Honey

I went to Pikeville this weekend for some farmtime adventures and catching up. I helped make honey, do you have any idea how much work it is to harvest that shit? If you’re interested to know how the process works, read on!

Day 1, you collect the “supers” (boxes) off of the hives, which involves wearing a sweaty bee suit and blowing smoke on the bees to calm their nerves and reduce the likelihood that they will swarm at your face. They are PISSED because they have spent the last 365 days creating their precious honey and you are stealing it from them. Each super weighs approx. 50 lbs, and in my dad’s case, there are about 50 supers to collect total. It takes about 10 hours to get all the supers to the honey room in dad’s workshop.

Day 2, you walk in the honey room and there are about 20 bees in there like “why the fuck is my honey all the way over here? plz give it back”. So you have to kill them which makes me really sad, but my dad tells me that honey bees (like ants) have a collective soul, so you’d have to kill the whole hive to kill its soul. A comforting thought as you club their tiny furry bodies with a rubber mallet. Now you take the frames out of the supers, 9 frames per super, which are filled with the actual honey. You have to pry the frames from each other with a crazy tool because bees produce a sort of sticky glue shit called prophylactus to hold everything together. You bring each frame to this huge stainless steel contraption where you cut the wax cappings off the frame with a huge fucking knife to release the honey. As you do this, you place each frame in a centrifuge device that will spin the honey out of the frame, 6 at a time. Its super hard to make this spinner go fast enough unless you have mad muscle, so my job was cutting and my dad spun them. You get super fucking dirty and sticky during this process, and I personally had honey literally dripping down my arms and legs. sounds like a hot sex scene doesn’t it?

 (a capped frame full of honey)

about 500 frames and 12 hours later, we have 300 pounds of honey in a GIANT stainless steel drum! We give the empty frames back to the angry bees, and on Day 3 we put the honey into cute little mason jars and honey bears.

What an ordeal…but we got a ton of honey, which my dad will sell at his office to all the lil old ladies. he is making candles out of the wax too. I got paid in honey for my efforts as well, so if you like honey i will send you some! just let me know