Bees Make Honey. . .

~ Highlight of the Day: eating honey freshly extracted from one of the Row hives ~

I learned so much about bees and bee keeping today it's crazy. Did you know the attack pheremone smells like bananas? So don't eat a banana before working on a  hive. . . Or that honey harvested later in the season is darker? Or that eating local honey may help your body fight against allergies? Today we were extracting honey. It involves a fume board, special knives and combs, a centerfuge and a series of filters, and a bit of time. . . and it is so worth it!

So this is called a 'super'. The hive is made up of a series of these stacked one on top of the other. You can get them in different sizes, depending on how much honey you're able to lift at a time. I think this is a medium super. . . but I'm not sure.

We also learned how to light the . . . the name excapes me, but it's for smoking the bees. Pine needles are the best because they don't burn very hot, so you won't burn your bees, just lull them over :)

You can tell if the honey is ready to be extracted because it will have been capped over. The bees cap it over once the moisture has been reduced to the point where it won't go bad. Aparantly the only thing that can make honey go bad is moisture.

Then we put the racks into this big grey metal thing and spin it to make all of the honey fly to the sides and drain down to the bottom. From there it is put through a series of filters to catch the wax and anything else that managed to get in.

The honey they extract from the Row gets bottled and sent to the giftshop to sell.

So now I'm going to have bee hives next to my big ol' chicken coop :)

By the way, I discovered today that Haj a Amin Husseini's favorite animal was a chicken. I'm not sure how I feel about that. . .