I ended up taking a PTO day to prep for honey extraction day. I was feeling pretty stressed about getting everything done, and I thought it’d be best to try to get it all done on Friday since I try to cram 40 hours of work into the first four days of the week, and my kids theoretically would be at school and camp. The baby had other plans!

My plan was to use a fume board to get the bees to flee the honey supers, but we were (once again) experiencing a Biblical degree of poor air quality here, so I knew the sun would not be working with me. Fume boards work best on a sunny day when the metal side heats in the sun, making the scent of whatever bee repellent on the other side dissipate more readily throughout the hive.

We texted some friends in the neighborhood, Z and E, to ask if they had an electric leaf blower we could borrow. “No. Z calls them the devil’s hair dryer,” E texted back. I didn’t think they seemed like the leaf-blowing type. She did offer her actual hair dryer, which I declined, mostly because I wouldn’t have a power source at the cemetery.

We ended up getting most of the bees out of the first super with the fume board in the morning, but had a few stragglers. I sent Chad inside to get my Dyson Airwrap, and did in fact blowdry bees out of the honey super. The Airwrap is nice for a lot of things, and I do appreciate the cool setting, now for another, less conventional, reason.

I texted E to ask if she wanted to come over and watch me blow dry my bees. She came over and then spent the rest of the day helping with everything from holding the extractor steady to returning to the cemetery with me to get the other two honey supers ready. I really would have been lost without her, as my 7yo was in half day camp and had a lunchtime performance (which I unfortunately missed) that Chad attended. While he was there, daycare called me to let me know the baby had a fever and we’d need to pick him up. Yikes. Chad collected our art camper, lunch, and then the baby, and we took a break to get the baby settled and eat lunch.

The afternoon was a fun and messy blur. At one point I noticed a delivery driver approaching my door. He was wearing earbuds and appeared to be talking to someone on the phone. I poked my head out to warn him that there may be bees around. Before I could open my mouth he said “Ah! I see y’all here growin’ some honey!” and walked right into the cloud of bees, completely unbothered. Later that day, I noticed another delivery driver (why are we getting so many packages?) dropped something halfway up our walk.

We did end up borrowing a leaf blower from another neighbor for the next two supers, and there were enough stragglers around that they moved into the leaf blower after we’d finished using it. After a day or two of waiting for them to leave, I waited until evening when they were resting in the leaf blower, then put the pieces of the leaf blower in a mesh bag I have for transporting nucs, and returned them to their more pastoral home, almost missing a summer rainstorm, but not quite.

All told, I harvested about 7 gallons/84 pounds (honey is sold by weight), not counting the two frames I took cuts of comb from, due to some wonky comb that wouldn’t have survived the spinning in the extractor. This was approximately two and a half nine frame medium supers (out of a ten frame hive, but I have the spacers in the supers to make them hold nine frames).

I ordered jars from WebstaurantStore (really putting my employee discount to use this week!) and I’m planning to bottle in the next week or so once I can nail down some time in an inspected kitchen so that I can sell some of the honey if I choose to.

I’ve been having fun collecting my honey thoughts and thinking about designing honey labels inspired by perfume packaging. We’ll see where this goes.

I am obviously biased, but this is the best honey I’ve ever tried. It is light and delicate but so flavorful.