Don’t blame me, it was Nicky that told me this. She was cleaning up the honey mess in the kitchen as Randy was stepping outside to show me the bees. “Randy always tells me he’s gonna go work the ladies,” Nicky said as I followed him out the door. I liked the sense of humor that sparked him to say that. But that was halfway through our honey extracting project.

When I first got to Randy and Nicky’s house, Randy got right to work. I was there to watch the honey harvesting process. There was already what he called a “super” on the table, full of honey. If you’ve ever seen an apiary, you’ve probably seen what looked like boxes stacked up on top of each other. Randy says the bottom box is their established “home.” It’s the box the beekeeper doesn’t take honey from. The boxes on top are the “supers” and are what the bees would like to think of as their expanded home, but the beekeeper knows them as honey harvest.

the "super"--its ready to harvest

“There’s probably 50 to 60 pounds of honey in that super there,” Randy told me. Then he had me lift up one of the frames. It was heavy and strange to think it was heavy with honey. It was even stranger that the honey wasn’t straining out of the frame. I’m not saying the frame wasn’t sticky, but there were no streams of honey anywhere. That’s because the bees make these honeycombs with wax. The honeycombs are shaped into perfect hexagons that, when the honey is ready to be harvested, the beekeeper knows because the bees have “capped” the tops of the hexagons. The caps hold the honey inside the comb.

Bees make perfect hexagons out of wax. The fully white area is where the bees have "capped" off their hexagons.

Randy started beekeeping about 3 years ago. “It took me 6 to 8 years of reading about it before I could get the guts up to do it.” That’s because Randy is allergic to bee stings. But he said he knew he needed the help of the bees to pollinate his garden. “There’s just not enough bees around here anymore,” he said.

That fact has helped Randy in his honey making business. That’s because bees need plenty of land to keep them happy and Randy doesn’t have that much land. Last year, one of Randy’s neighbors asked him if he would place some of his beehives on his property. The neighbor wanted to benefit from the pollinating factor of the bees too. The honey we were harvesting was from the beehives he had out on the neighbor’s property.

Honey making is a slow process if you don’t have a bunch of money to invest all at once. Once he gets a beehive going, Randy can separate them, and add a queen bee to the new hive so that now he has two hives. But it takes about a year before he can harvest the honey from the new hive. Randy started with just two hives. Now he has about nine or ten with a bunch of supers on top of the hives. He says next year he should harvest enough to sell to a large honey processing factory.

For now, Randy and Nicky extract the honey from their combs themselves. He purchased a manual extractor to assist him.

Uncapping the comb with a fork

Randy and Nicky use a fork to uncap the wax from the comb. They let me try it, and in my ignorance, I broke some of the comb.

This extractor holds four frames of honey

And then turn the handle on the extractor, which spins the frames around, and the motion causes the honey to be extracted from inside the hexagons.

Randy and Nicky's son Dylan turning the extractor.

The honey drains through holes in the bottom of the extractor and into a vat. On the top of the vat is a filter, which keeps wax and other stuff from going into the honey vat.

Wax on the filter

This wax is what candle makers use to make their candles. It’s also the raw material for other products like lip balm and soaps. Bees are quite the productive creature. We also can use the pollen that they gather to help cut down on our allergies.

A bowl of bee pollen

Some people eat some of this everyday to introduce the pollens into their system a little at a time. After a while, exposure to the pollen does not cause a reaction in their bodies the way it would had they not eaten the pollen.

Although at first I was disappointed I didn’t get a chance to watch Randy “work with the ladies,” after he took me outside to show me his hives, I decided I was glad I hadn’t been there. I was anxious just standing close enough to get a few good pictures.

Bees on the front porch

It was probably about 4:30 when we went out. Randy said that was a good thing because the bees would be relatively calm. When he showed me these hives, and the bees all congregating on the outside bottom of it, he said, “their just sitting on the front porch now.”

He showed me another hive, this one a smaller box. “That’s an incubator.” When Randy is starting a new group of bees, he places them in these smaller boxes.

Bees in an incubator

Randy has several of these on his property. He’s wondering if maybe this might be better for winter too, as the smaller space may help them achieve their above-98 degree temperature they strive for in their hives. I can just imagine all the bees huddled together like penguins on an ice cube, shifting around with the bee queen in the center, trying to keep her little spot at 98 degrees. “The bees will do anything for their queen,” Randy says. They would die for her. “It’s simply amazing.”

Back inside, the honey has been draining from the vat into a food-quality bucket, but not before being strained once again through cheesecloth.

Straining the honey once more, just for goodness sake

“Beekeepers like to call this liquid gold,” Randy said. And look at that color. It is. It’s liquid gold.

Nicky bottled up some of that liquid gold for me. She even gave me some of the honeycomb for one of my jars.

Jar full of honey and comb

They also bottled some up for one of you readers. If you are interested in some honey, please leave a comment within this blog. If there are enough commenters, then I will make a random drawing and mail the winner a jar of Randy and Nicky’s honey. Also, if you’d like to purchase any of his honey, feel free to leave a brief comment. The comment widget will ask you to leave your email address (for my eyes only) and I will email you back.