Labor Day was the opportunity we were waiting for to remove the honey supers from our hive.
Our big excitement of the day was spotting our queen, for the first time ever! (After a year and a half of beekeeping.) She’s not marked or anything, so it’s tricky. She was actually up on the lower box of supers, so we were a bit confused to see her up there.
The second “big excitement” was my first sting as a beekeeper. Jeremy’s been stung 3 or 4 times, but so far I’ve lucked out. I’ve actually been nervous about getting stung, because I don’t remember being stung by a bee, so I didn’t know how bad it would be.
It wasn’t that bad–it hurt for two or three minutes, then the next day it swelled up to a decent size and is now just itchy. But, with that sting, I am now officially a beekeeper.
We pulled out 17 frames from our two supers to extract honey from. (Not including the two frames we harvested earlier in the summer.)
As soon as we can borrow an extractor from our beekeeping friends, we’ll get this all extracted, into bottles, and up onto shelves in the pantry to get us through this next year.
September 5, 2012 at 12:07 pm
Cool! I get stung several times a year…not from beekeeping (hoping to add that to our homestead someday) but from gardening and walking around the yard barefoot. It’s my arthritis therapy :)
Found you on Frugal Days! I’m getting ready to follow you :)