version doesn't do it much justice.