Liquid Gold

I have honey!
Only 2.5 jars of it, but it is the best tasting honey ever - not that I am biased.
I am a month late posting this, and much has happened since our exciting and sticky extraction experience, but getting the goods is the most fun part, so the rest can wait a while.

The finished product - beautiful dark and delicious.

 Note the jar to the left says 'Nectar'?
I learned on the course that uncapped honey can't be called honey. It has to be called nectar, because the bees will only put a wax cap over it if it has evapourated enough water from the cells to be of a concentration that will not allow the honey to ferment. The second of the two batches of frames we extracted was mostly uncapped, but it kept beautifully all the same and tasted like honey to me!
I say it kept - of course we ate it within 3 weeks, so that wasn't much of a test, was it?

Close up of the 1/2 jar, which contained a chunk of comb for reasons that will become apparent shortly...

 

 

 

here's how it happened:

In mid-august I attended a top up class where the experts imparted their know-how on helping a new colony to survive its first winter.  Very informative it was too.
Plan was: remove any honey-containing 'supers' then treat the bees for Varroa mite immediately. This means two sets of two week treatments, so the hive is a no go area for that month, any honey collected during that time can't be eaten by humans.

To my utter delight, there were four frames nearly full of honey/nectar, two of them mostly capped, two partly capped.

First job is to remove the 'cappings'; a thin layer of wax that the bees cover each cell with once it has reached the correct concentration of sugars. I used a bread knife. Most of this frame is uncapped, but you have to remove the top part of the cells anyway to couteract capillary action. Sorry, getting a little technical here...

Once uncapped we attached two frames at a time to Mark's rapidly engineered home made extractor.
This is effectively a slow spin centrifuge comprising a large polythene bucket, a long threaded steel rod, a couple of metal plates, some screws and....a drill and an index finger (!) to make the motor!!

All went well to begin with, the honey began to splatter against the sides of the bucket. We were amazed at how much there was in there, but there was still so much left in the comb. So Mark decided to press the trigger a little harder, and oops! a slight wobble of the hand, with the result as below:

Splat! The big holes in the honey comb and the splattered wax on the sides are not meant to be there!

 
Much hilarity ensued. We decided to cut our losses - literally - by cutting out the remaining comb and (ahem, horror on faces of food hygenists...) I squeezed the honey out of the bits that had flown out during extraction.
It was a very sticky experience. I washed the floor and counter tops (And a few cupboard faces) down twice afterwards, but the cat still had honey on his tail the next morning!

Next year I will borrow a commercial honey extractor for the 22 frames that I hope to have filled. This year, it was just so much fun to do it ourselves!