Oh Yes We've Got Honey!

​My friend, Sandy Kintner and I started bee keeping last year.  We began with one hive each.  The queen in my hive was overthrown and killed for mysterious reasons.  I bought a second queen hoping her social skills were better than the first queen.  No such luck.  Sandy’s hive also struggled they didn’t seem to have any interest in making enough honey to share with us.  In an effort to have one strong to survive a Wisconsin winter we combined the hives into one.
We followed the recommendations of the Dane County Beekeepers Association and our one hive survived one of the coldest winters in Wisconsin history.  We both bought new hives this year.  Our 2015 hive thrived so we split it so that we had four hives, but not for long.  We also put one hive at my house.  One of the “split” hives failed and we moved the bees to the 2015 hive.  Now we have three hives.
My bad luck with queens continued in 2016.  The queen for the hive at my house was ruthlessly banished.  I didn’t want to pay for another queen so I decided to take a chance to see if the bees would select their own queen from among themselves.  The process takes several weeks and works about half the time.  I watched every week and discovered “queen cells” so it was time to leave them alone and not interfere with their routine.
Meanwhile, the new hive at my friend’s house was thriving.  There were a lot of bees and by July had enough honey for themselves that we gave them a box called a “super”.  This is a small box with ten frames that are used exclusively to have the bees make honey for human consumption.  When Sandy was on vacation in mid-July I checked the super to find about half of the frames full of honey.  We waited several weeks and all but two the frames were gushing with honey.
We talked with our bee mentor from the Dane County Beekeepers Association and decided to harvest our honey using the squeeze and drain process, we also watched a youtube video giving us step by step instructions.  We tested the honey for water and it came in at 17.5%, just under the 18% maximum.  We worked for about two hours to scrape the honey and comb off and put it through a strainer and then bottle it.  We weighed our bucket of honey on a bathroom scale and it was just shy of 18 pounds. 
Eighteen pounds of honey! All the work, the frustration, the uncertainty, was worth the first taste of sweet, delicious, golden honey.